Diaz gets Council slapdown
Pols ax his panel over anti-gay comments
The City Council voted overwhelmingly to dissolve the committee overseen by Councilman Ruben Diaz Sr. — stripping him of his leadership position in a sharp rebuke for homophobic remarks he made about the Council.
In doing so, Council Speaker Corey Johnson — who is gay — apologized for giving Diaz, a minister with a long history of such comments, the committee in the first place. He said the last week had weighed heavily on the Council, but particularly on its staff — some of them young gay people who worked directly with Diaz.
“It is to them that I especially would like to apologize. I will never forget the feeling of being a suicidal teenager, terrified that the world would hate me for being gay, and this entire experience takes me right back, in some ways, to that feeling,” Johnson said. “And I am so sorry to you and every LGBT person who feels the same because of what has transpired the last five days.”
Diaz has for days resisted calls to apologize for saying that the City Council is “controlled by the homosexual community” — and then doubling down, insisting it was a compliment. He did not attend Wednesday’s meeting, where 45 of his 51 colleagues voted to end his committee. Three abstained, one voted no, and one was absent.
The meeting was an unusual display of discipline in the typically congenial Council. Gay Council members offered wrenching recollections, as Johnson did, of their own youth coming to terms with their sexuality in an effort to explain why Diaz’s comments were so upsetting.
Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer described cutting school when he was 13 to stand on his Astoria rooftop and “think about whether or not it was better to die than to be a gay man.” As a child grappling with homophobia, he said, he was powerless — something that changed when became an activist and then an elected official.
“We have fought and struggled and many died so that we could have a few seats at the table, only to be attacked for having too much power in this body and this state,” he said.
Diaz has a long reputation for homophobia: Councilman Daniel Dromm first called for his resignation in 1994, when Diaz was on the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
That has led to questions about why Diaz was given a committee in the first place — one created just for him, regulating the for-hire vehicle industry whose employees have lavished donations on Diaz.
The councilman, in the same radio interview as his remarks about gays, said the arrangement was hammered out by his son, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., and by county party head Assemblyman Marcos Crespo — and such deals are common in lining up county support in a bid for speaker.
Johnson has insisted he merely asked each member what they wanted and tried to accommodate, but said it was a mistake to do so for Diaz.
Johnson, who is HIV positive, noted he wouldn’t be on the City Council if not for people like Van Bramer and Dromm, who spoke out against homophobia, including from Diaz Sr., in the 1990s.