Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

by Anna Quindlen

  Gay marriage is a radical notion for straight people and a conservative notion for gay ones. After years of being sledgehammered by society, some gay men and lesbian women are deeply suspicious of participating in an institution that seems to have “straight world” written all over it.

  But the rads of twenty years ago, straight and gay alike, have other things on their minds today. Family is one, and the linchpin of family has commonly been a loving commitment between two adults. When same-sex couples set out to make that commitment, they discover that they are at a disadvantage: No joint tax returns. No health insurance coverage for an uninsured partner. No survivor’s benefits from Social Security. None of the automatic rights, privileges, and responsibilities society attaches to a marriage contract. In Madison, Wisconsin, a couple who applied at the Y with their kids for a family membership were turned down because both were women. It’s one of those small things that can make you feel small.

  Some took marriage statutes that refer to “two persons” at their word and applied for a license. The results were court decisions that quoted the Bible and embraced circular argument: marriage is by definition the union of a man and a woman because that is how we’ve defined it.

  No religion should be forced to marry anyone in violation of its tenets, although ironically it is now only in religious ceremonies that gay people can marry, performed by clergy who find the blessing of two who love each other no sin. But there is no secular reason that we should take a patchwork approach of corporate, governmental, and legal steps to guarantee what can be done simply, economically, conclusively, and inclusively with the words “I do.”

  “Fran and I chose to get married for the same reasons that any two people do,” said the lawyer who was fired in Georgia. “We fell in love; we wanted to spend our lives together.” Pretty simple.

  Consider the case of Loving v. Virginia, aptly named. At the time, sixteen states had laws that barred interracial marriage, relying on natural law, that amorphous grab bag for justifying prejudice. Sounding a little like God throwing Adam and Eve out of paradise, the trial judge suspended the one-year sentence of Richard Loving, who was white, and his wife, Mildred, who was black, provided they got out of the state of Virginia.

  In 1967 the Supreme Court found such laws to be unconstitutional. Only twenty-five years ago and it was a crime for a black woman to marry a white man. Perhaps twenty-five years from now we will find it just as incredible that two people of the same sex were not entitled to legally commit themselves to each other. Love and commitment are rare enough; it seems absurd to thwart them in any guise.

  MOVING THE FURNITURE AROUND

  December 2, 1990

  The man who wears an Army blanket and holds out a cardboard coffee cup in the Christopher Street subway station has a method to what some might call his madness. When he is told to leave the landing there, he goes two blocks down to the station from which trains run beneath the Hudson River to New Jersey. If that station is inhospitable, short on commuters or long on cops, he walks east to the West Fourth Street subway station. And he goes back to Christopher Street if there are problems at West Fourth.

  The subway has always been a good place to collect money. It is not uncommon to sit on a train and have the narrow tube filled with fund-raisers’ speechifying: “Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman. I represent the Sons of the Lord community outreach program in Brooklyn!” It is not unheard of to sit on a train and find your life on the line: “Give me your money or I’ll cut you bad.” The definition of a captive audience is a dozen people on an express train between stations.

  But the New York City Transit Authority has banned begging on the subway, and the Supreme Court last week let stand that ban. The legal pavane included pages of discussion of whether begging is speech or begging is behavior. For my acquaintance in the Christopher Street station, begging is a container of coffee, a buttered roll, and a bottle of bad wine.

  Once again, we’ve wasted time and money by dealing with the homeless backward. Too much energy has gone into deciding where we do not want them to be, and making sure that they would not be there. Benches were outfitted with dividers so that no one could lie down. Police were taught to turn people out of public buildings. And the Transit Authority rousted them off trains. The exercise is reminiscent of moving furniture in a small apartment; you can put the couch in a number of places, but you cannot make it unobtrusive. The secret is to find a place where the couch fits.

  There is no doubt that some of the homeless belong in psychiatric hospitals, but the number is probably much smaller than we believe. Mary Scullion, who runs two communal homes for women in Philadelphia, took a census five years ago of habitual street dwellers in Center City, identified by name and location 115 who appeared to be mentally ill, and set out to see if they were salvageable. Today, only five of them are in long-term psychiatric care. Eight are still on the streets. The rest are living in supervised residences or with their families.

  Four years ago a woman named Ellen Baxter opened a single-room-occupancy building in upper Manhattan for homeless men and women. Today she is preparing to open her fifth building, a $4 million city-financed renovation that contains seventy-five studio apartments for individuals and seven two-bedroom apartments for families. None of the people in her buildings need to be in institutions, but few of them are ready to live without the assistance of the staff Columbia University provides, to help with their medical problems and their addictions, to negotiate the social service maze and what Ms. Baxter calls “the paperwork of poverty.”

