Video Interview, Thomas Privitere, January 21, 2013

THOMAS PRIVITERE: (unintelligible) I'll try.

CREW: Adam, rolling.

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.

This is the toughest question.

I need the correct spelling of your first and last name

as you want it to appear on screen.

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Ah.

Thomas, T-H-O-M-A-S. Middle initial M. Privitere.

P as in Peter, R-I, V as in Victor, I-T-E-R-E.

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK, good.

This just kind of sets for me, really, and maybe the audience

to kind of get to know you.

Because I don't really know you that well.

I know the questions I have to ask you in regards to labor

union and all that stuff.

But before we get into that, I want to kind of get

a sense of who you are.

A little bit about your coming out

experience in that kind of scenario.

Why you then got--

which then sets it up, why you got involved later

on in activism for gay rights.

So just talk to me about that.

I mean, your coming out experience.

What was Rochester like at that time for gay people?

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Well, I came out in the mid-'70s.

And I grew up in Rochester.

I went to school here.

I went to college here.

Grew up in a middle-class, inner-city Italian

neighborhood.

Growing up, I had these feelings of being different.

I think I kind of knew deep down inside what was going on.

But you know, I also understood that it

wasn't safe to be who and what I felt I was.

And so I squelched and stuffed and repressed any feelings

that I had that might even be remotely same-sex attracted.

Went through high school and college.

And while I was in college, my then girlfriend,

we got pregnant.

Got married.

It did keep me out of Vietnam in those days.

Had I know all I had was to tell them I was gay,

I probably would have taken that path.

But stayed here, worked.

Went to MCC and graduated from MCC,

and then went to criminal justice in RIT

When I was in school, I had a law professor.

And he became integral later on to my coming out process.

One of the things I did as part of my internship was

went to work in the police department.

And at that time, they were civilianizing jobs back then

after the riots of the '60s and the social unrest

and the civil rights movement.

And I was tangentially involved with that as an activist.

Because I went to a school here in Rochester,

which was predominantly Italian and African American.

And so I had an experience at 15 actually

going South, where a friend of mine took a bus to Florida.

His father lived down there and his mother lived in Rochester.

And we stopped in a small diner in Kingstree, South Carolina.

It's about 2 o'clock in the morning.

And I unwittingly sat in the wrong section.

And segregation was still going on back then,

even though the civil rights bill had been passed.

And King had given his now famous "I had a dream" speech.

Things were still segregated.

And I remember sitting down at a counter at about 2 o'clock

in the morning.

And the waitress came over and asked me

why I was sitting there.

And I said, well, is this section closed?

Because the only people there were the people from the bus.

And she said in her best North Carolinian accent, no,

y'all can't sit here.

You're in the colored section.

And I just looked at her aghast and I said,

you people really do that shit down here?

And my friend, who had been experiencing

this thing for years because he had been going back and forth

said, we got to get out of here.

We'll get killed.

And it was my first experience with overt racism

and segregation.

And the farther South we went, the worse it got.

It was colored-only drinking fountains and restaurants.

And after about two and a half weeks,

I called my mom back here.

I said, I want to come home.

And the back story was I had bugged her for years to go

to Florida with my friend.

And I finally went to the Supreme Court of the family.

Back then, it was my grandmother.

She talked my mother into letting

me go in the first place.

And I remember my mother saying, so you want to come home?

And I said, yeah.

I said, it's horrible how they treat colored people down here.

She said, I got an idea.

Why don't you call your grandmother?

And she hung up the phone.

And that was my first experience with discrimination,

overt discrimination.

And I think that was a seminal point in my life

that changed everything from that point on.

And so I came back here and there had just

been-- the schools and the colleges,

they were just starting African-American studies.

And I enrolled in an African-American studies class.

I was the only white kid in the class.

It kind of gave me a sense later on when I started activism

in the gay rights movement how important it

was to fight against injustice.

And so when I went to work for the police department

back then, I recall that there was a guy who

had been on the police force.

And the buzz went around that he had

been fired because he was gay.

They didn't use that term back then.

It was queer.

And that sent a chill up my spine

because despite having lived in the closet, gotten married.

I already had a child.

