Daniel Dromm and members of the Keltic Dreams Irish dance group performed “Y.M.C.A.” at his inauguration party on Sunday.
Huddled with aides last week in a room upstairs from his future district office, which the incumbent he defeated in the Democratic primary had yet to clear out, City Councilman Daniel Dromm ironed out the final details of his inauguration party.
They discussed when the bagpipes would chime in, who would sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and which line would be recited by each of the four judges administering the oath of office. “And when the show begins, we’ll do the drag queens and then Randy Jones,” he said, referring to the original cowboy in the Village People.
Mr. Dromm’s choice of entertainment was at once a personal indulgence (“I’m a fan of early disco,” he explained) and a tongue-in-cheek statement of his sexuality. He is the first openly gay elected official to represent Jackson Heights, Queens, a neighborhood known for its diversity of people and cuisines that enjoys a more obscure distinction as a haven for gay men and lesbians.
At first glance, it might seem incongruous that gay people would find acceptance in a place that is home to large populations of South Asian and South American immigrants, who usually hold conservative values. In the days leading up to the general election, Mr. Dromm’s Republican opponent, a Bangladeshi Muslim named Mujib Rahman, tried to turn his rival’s sexual orientation into a campaign issue, denouncing Mr. Dromm as a “radical gay activist.”
Still, Mr. Dromm, 54, won with nearly 75 percent of the vote.
Jackson Heights was not always this way. Mr. Dromm, a veteran gay activist and former teacher at an elementary school, recalled that a police helicopter hovered overhead, in case violence broke out, when the neighborhood held Queens’s first gay pride parade in 1993. Tensions had been running high since a gay man from Colombia, Julio Rivera, was stabbed to death in a bias attack three years earlier.
What Mr. Rivera’s killing did, though, was expose the divisions and intersections within the many worlds that define Jackson Heights. Problems still persist: Just last month, a gay man reported to the police that he was beaten by bouncers at a Mexican restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue. But for gay people and Latinos, at least, “it’s not a matter of coexisting, but a matter of how much they overlap,” said Joe Rollins, 48, a political science professor at the City University of New York who is gay and has lived in Jackson Heights for eight years.
It is exactly this sense of mash-up multiculturalism that many gays said had attracted them to Jackson Heights, along with its vast subway network and its housing stock, ample and relatively affordable apartments with luxurious gardens and ornate architectural flourishes.
That it has a gay subculture “was a sort of bonus, but not a deciding factor,” said Alfonso Quiroz, 37, who four years ago began organizing monthly dinners that now draw more than 30 people — most of them gay men, but also some lesbians and a heterosexual couple.
“It was never about your ethnic background, your religious background, your sexual orientation, or about being rich or poor,” said Mr. Quiroz, a spokesman for Con Edison who has lived in Jackson Heights since 2003 with his partner, Jeff Simmons, 45. “It was really about feeling comfortable here.”
Glenn Magpantay, 41, and his partner, Christopher Goeken, 42, moved to Jackson Heights from Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, in 2004 because “we wanted a place where we could raise a family,” said Mr. Magpantay, a civil rights lawyer. He is of Filipino descent, Mr. Goeken is white and they have an adopted son, a 3-year-old black boy named Malcolm.
“To us,” Mr. Magpantay said over empanadas at a Colombian restaurant on 37th Avenue, “living in a racially diverse neighborhood was very important.”
Gay men said they were not afraid to hold hands with their partners while walking the streets. And while there are gay bars and clubs on Roosevelt Avenue — patrons described the scene as twice as fun as Manhattan’s, but half the price — there is no sense of an enclave like there is in Chelsea, where gay people seem to inhabit a world of their own, they said.
“Jackson Heights happens to have a lot of gays, but it’s not a gay neighborhood,” said Jeffrey Reich-Hale, 35, a hotel sales director who was eating at a neighborhood restaurant. “We have our problems, but you really feel like everyone belongs everywhere.” In recent years at the Queens Gay Pride Parade, which Mr. Dromm helped found, sidewalks have been packed with immigrant men, women and children cheering as gays from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru pass by, waving their countries’ flags. It is the city’s largest gay parade outside Manhattan and it has “a real neighborhood feeling, with people coming out with their folding chairs, their coolers, like you’d see on Memorial Day,” said City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, who is a lesbian and has been one of the parade’s most loyal participants.
But at his inauguration party on Sunday, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Mr. Dromm made sure to point out that as a councilman, he would not embrace “a gay agenda,” but causes that are important to the people he represents, like traffic and parking improvements, additional parkland and the creation of a day laborer hiring site. (His district also includes parts of Corona, Woodside, Elmhurst and East Elmhurst, which has a sizable Chinese population.)
“I believe that our struggles as progressives, as gays, as immigrants, as Latinos, as South Asians, as African-Americans, as Asians, as Muslims, as human beings, is one and the same,” he told an audience of about 600 people. “We are fighting to make people’s lives better.”
Written by Fernanda Santos. Published New York Times January 15th, 2010
Labels: CommunityOrganizing, Press, Progressive
