VIRGINIA APUZZO (1941–)

 

When Bronx-native Ginny Apuzzo was ten, she proposed to her best friend Lucille, who didn’t respond favorably. “That’s when I learned of the ‘love that dare not speak its name,’” she has said³. After college and graduate school, she entered the convent at the age of twenty-six but left after three years (in 1969) so she could do gay rights organizing the way she felt she must.

Apuzzo ran for office and dove into movement politics. In 1976, she lobbied to add a gay and lesbian plank to the Democratic Party platform (the plank was added in 1980) and fought for the National Organization for Women to list a similar plank as one of their four demands along with abortion, day care, and ERA, but NOW dropped gay rights when lobbying failed. 

Apuzzo’s experiences with the feminist movement of the second wave typify the exclusion many gay women felt—that their labor and support were desired, but not their issues or identities. “I felt like [as] a lesbian, I needed to have a guitar,” Apuzzo once said. “You were fine if you had a guitar. If you played a little folk song, that was great. But if you were interested in lesbian feminist power, then you were going to embarrass [the straight feminists].”

After becoming the director of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force during the AIDS crisis, Apuzzo made it clear that the epidemic “was and always has been a women’s issue,” as well as a health issue that intersects with homelessness, poverty, and racism. When she was appointed Assistant to the President for Administration and Management during the Clinton presidency, she became the highest ranking out lesbian government official in American history. Her work builds on the idea of hope, but adds in a crucial element of movement-building—power. The speech that follows, delivered at the end of the Reagan era, identifies the path to same-sex marriage. In reality, same-sex marriage itself wasn’t her rallying point—and it isn’t for many leaders within the movement—but she recognized that “the rights that accrue [via marriage] are significant and we’re entitled to [them].”

Apuzzo’s approach to lesbian and gay rights was intimately informed by feminism’s claim on raising the status of women and destabilizing the false set of “norms” that dominated our understanding of men, women, and family. She knew that the more a homogeneous version of America was put forth, the harder it would be for anyone who defied that narrow path.

By the time she made this speech in 1988, at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force “Creating Change” conference, AIDS had ravaged the gay community and framed how essential spousal benefits are. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual people began suing for domestic partner benefits. The Village Voice had started the practice of offering domestic partnership benefits in 1982, followed two years later by the city of Berkeley. Undermining that victory, the Supreme Court had ruled in 1986 in Bower v. Hardwick that homosexual sex is not protected under the right to privacy, and the misunderstanding of AIDS and who it affects was still a reliable scapegoat to justify antigay positions.