  We can do much more of this, or we can continue to waste time and money moving these people around like so much furniture. One of the craziest ladies on the streets of Center City, a woman considered totally lost to normal life, lives in a group residence and works full time now, and Mary Scullion says that since that woman has been getting enough food and sleep and medical attention it’s amazing, the resemblance she bears to you or me.

  Discussions about the homeless always remind me of a woman who told me that she was damned if her tax dollars were going to pay for birth control for the poor. Come to think of it, she said, she didn’t want her tax dollars paying for any social welfare programs. I wanted to say to her: If you don’t pay for birth control, you’ll have to pay for schools. If you don’t pay for schools, you’re going to pay for welfare. And if you don’t pay for any of those things, you’re going to spend a small fortune on prisons.

  The question is not whether we will pay. It is what we want to pay for, and what works. The negative approach, the deciding where we want people not to be, has been a deplorable failure. There are those who believe the homeless are either criminal or crazy, that one way or another they should be locked up. It’s worth remembering that it costs far more to lock someone up than to give them, as Ms. Scullion and Ms. Baxter have, a key of their own.

  ROOM AT THE INN

  December 11, 1991

  Ten years ago Harold Brown decided to do something that he had never done before but that he believed his Catholic faith required him to do. He began to help house the homeless. He and his wife, Virginia, and a group of volunteers from Sacred Heart Church in Queens set up a small shelter in the basement of the church in response to a call to action from the mayor, the cardinal, and the Partnership for the Homeless.

  For a decade they have provided a bed each night, as well as breakfast, a bag lunch, a hot dinner, a change of underclothes, and, after the plumber hooked up extra waterlines, a shower and the use of a washer and dryer. The city housed almost seventy-five hundred people in shelters the other night; Sacred Heart housed ten. Alleluia and pass the excuses. This is an answer to people who have said they’d like to help the homeless but don’t know how.

  This is an answer to all those people who find the holidays a fearsome round of eggnog and revolving charges. It doesn’t have to be that way. Even now there are friends preparing polite ecstasies for gifts they neither want nor need. Even now there are peopl
e penciling your party into their datebooks and quietly wishing they could spend the day at home.

  The important thing to remember about Christmas is not closing time at Macy’s but the story of a pregnant woman and her husband who looked for a bed for what some still think was the most transformative event in history and were told to get lost. The irony of the fact that there is no room at the inn for millions in this country is potent at this time.

  Ten years ago this month the Partnership for the Homeless began the church/synagogue network with a simple premise: that with thousands of institutions in New York built on charity and compassion, surely there must be some willing to provide a bed for the night. Tonight there will be something like 1,365 homeless people sleeping in 126 churches and synagogues. At a time when homeless men and women are being rousted from public buildings, subway stations, and assorted doorways, apparently in the belief that a moving target is less offensive to community comfort levels, that is no small thing.

  These small shelters, all with fewer than twenty beds, are scattered throughout the city. Their success gives the lie to dire predictions surrounding the city’s plan to build small shelters in residential areas, predictions ranging from plummeting property values to soaring crime. Mr. Brown says he was “scared to death” of opposition when the parishioners opened their little place in the community of Glendale, which is where Archie Bunker was said to have had his home. Last Sunday Mr. Brown took up a collection to pay for food for shelter guests. At the end of the day there was $1,100 in the baskets. Last month he called for more volunteers. Fifty people put their names on the list.

  Surely there are more churches and synagogues out there that could do this. Surely a shelter in the basement would do more to teach the values that are supposed to inform the holidays than a hundred sermons.

  Surely there is more connection with Christmas in setting up cots and serving stew than in the frenetic round of the season, which is habitually cited as exhausting and rarely as satisfying. Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders’ cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.

  We question the efficiency of government, and with good cause. We say that something permanent needs to be done, and that is true. And if we agree that government has done a rotten job reducing the quotient of human misery, Mr. Brown has an alternative: Do it yourself.

  “I work in midtown,” says Mr. Brown, who is a vice president in futures and options at Dean Witter, “and I saw these poor souls on the subway grates. We’re just trying to do what Christ asked us to do.” That is, to do good. Boy, does that seem distant from the white noise of modern life. “If I am for myself alone, what good am I?” said the Jewish sage Hillel two thousand years ago, around the time that his coreligionists Mary and Joseph found themselves homeless in Bethlehem. And if the time to act is not now, when will it be?

  NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  May 20, 1992

  Homeless is like the government wanting you locked up

  And the people in America do not like you.

  They look at you and say Beast!

  I wish the people would help the homeless

  And stop their talking.

  —FRANK S. RICE,

  the Rio Times

  The building is beautiful, white and beige and oak, the colors of yuppies. The rehab of the Rio came in seven-hundred-thousand dollars under budget, two months ahead of schedule. The tenants say they will not mess it up, no, no, no. “When you don’t have a place and you get a good place, the last thing you want to do is lose it,” said one man who slept in shelters for seven years—seven years during which you might have gotten married, or lost a loved one, or struck it rich, but all this guy did was live on the streets.

