Politics, Policy, and the Deeply Personal

Ally and former Mayor Tom Murphy looks back on gay rights in Pittsburgh

Former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy wasn’t at all surprised when labor representatives first approached his administration about offering health benefits to city workers in same-sex relationships.

It was the Mayor himself who engineered the request. Working behind the scenes and without fanfare Murphy urged gay union members to press their leaders about asking for the benefits at the negotiating table. The strategy worked. AFSCME union officials, cognizant of their members’ priorities, pushed the issue in contract discussions with the city. Murphy readily agreed to the request, thus setting the stage for the city’s other unions to ask for the benefit and for city council to subsequently change the policy for non-union employees.

“We orchestrated all of this,” Murphy recalls. “We figured out a way to do it.”

That was back in the mid to late 1990s, a time when the issue of gay rights was finally gaining a foothold, in the public consciousness. Still, providing health benefits to same-sex couples had the potential to be explosive and divisive even though the Mayor and some members of City Council wanted to make it happen. The city already had a fullblown fight over gay rights in 1990 well before Murphy was elected mayor. That was the year then-Councilmen Daniel S. Cohen and Jim Ferlo proposed adding the words “and sexual orientation” to the city’s existing nondiscrimination policy which covered race, age, gender, religion and origin.

“The entire bill was three words. Those were three words that caused a lot of drama in city council,” Cohen said. “The city prohibited discrimination against everyone except gays and lesbians. There were over 100 speakers at the public hearing. It was by no means certain the bill would pass. It was a very different time.”

Ultimately the legislation did pass providing the crack in the glass which Murphy could shatter after he took office several years later.

“Once Mayor Murphy took that step with AFCSME, it gave everyone on Council the green light to provide same-sex benefits to all city employees not just that one union,” said Doug Shields, a top council aide at the time. “Once that happened the wall broke down.”

As of June 10, 1999, Pittsburgh recognized “domestic partnerships and common law marriage relationships within the context of city employment.”

“When I had the opportunity to make a difference, I decided to do that,” Murphy said. “It affects people in the most personal way. I thought we needed to lead. I thought it was about basic fairness.”

Few people today would see the Murphy administration’s legacy as one in which the rainbow flag waved high and proud. Murphy’s tenure as mayor from 1994 through 2006 is typically associated with Downtown development, building stadiums and moving the city into its third Renaissance with signature projects including the construction of a new “green” convention center and opening access to the three rivers.

Still those who worked closely with Murphy say he set a tone from the onset that equality for women, minorities and gays would be a hallmark of his administration, a move welcomed by a network of young public servants. What’s more, Murphy’s resolute stance on equality created an environment where discussions about diversity and providing opportunity were now part of the conversation in areas such as city purchasing and contracting which for decades had been activities largely dominated by white men whose connections to city hall were familial or long-standing.

“It was understood that the time had come. It was the right thing to do and he was very insistent about that,” recalls former Deputy Mayor Sal Sirabella. “He led the directors and senior staff that way and if you didn’t understand, he’d tell you about it.”

Today Murphy’s support for LGBT issues is deeply personal as his son, T.J., is gay. But long before T.J. was born, even before Murphy married his wife, Mona, the former Mayor sensed that the politics and policy of gay rights had to change.

Murphy can pinpoint the moment he realized discrimination over sexual orientation was simply wrong. As student government president at John Carroll University the late 1960s Murphy developed a friendship with an underclassman whom he saw as a future campus leader, a smart talented young man who could win the presidency Murphy was about to leave. But his friend declined to take on the challenge fearing that such a public role on would expose his very private life as a gay man.

“That was the first recognition I had of the incredible trauma people go through, people who are in the closet. I just thought it was unfortunate people had to make choices like that,” Murphy said.

A few years later, that former college friend was living and working in New York City. He and his circle of friends embraced Murphy and Mona who had just moved to the city after a stint in the Peace Corps. Murphy soon realized that although New York was a melting pot, like most of America in the early 1970s, it was still a melting pot not accepting of the gay community.

“I watched the ugliness they faced and all of that had an impression on me. I just felt that society should not persecute people.”

That sentiment was reinforced in the coming years when as a Pittsburgh neighborhood activist and political candidate Murphy found himself on what was then an uncommon approach to campaigning: the gay bar tour.

“Well before T.J. was born there were just an astounding number of gay bars in Pittsburgh and the number of people who went to them was incredible. There were thousands and thousands of people but it was an invisible population.”

That invisible population found a friend in a Murphy who wasn’t afraid to defend the rights of others even in the hallowed halls of the very male-dominated and conservative state legislature where he would serve as from 1979 through 1993.

To that end, Murphy can still recall one particular floor speech among hundreds he made over his tenure. On this day, the legislature was debating a non-discrimination bill. Murphy had not planned to take the microphone, but insidious behind-the-scenes remarks from colleagues who went so far as to threaten “to shoot faggots” drove him to his feet. Every legislative and government office throughout the Capitol had a “squawk” box which provided a broadcast from the House floor so hundreds of employees in the complex heard his speech.

Murphy apparently struck a nerve with an impassioned plea for equality in an institution where gay employees toiled in fear of being “outed” and lived daily with the indignities heaped upon them by good-old-boy lawmakers whose private remarks were unkind at best, threatening at worst.

“For days afterward I would be walking down the hall and people would walk by me and just whisper, “thank you.”

By the time he reached the Mayor’s office in 1994, Murphy knew he wanted the city to be more welcoming, and he wanted the gay community to feel protected inside and outside of City Hall. That stance didn’t always make him popular.

State leaders were quick to call Murphy and threaten to strip him of his power if he continued his efforts to offer health benefits to same-sex couples, threats he chose to ignore. When the American Civil Liberties Union sued the University of Pittsburgh over policies it claimed violated the city’s anti-discrimination law, Murphy ended up in the middle of the fray which had dragged on for years. It was the city’s Law Department which criticized Pitt in a supporting legal brief with the Pittsburgh Human Relations Commission where the suit originated. There was little doubt the order to file the brief had come directly from Murphy who had no qualms about taking on Pitt, once an unthinkable act for the city’s Mayor.

“It really colored our relationship with Pitt,” Murphy said. “You kind of expected a university would be more open-minded in its thinking.”

In looking back on his administration’s record, Murphy believes he moved the issue of gay rights forward as much as he could by setting a tone that the administration wanted to be inclusive; by offering health benefits to employees in same-sex relationships and by speaking publicly when necessary. In his own mind, Murphy even toyed briefly with thoughts of marriage for same-sex couples, but he knew it was an idea whose time had not yet come.

“As Mayor, I could have married people and the thought crossed my mind. But talk about poking the dragon in the eye. I don’t know that we could have gone further than we did.”

From his current vantage point as a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute Murphy travels the country sharing his passion for building vibrant communities. He has little doubt that cities, governments, institutions and businesses which practice policies of inclusiveness ultimately will have a competitive advantage from trying to attract and retain talented employees to growing a tax base.

Interestingly, Murphy says that while he was mayor the issue of gay rights was always simply a matter of treating people equally. “It wasn’t my big issue. But it was an issue of fairness. Never would I have imagined we would have gotten this far in my lifetime.”

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