I knew in my gut that something just wasn't

passing the smell test for me.

So I remember I got my first job in the police department.

I moved down to criminal court.

And in those days, companies like McCurdy's and Sibley's

and large commercial stores downtown, people

still used paper checks.

And when checks bounced, they'd bring them in.

And I was the chief complaint clerk.

And it was an intake and criminal court.

My ex-law professor had a client who owned a bar downtown.

And as a favor to my professor, I

would bring him in the back door and take care of him.

And we would just send letters out to people.

And later on, he came in one day and he had a stack of tickets

to a Halloween drag show open bar thing.

And what I didn't know was that his client

was a guy named Jim van Allen who

owned a gay bar downtown called Jim's on North Street.

I'd never been there.

I didn't know that I knew any gay people actually growing up,

but I did know that in my neighborhood,

there were some pretty tough customers.

And they would go downtown and they would roll queers.

That's what they called it back then.

Beat them up, take their money.

So there was this dichotomy in me.

This sense that I knew I was hiding from something,

and I was afraid to have it come out.

And at the same time, knowing that it

was wrong what they were doing, but not speaking up.

And it wasn't until an incident in Kingstree

that I experienced the racism, the sense of injustice kind of

took hold in me.

I think that's probably--

I went into the field that I eventually went into,

which was criminal justice.

And then, I got active in the labor union movement

while I was an employee in the city.

And-- backtrack.

He gave us these tickets.

We went to the bar.

And of course, it was Halloween, which

was the high holiday for gay people.

And it was a traditional drag show,

but I also noticed out of the corner of my eye

that there were men dancing with other men.

They had jeans on and flannel shirts.

It was the '70s.

It was the look.

And mustaches.

Picture the Village People on steroids.

And something clicked.

Again, another click.

You know, like the clicking in that restaurant.

Something turned on, some switch.

And I was intrigued, and enthralled, and thought

and felt, for the first time in my life, oh my god.

I'm home.

And I went back the following week, met my first lover,

who was also married and in the closet.

And that was my coming out.

It wasn't planned.

It certainly wasn't something that I expected to happen.

And I would go out every Friday night

after that, telling my then ex-wife

I was going out with the boys, the guys.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Which was the truth.

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Which was the truth.

KEVIN INDOVINO: I want to hit on something that you just

said here, a place like Jim's becoming a place like home.

That this is where you were finding yourself.

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Well, for the first time

ever, I saw gay men who looked like any other man.

I had this stereotypical image in my head

about what gay men were supposed to look like.

And they all wore makeup and tutus.

And these were guys with other guys holding each other,

kissing each other, drinking at the bar together, and dancing.

It was a real eye-opener for me.

And of course, in those days in the mid-'70s before the AIDS

epidemic, I recall that a lot of straight people were coming

to the bar, including myself at the time.

And they were coming for the disco.

There seemed to be a social melding

of gay and straight people back then.

And that continued, I think right up until the early '80s.

And at that point, I decided that I

couldn't live this lie anymore.

And my ex-wife and I decided to separate and divorce amicably.

We had three children at that point.

And she was a great woman, good wife, good mother.

We weren't aware that she had married a gay man, because

socially, culturally, and certainly

economically, it wasn't feasible for me to come out.

And I knew what had happened to that police officer

back then who had gotten fired because they discovered

he was apparently gay.

And that's what happened in those days, you lost your job.

There was a real underlying fear that coming out

could cost you dearly.

KEVIN INDOVINO: I don't want you to get too far ahead here.

When you came to terms with being a gay man--

and you're now going out to the bars and all that stuff--

were there other outlets/resources

for gay people back then?

Or was the bars it?

I mean, what was the gay social scene like as far as meeting

people and finding other resources for information

and that kind of thing?

THOMAS PRIVITERE: The only information

I got about being gay was what I had

read in high school in the Kinsey report.

That was it.

And as far as I knew, because my first coming out experience was

in a gay bar, the only place that we did gather

were in the bars.

And that was a double-edged sword

because I know a lot of gay people,

myself included, who went into those bars.

And I wasn't a drinker.

I wasn't a partier.

But what I did discover though, after a couple of drinks,

my inhibitions dropped.

