From left: Former Center Development Director Janet Weinberg, Advertising Coordinator Clay Cane and Executive Director Richard Burns at the Boston–New York AIDS Ride, 2001. Photo: Marilyn Humphries.
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By TRENTON STRAUBE
Monday, November 27, 2006
Step into Richard Burns’ office at The LGBT Center and you’ll get a quick lesson on the past 30 years of queer history just by perusing the decor. Talk to Burns for even a few moments and you’ll get a glimpse of the activism and passion that fuel our movement.
A poster marks the first gay and lesbian march on Washington, D.C., (in 1979). A framed T-shirt reads "Gay Community News," which was the nation’s only gay and lesbian news weekly back in 1977, when Burns moved to Boston after college specifically to join the paper.
"We did not think of ourselves as journalists," Burns said of the GCN staff. "We thought of ourselves as activists. The Gay Community News was a weapon of gay liberation, which is much the way today I think of The Center: as an engine of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender liberation."
This Friday, Dec. 1, Burns will celebrate 20 years of service as the executive director of The LGBT Center. He will be fêted 6–9 p.m, Tues., Nov. 28, at The Center with a celebration including Harvey Fierstein, Billie Jean King, Richard Winger and Urvashi Vaid.
"The thing about Richard Burns is that he’s humble and inspirational at the same time," said Barbara Warren, Director of Organizational Development, Planning and Research at The Center, where she has worked for 19 years. She describes Richard as a fun guy who also has a serious side and is down to earth. "He has a lot of images," she said, "and he’s so tall that some people are intimidated. But he’s very loving. The Center has a real spirit—it’s a wonderful place—and he embodies that spirit." Warren credits Burns with keeping the growing staff connected. "He makes us all go to a weekly staff meeting, sit in a circle—there are 60 of us—and everyone can say something."
We spoke with Burns recently about the highlights and hard times of the past 20 years helming our community’s home.
Let’s start with the very basics. What exactly does the executive director of The LGBT Center do on a daily basis?
Fundraising, community organizing, program planning, working with elected officials, being both a steward of this home for our community and an agitator for our community in the outside world. The first 10 years of this job I was also spending a lot of time with people who were dying. That was something queer executive directors did a lot of until ’96 really—because ’95 was a big dying year. You visited people in the hospital, would speak at their funeral. They wanted, I think appropriately, their lives placed in a context of this movement.
How has The LGBT
Center changed during your 20-year tenure?
When I came here, there were three staff people. We were heated by coal, we didn’t have electricity everywhere and weren’t handicap accessible. The Center received a foreclosure notice from the city. The first order was to get our fiscal house in order. I’m very proud that we were able to do a $13 million capital campaign to renovate this building so that it’s the kind of home our community deserves. We now have an annual budget of $7 million. More than 6,000 people come through the doors every week, and there are about 40 classes a day.
The Center functions as a meeting place for an eclectic mixture of groups. Are you hands-on with selecting who meets?
No. We want to set up a system that promotes your meeting. Anyone in the community can call and say, "I want to start a group." We’ll put it in the calendar. Many groups [that started here] still exist today: GLAAD, ACT UP, GMAD, Queers for Economic Justice. A couple years ago, we stared a lesbian cancer initiative. Under this system, the number of queer groups in New York City exploded in the last 20 years.
And we have been very involved in substance and alcohol abuse. That’s important because it’s tightly connected to putting yourself at risk for HIV and not taking care of yourself. Around 2000, we began to see men coming to us struggling with crystal meth, so we created crystal meth anonymous groups. That’s an example of how we can shift our programs to meet community needs.
Then there’s the queer celebration of our community, queer book-of-the-month clubs and lecture series. Tons of people are coming here for cultural programming.
You’ve always been an activist. Does that influence your vision of The Center’s role in the community?
We see our activism, our advocacy work, our government policy and government relations work as central to The Center’s mission. We lobby in Albany and Washington. We pull together groups to work on safe schools, nondiscrimination, gender identity. [In September], we held a big town meeting about the lack of LGBT representation in the New York state judiciary and how that resulted in the anti-gay marriage decision. Not only are there no queer judges on that court, those people wrote a decision like they’ve never met a gay person!
Is it a challenge to motivate the community?
What is true today, which was also true 20 years ago, is that it’s always a challenge to get people involved unless we’re in a crisis. But then, I have to say, people step up to the plate. The advent of AIDS: a huge influx of activists and money. In 1986 the Hardwick Decision came down; people thought, "I’m not discriminated against," then the U.S. Supreme court says, "The police can go into your bedroom in 20 states and drag you out of bed and put you in jail!" That was a wake up call, and more people got involved.
When Matthew Shepard was killed [in 1998], we had probably a 30 percent increase in number of volunteer applications—they’re online [at gaycenter.org]. We were at Little West 12th Street then [because the current space was being renovated], and we had to ask if we could schedule some of the meetings in gay bars; we were so full because of all the organizing that was going on after Matthew Shepard.
Let’s get personal for a minute: What do you do for fun?
I’m a theater queen. I’m a cyclist—I met my boyfriend Bobby from mountain biking. We’ve been together almost five years, living together two.
Finally, The LGBT Center offers many programs specifically for youths. Do you notice any differences in the younger generations?
One of the exciting things we see in the generations coming up is complete intolerance that we should be second- class citizens. It’s just not acceptable, and that’s a great thing. It means they’re all going to push.
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