  Mayor David Dinkins has announced that he will study parts of the study he commissioned from a commission on the homeless, the newest in a long line of studies.

  One study, done in 1981, was called “Private Lives, Public Spaces.” It was researched by Ellen Baxter, who now runs the nonprofit company that has brought us the Rio and four other buildings that provide permanent housing for the homeless in Washington Heights.

  Another study, done in 1987, was called “A Shelter Is Not a Home” and was produced by the Manhattan Borough president, David Dinkins, who now runs the city of New York. At the time, the Koch administration said it would study Mr. Dinkins’s study, which must have taught Mr. Dinkins something.

  Robert Hayes, one of the founding fathers of the movement to help the homeless, once told me there were three answers to the problem: housing, housing, housing. It was an overly simplistic answer, and it was essentially correct.

  Despite our obsessions with pathology and addiction, Ms. Baxter has renovated one apartment building after another and filled them with people. At the Rio, what was once a burnt-out eyesore is now, with its curving façade and bright lobby, the handsomest building on the block; what were once armory transients with dirt etched in the creases of hands and face are now tenants. The building needed people; the people needed a home. The city provided the rehab money; Columbia University provides social service support.

  Some of the tenants need to spend time in drug treatment and some go to Alcoholics Anonymous and some of them lapse into pretty pronounced fugue states from time to time. So what? How would you behave if you’d lived on the streets for seven years? What is better: To leave them out there while we lament the emptying of the mental hospitals and the demise of jobs? Or to provide a roof over their heads and then get them psychiatric care and job training?

  What is better: To spend nearly $20,000 each year to have them sleep on cots at night and wander the streets by day? Or to make a onetime investment of $38,000 a unit, as they did in the single rooms with kitchens and baths in the Rio, for permanent homes for people who will pay rent from their future wages or from entitlement benefits?

  Years ago I became cynical enough to envision a game plan in which politicians, tussling over government stuff like demonstration projects and agency jurisdiction and commission studies, ignored this problem until it went away.

  And, in a sense, it has. We have become so accustomed to people sleeping on sidewalks and in subway stations that recumbent bodies have become small landmarks in our neighborhoods. Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, says she was stunned, talking to students, at their assumption that people always had and always would be living on the streets. My children call by pet names—“the man with the cup,” “the lady with the falling-down pants”—the homeless people around their school.

  And when a problem becomes that rooted in our everyday perceptions, it is understood to be without solution. Nonprofit groups like the one that renovated the Rio prove that this is not so. The cots in the armory are poison; drug programs and job training are icing. A place to shut the door, to sleep without one eye open, to be warm, to be safe—that’s the cake. There’s no place like home. You didn’t need a study to figure that out, did you?

  SOMALIA’S PLAGUES

  September 6, 1992

  The two children are the last survivors of their family, but not, it appears, for long. In news footage they sit naked on the ground, their spindly arms wrapped around each other, the inevitability of their imminent death in their sunken eyes. In their homeland, rent by internal power struggles, there is no food, and so they starve while worlds away the politicians puzzle over what to do.

  But these children are not in Bosnia, now the center of world attention. They are in Somalia, an African country living through—and dying of—a lethal combination of clan warfare, drought, and famine that has wrought what one U.S. official called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world right now.

  Millions of people in Somalia are in danger of starving to death in the months to come. Hundreds will die today. Although the International Red Cros
s has mounted the largest relief effort in its history, it is too dangerous to take food to some areas, and supplies are often stolen by gunmen and sold by profiteers. Relief kitchens have graveyards flanking them, so that those who die on food lines may be buried while the line moves on.

  Eurocentrism was a kind of catchword not long ago amid the scornful discussion of multicultural curricula in the public schools. Were we going to throw out Shakespeare, cease to teach the Magna Carta, minimize the role of Napoleon in world affairs?

  But the truth is that we are a deeply Eurocentric nation, and for obvious reasons. Many of us have Euroroots, and from the beginning we have sought Euroalliances. When we hear of Serbian-run concentration camps we relate them, with renewed outrage, to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. When Americans see Bosnian orphans crying in the windows of buses, offers pour in to adopt them.

  Bosnia, with all its horrors, is at the center of public and political dialogue, and Somalia, with all its horrors, is a peripheral discussion. “It’s racism,” says Jack Healey, executive director of Amnesty International.

  And a peculiar sort of myopic ignorance. Civil war and unconscionable internment in Bosnia seem man-made evils, subject to man-made solutions. But Africa is a mystery to our Eurocentric nation, even to many African-Americans. Its troubles seem like Old Testament plagues, irresolvable and inevitable.

  There is nothing inevitable about the corpses littering the landscape of Somalia. There are no easy solutions for a nation of nomads who have been prevented from planting crops by the ravages of civil war, a country that has almost no government aside from village elders in dying towns.