So the point is I still wasn't comfortable in my own skin.

I wasn't comfortable with my sexuality.

I had come home in a sense, but it was a dysfunctional home,

I guess is the way I would describe it.

The bar scene-- they seemed to-- no matter what city I went to,

they seemed to all be located in the same dark corners

of inner cities where a subculture existed.

Whether you were in Manhattan, or Rochester, or Washington,

DC.

And I remember-- maybe I'm getting

a little ahead of myself.

But even out of the city, when I would go to DC,

they actually had signs outside the bars in those days,

this is a gay establishment run for gay people by gay people.

And it was sort of welcoming, but it was also a warning.

I guess it was be aware.

If you're straight and you're coming in here,

this is a gay bar.

We didn't have that here.

We all, of course, knew were the gay bars were.

And as I said, the time of my coming out, which ironically,

was in '76--

the bicentennial year-- there were straight people

definitely coming to the bars.

I think it was easier to buy drugs

in gay bars in those days.

It was in ghetto-like areas.

North Street was pretty tough neighborhood, even back then.

And there was, around the city, gay bars peppered here.

Mostly along Monroe Avenue.

In the early '80s, after my separation and divorce,

I moved in with my first lover in an apartment on Goodman

street near Park Avenue.

And I kind of half-jokingly tell people today

that you could fire a cannon down Park Avenue

and not hit a straight person in those days.

And gay people were moving into what

now is the Park Avenue area.

I later discovered it's what we do.

We move into an area.

We beautify it and raise the property values, kind

of faggotize the houses, and then we

can't afford to live there anymore because the taxes go up

and everybody wants to move in.

And I tell people, if you really want

to know where property values are going to rise,

follow the queer.

It's what we do.

So early '80s, I'd really come into my own.

I was living openly as a gay man.

I went to work for a public sector labor union.

And I actually came out at work.

It was something that I hadn't planned on doing,

but it was something that I needed

to do because I had come to terms with being

gay with my wife and my family.

My ex-wife.

And ironically, all the terrible things

that I thought were going to happen when I came out

didn't happen.

I didn't lose my children.

I wasn't ostracized by my family.

I think I was very fortunate because I've

heard horror stories from a lot of people

about how their family rejects them and turns on them.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Back up just a little bit then.

I want to explore a little bit why you felt

or how you got to the point where you felt

that you needed to come out.

What was driving that decision?

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Well, one of the things

that drove my decision to come out at work

was the realization that what I was

doing for a living, which was representing people at the work

site.

Labor unions were historically famous for being on the cutting

edge of social justice movements in this country,

including the civil rights movement.

And I think historically, people forget that Martin Luther

King, when he was in Memphis and when he was shot,

he was there on behalf of striking garbage workers.

AFSCME employees.

And I was working for a AFSCME union.

And so it wasn't lost to me that I was now

working in an industry where I realized

that the contracts that we were negotiating

and the benefits that we were proposing for the rank and file

people tacitly excluded any reference to gender

identity, sexual orientation.

This is pre-domestic partner benefit negotiations.

So I felt that it was important for me personally

to make it clear to my employer that I was gay.

It was a couple of years after I'd started working there.

Believe me, I didn't just jump in and say, oh, I'm queer.

I'm here.

Hire me.

But I had built a reputation at that point in time.

And I had been active as a member of my union

before I went to work for the union.

The early '80s were pretty rocky,

primarily because at that time, AIDS and HIV started to hit.

I remember the first time I started hearing

about what they were then calling this "gay cancer."

And being in Rochester, we were kind of isolated,

we thought, from the impact of what we were reading

about in the newspapers.

And it certainly caught my eye.

And we wondered about it.

I remember the first person that I knew personally

to come down with later we found out

to be HIV was a prominent bar owner here.

A fellow owned a bar called Friar's on Monroe Avenue.

And he had gotten sick, and nobody could really identify

what was wrong with him.

And he had the resources to search out specialists.

He died relatively quickly, as most people in those days did.

And by the time we realized what was going on,

it was almost too late to do anything about it.

People who were diagnosed in those days in the early '80s--

as soon as you found out somebody was diagnosed,

it seemed that within a matter of months, they were dying.

