Brandon Neese was the first to notice it. An aide to Alderman David Orr, Neese was opening the office mail when he came across the announcement that a last-minute addition had been made to the annual Commission on Human Relations awards presentation. The late Alderman George Hagopian, who had led the fight against gay rights with remarkable vitriol, was now slated to receive one of the commission’s awards–awards that are to be given “to individuals making an outstanding contribution to the improvement of human relations in Chicago.”
That was October 18. Since then, the Daley administration has made a series of moves that have left more and more gays and lesbians with the same doubt.
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Though Reiff is openly lesbian, she had already raised eyebrows by publicly supporting Wood’s story about the low ticket sales; now she seemed to be helping the administration ice out COGLI, which increased community ire.
Worries about COGLI being circumvented–or disbanded completely–reached a still higher pitch when mayoral press secretary Avis LaVelle told the gay press that the administration believed the committee should not report directly to the mayor but rather to Clarence Wood. In fact, she said, Wood had recently been assigned the task of restructuring CHR and COGLI’s new place within it. With trust of Wood at rock bottom in the lesbian/gay community, this was not encouraging news.
But when Wood fired back that those phone calls were so out of line that he was pulling all the awards, gay activists were slack-jawed. Still, they felt that they had to escalate in kind, so they joined with black activists–including Alderman Danny Davis, former Washington aide Jacky Grimshaw, and Patricia Raby, Al’s widow–to hold a press conference denouncing Wood’s response and asking him and Daley to reverse that decision. They didn’t. As of today, Wood’s decision stands (though he is now taking a lower profile).
Through the 15-year battle to pass the human rights ordinance and through organizing to take care of their dying, gays have learned a lot of political savvy. Still, taking the matter to the media has its dangers.
A few of the organizers, such as John Chester, a staunch Daley backer, feel that the relationship between the community and the administration is not in fact adversarial. According to Chester, the pressure now being applied will only hasten what the administration would have done anyway. “I think the Daley administration got hit with some very large problems when it was inaugurated,” said Chester, reciting a litany including the school woes and the trouble at the Department of Health. According to Chester, the administration “had to get to work dealing with those immediate crises. I imagine some different communities and community groups got neglected–not because the Daley administration wasn’t interested in reaching out and working with them, but because there are only so many hours in a day and only so much work that can be done.”