And one of the backup plans that I had

had when I got out of college--

I should have mentioned this earlier.

I realized that it was risky being gay.

I had these feelings.

I had been to the bars.

I had a lover.

And it was before I came out at work,

and I went to hairdressing school

to have a backup occupation.

And I thought, wow.

I went to college.

I had a bachelor's degree.

I was working on my master's and realized if I weren't careful,

and if they found out, especially when I

was working in the courts for the government,

I could be fired.

And how would I support myself?

How would I support my children?

I was divorced and paying child support

and responsible for everything-- their education, their health

insurance.

So I went to school and got a hairdressing license.

And I thought, well, if something does happen,

at least I'll be able to support myself.

When the AIDS epidemic hit, I remember

friends of mine getting sick.

And it was a pretty scary time.

If you were out and you were gay and you

went to a hospital or a doctor in those days,

and even suspected you were gay, they wouldn't treat you.

I knew people who started deteriorating physically

and what I could do--

and this is one of the blessings,

I suppose, of having--

to have a second career.

I was able to go and cut people's hair

because nobody would touch them.

And bring them some comfort, some relief.

I remember too, when I first came out, the bar scene was--

there was a timing to it.

Lesbians would come out a lot earlier than gay men.

They'd be in the bars, probably by 6 o'clock.

And by 8:30, they were gone.

And we didn't come out until 11 or 12 o'clock at night.

And so there was this separation between gay men and lesbian

women when I first came out.

And that rapidly changed with the AIDS epidemic.

I heard people talking about how important lesbians

were to gay men during the early days of the crisis.

And I was there and I saw it.

And I was fortunate in that I had--

I was in a committed relationship

for the first several years of my coming out.

And you know, dodged a bullet.

And so I did what I could.

And my activism around labor unions and AIDS

sort of dovetailed.

So I hearken back to what I was doing

during the '60s in the civil rights movement.

That kind of laid the foundation for me

in the labor union movement.

And I started realizing how much of an impact

I could potentially make on my own people

by advocating for LGBT people in the workplace.

Fast forward to the early '90s.

A lot was going on in the country

in the '60s, '70s, '80s, and we capitalized on all of the--

"we" meaning gay people capitalized

on all of the elements of organizing and mobilizing

that we learned in the union movement

and in the civil rights movement.

And of course, we'd heard about Stonewall.

It was sort of distant from Rochester,

but we knew about it.

And those of us who considered ourselves activists started--

we started building and forming our own network system here.

Part of what I did as my job with the union

was to get involved in politics, because I

was in a public sector union.

And so the political machine was critical to negotiating

with employers.

Whether they were the city or the state.

And I realized that I could make a difference because my jobs

became increasingly more--

progressively more integral to the negotiating process

and the organizing process.

So I found myself in the mid-'80s coming to work

for the New York State Public Employees Federation,

which has a statewide union that represents professional,

scientific, and technical people that work for the state.

And I had left AFSCME to work for PEF,

and was very pleased and surprised to find

that they had a very active gay and lesbian caucus within PEF.

So I got involved with the caucus.

And then I became the liaison to the LGBT members

in our union, which suited me just fine.

In the mid-'80s, there was really a movement within

the movement by LGBT activists to make some changes in things

like health insurance, bereavement leave,

sick leave for family.

And we started to redefine what family meant

based on our experiences and our realization

that the larger community, even the labor community,

didn't recognize our families.

At least not technically.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Back up a little bit.

I kind of want to put that in the context of--

and I think this was related to the AIDS crisis

as well, because that really brought

to light a lot of the rights issues

that gay people didn't have.

The right to visit your partner in the hospital.

A right to property that you shared

if a partnered died, that of--

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Correct.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Can you kind of maybe pick it up there

and kind of tie it in for me?

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Sure.

Yeah, I think what's critical to understand about what

was happening during the AIDS crisis was

the acute awareness that we had that people weren't covered

by health insurance.

A lot of times, if they did have health insurance on the job

and they were fired, they were without health care.

And even if you had health insurance

and you had health care, doctors and hospitals

were rejecting you, which--

again, the flip side, the double-edged sword

to the AIDS epidemic was that for the first time

in my lifetime, in my experience, which

began with the gay bar scene in the dark corners of the middles

of cities, gay people for the first time

were coming out into the light.

We were coming into churches and synagogues and public places

in the day time.

Unfortunately, to bury our dead.

And it was a catalyst, I think, the burying of our dead

and the awareness that if we didn't do something--

and if we didn't do something dramatic, we, as a community,

we're going to die.

Because we didn't know what was causing the disease.

And it wasn't until people like--

locally, people like Bill Valenti

began building AIDS awareness, and research,

and fundraising drives.

And the first Dining for Dollars here in Rochester.

I remember that.

So there was an awareness on my part

that what gays and lesbians didn't

have that straight people took for granted.

That safety net that their employer or the government

even provided for heterosexual people

was glaringly lacking during the AIDS crisis.

So fast forward to my negotiating contracts,

which I believed it was important for us

as a community within a community.

Meaning gay and lesbian union activists within the union

movement started to network.

And we participated.

I know many of us from Rochester participated in the 1993 march

on Washington, the gay march on Washington.

And it was a three-day event.

Another seminal moment in my life

where for three days in Virginia, Maryland,

and Washington, DC, there were a million

LGBT people, men and women of all colors and stripes.

And it was-- for the first time in my life,

I felt the sense of what it must be like to just walk down

the street and not have that inner alarm

bell of not being safe silenced for the first time in my life.

And I thought, wow.

This is wonderful.

This is what it's like to walk around as a human being,

as an adult and not be afraid.

Because I think the underlying cause of homophobia and fear

is a lack of knowing and understanding.

I felt that in Kingstree, South Carolina.

And I felt that in the early days of burying my friends

and going to hospitals.

And you know, wearing masks and gowns

and realizing that nurses weren't coming in.

And doctors weren't coming in.

And they were lying in beds.

And the families and friends were taking care of them.

And so I guess my activism--

I can't parcel it out and say that I woke up one

morning and decided that I was going to fight for gay rights.

It doesn't happen that way.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Let me ask you this then.

How did you come to the realization

that you could make a difference in regards to gay rights

through the labor unions?

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Well, it's an interesting story.

In the early 1990s, then Governor Cuomo

decided to extend what they then called "domestic partner

benefits" to state workers.

And domestic partner benefits simply

meant that if you met the criteria

for having a domestic partner, living

with someone as a couple, being financially interdependent,

you could sign your domestic partner up

for health care coverage.

And that was great to the extent at which it went.

But fast forward through 1995, Governor Pataki,

the Republican, came into power.

And simultaneously, Dennis Vacco,

who was the new attorney general, who was also

a Republican, came into office.

And the very first thing that Dennis Vacco did

was rescind what had been a standing

policy in his agency of not discrimination against gays

and lesbians.

And an aha moment occurred over my head.

And I thought, yeah.

Well, what one governor gives, another governor

can take away by executive order.

So part of my training was that I

knew if we had negotiated benefits like those

into our contracts, that in order for them to take them

away, they'd have to bargain them away.

The gay and lesbian caucus have started to actively promote

the concept of negotiating these benefits

into our collective bargaining agreement.

And I just happened to be the chief negotiator in 1995

for the PEF contract.

And part of my coalition building,

which I had started back in the civil rights

days and the college days, part of that coalition building

started to kick in.

And I went to other labor unions who were also negotiating

their contracts at the time.

And I said, look.

And again, it was becoming increasingly apparent to us

that health insurance was--

which in the early '70s was just a given.

Every employer gave you health insurance back then.

Kodak, Xerox, public sector workers, health insurance

was not an issue.

Everybody expected that when you went

to work for a company or an agency,

you would get your health insurance

and it was part of the package.

Well, as health insurance began to escalate in cost,

and we realized that it was going

to be an important issue at the table.

I met with my colleagues and counterparts

in other statewide unions.

And I remember particularly going to the Corrections

Officers Union, the guys who work in the prisons,

in the state prisons.

And one of the principals that I lived by was--

the fact that we had been discriminated against

didn't mean that I was going to participate

in that same principle.

Because they had been approaching us and saying,

look, we will give domestic partner benefits to gay people

but not to straight people.

And I said to my then colleagues, look.

I'm not about the business of discriminating

against heterosexual people on the job.

It's not right.

It's not right to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

And it's certainly not right to discriminate

against straight people.

So why would I want to negotiate a benefit that

excluded 90 percent of the potential benefactors?

And the corrections officers came to me

and said, well, we don't have any gay people in our party.

And I said, OK.

I said, but you misunderstand my proposal.

I don't intend to exclude heterosexuals.

And I think that made all the difference in the world

to them, that they knew that they had members who maybe

had been living with their girlfriends or boyfriends

for years.

And that this was something that they could embrace.

And that took us over the edge.

It was the pivotal moment and the decisive factor

for us being able to actually negotiate

for the first time in state history

that language into a state contract.

And I still point to that as probably the highlight

of my career, the ability to negotiate and bargain

health insurance benefits for LGBT people

into their labor agreement.

And it wasn't just that.

It was bereavement leave for their domestic partner,

sick leave for children of their unions.

And keep in mind, this is way before we even

thought that marriage was going to be a reality for us.

But it was the precursor.

The domestic partner benefits in our contracts

was the precursor to the political basis

for us arguing that marriage is the next logical step.

And because I worked in the public sector

and because the state legislature

had to approve contracts.

And actually, the governor-- whoever

the respective governor was.

As a sideline, I got very active in partisan politics,

both here in the city, and at the county level,

and at the state level.

Not just part of my job, but I was aware

that politics was the key to success for us as a community.

We had already in Rochester elected

the first openly gay city councilman

in the state of New York.

Tim Mains was a good friend of mine.

And I'm so proud of people like Tim and now Harry Bronson.

And I read in the paper last week

that Christine Quinn, who's an openly lesbian

woman in the city council in Manhattan,

is considering running for the mayor of the city of New York.

And you know, today, ironically, as we're

filming this is the inaugural festivities in Washington

for the first African American president of the United States.

And I think one of the quotes that I heard on the radio

today that he made is, instead of turning on each other,

we should be turning toward each other.

And you know, I revel in the fact

that we have elected the first African American president.

And twenty years ago, if somebody had sat in a chair

opposite me and said that we could legally

marry each other in New York state, I would have said,

you're out of your mind.

And twenty years to go, I would have equally said,

you're out of your mind if you would've

told me that we could have elected an African

American as president of the United States.

And today, we're talking about gay mayors, and senators,

and congressmen.

And perhaps, some day a gay or lesbian president

of the United States.

And as the father of a gay son--

I'm proud to call him second-generation queer--

the path to inclusion for us is open.

And there are still some hurdles to jump

and there are still places in this country where

it's not safe to be African American or a person of color.

And there are certainly still places

in this country where it's not safe to be

gay and lesbian and out.

In my memory is the vision or the visual

of Matthew Shepard dying and hanging on a fence in Wyoming.

And so it's important.

This whole project is critical because the veil

of forgetfulness about the horrors and the fear

and the homophobia that existed in my lifetime,

and the changes that have occurred in my lifetime,

they certainly give me pause for concern.

But they also give me the aspiration for hope

that someday people will look back at this period in history,

as we look back at the abolitionists

and we look back at the Revolutionary War and say, wow.

Against all odds, those people took on a European country

with the military might--

the British-- and conquered.

And African Americans did that in the '60s.

And certainly, gay Americans did that in the '80s and '90s.

And who knows where this will take us?

But I hope in some small way, people

that I hitched my wagon to.

You know, other activists, other people

who came before me, certainly in this city and in this state,

have made a difference for our community

and for gay and lesbian people across the country.

KEVIN INDOVINO: I want to go back just a little bit here

with your work on the labor unions.

There seemed to be, to me, to my way of thinking,

that there may be a fine line there,

in working within the labor unions

to promote legislative change on contract basis

with unions as opposed to enacting political change

through the unions.

Using the unions as a vehicle of enacting political change.

Talk to me a little bit, because there is a fine line

to walk there.

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Well, there is a fine line

between political change and activism.

And labor unions have, as I said before,

been at the forefront of most human and worker

rights and civil rights issues in this country.

But there was an inextricable link between partisan politics

and our success in creating equality

at the workplace in our labor unions.

Because keep in mind that if it weren't

for our political activism--

pride at work, Empire State Pride Agenda.

If it weren't for changing individual hearts

and minds of politicians who--

we passed legislation who actually then--

we use the power of the unions at the ballot box.

And we use the influence that collective bargaining and labor

unions had with politicians in their own self-interest

in getting elected and re-elected.

In convincing them that these issues

that were important to those of us who are activists

and who were members of labor unions, it was a package deal.

We got involved in politics because we realized

that politicians ultimately had to make decisions that

were going to either approve or disapprove

of these collective bargaining agreements

that we would reach with these--

weather it was at the city level or the county level.

So there was a political movement simultaneously

within the labor movement that coalesced

to increase the probability that we would

be able to get the votes needed down the road in the state

legislature and the governor to sign what we now

know as marriage equality in New York state.

And here in Rochester, I know the Rochester Area Labor

Federation and the Rochester Labor Council

in 2006, they formulated and passed

the first resolution in support of marriage equality

here in Rochester.

And that resolution then went to the state AFL-CIO.

And I called and lobbied the leaders

of my union, who then networked out

to the leaders of other unions who were sitting on the state

AFL-CIO at the time and said, this is an issue

that labor is bringing to the political arena, to the table.

And so labor and labor's involvement in politics

helped the issue of marriage equality

actually get the support that it needed

in the state legislature.

Because if labor unions were supporting marriage equality,

then politicians who needed labor support

for their individual political objectives and their careers

couldn't turn their heads.

Even though they may have not been

100 percent behind the concept, they're pragmatists.

Most politicians understand that it's a game of give and take.

That there are concessions that they have to make.

And so when labor got behind marriage equality

in New York state, and when labor went to the legislature

and to the governor and said, we support marriage equality.

And took it from the domestic partner

arena, then the next logical progression and step

would be marriage.

And even then, I think there was an awareness among those

in the movement that simply because we had it

in the contract, and simply because we were passing

legislation here in New York state for marriage equality,

we recognized that at the federal level,

the Defense of Marriage Act, DOMA,

was still another hurdle for us to jump.

And keep in mind also that labor unions were supporting

progressive candidates, like President Obama, who

was saying that while--

the beginning of his first term, it didn't look like Don't Ask,

Don't Tell was going to be a major agenda

item for his administration.

It turned out to be something that he

put all of the power and influence

of the Office of the President of the United States.

So we, as gay people in the labor movement

involved in politics, started to support progressive candidates,

both at the local and at the county

and at the state level, that synergy that

occurs between local politicians and federal politicians.

And you know, the party, and all of the power

that the unions had in influencing those outcomes.

We

KEVIN INDOVINO: What challenges lie ahead?

And what will the role of labor unions

be in meeting those challenges?

THOMAS PRIVITERE: Well, the sad part is that there is a--

I think there's a direct correlation

in the demise of labor, both in the private

and the public sector in this country,

and the demise of what we call the middle class.

There were correlations between the success of workers

and the middle class in organized

labor in the mid to later part of the 20th century.

And if you look at what's happening in our country today,

the glaring disparity between the haves and the have-nots

and the decline of unions.

Not that long ago, 30 percent of American workers

were unionized.

Now, the stats are down to 12 percent.

And 7 percent of those are public sector workers.

So the decline of unions and the decline in the middle class--

I use this term earlier.

Our wagon is hitched to that team.

And you know, gay people and marginalized people

and progressive people need to understand,

I think, and not sit on our laurels

and just think everything's fine and dandy because we can get

married in New York state.

Well, you take that piece of paper into Mississippi.

And you know, the ink might as well be blood

because with the federal Defense of Marriage Act,

even with domestic partner benefits and health insurance

for married couples in New York state, as we all know,

the taxation problem is there.

Because the federal government doesn't

recognize our marriages.

And even domestic partner benefits in those

places where they do have DP benefits and not marriage,

those are taxed unlike married couples.

And even married gay couples have

to pay taxes on those benefits because of the federal Defense

of Marriage Act.

So the question about, where do we go from here?

We have to keep going.

We have to keep fighting.