GLID Member and New York State Senator, Thomas K. Duane represents the 27th State Senatorial District, which encompasses much of Manhattan's West Side from 77th Street to Battery Park, and sections of East Midtown, the Lower East Side, and Chinatown. Elected to the State Senate in 1998, he became the first openly gay and first openly HIV-positive member of the State Senate. Prior to his election to the New York State Senate, Duane served for seven years in the New York City Council, and was its first openly gay and openly HIV-positive member. Upon election to the New York City Council in 1991, Duane became the first openly HIV-positive person elected to public office in the country.

In the State Senate, Duane is the Ranking Minority Member of the Committee on Crime Victims, Crime, and Corrections. There he has fought to increase protections for crime victims. As a member of the Codes Committee he has advocated for the strengthening and rationalizing of penalties for bias crimes and sexual assaults, to eliminate unfair or unjust mandatory sentencing laws, and against attempts to criminalize behavior, particularly regarding HIV and drug abuse, which should be more appropriately dealt with as medical issues. Duane also sits on the Committee on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, where he has committed to fight for more treatment for drug and alcohol programs, and the Committee on Tourism, Recreation, and Sports Development, where he has pledged to work to promote tourism around New York's vital cultural institutions and the arts while at the same time scrutinize any proposals for sports gambling facilities. Additionally, Duane sits on the Committees on Elections, Energy and Telecommunications, Judiciary, and Water Resources.

In the State Senate as well as on the New York City Council, Duane has fought for funding for programs for people in need, sought to expand civil rights protections, and worked to preserve the integrity and diversity of New York City neighborhoods and to strengthen protections for tenants. On the New York City Council, Duane was chosen by his colleagues to be one of the City Council budget negotiators representing Manhattan. In that capacity he succeeded in saving many city programs from the budget chopping block, including proposed cuts to youth services, libraries, Legal Aid and other social service programs. He also secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding for computer centers in local public schools, and improvements for neighborhood parks, libraries and housing developments in his district, including new or improved computer facilities for virtually every public school in the community school district and capital improvements for virtually every park in the district he represented.

As a member of his local Community Board in the 1980's, Duane helped develop and advance the Chelsea Plan, one of the city's first community-initiated land use and zoning plan. The plan, approved by the City Council, will preserve the low-rise nature of the neighborhood, protect affordable housing, maintain Chelsea's historic districts and encourage responsible development. Duane also helped draft and push for the passage of a similar plan for Greenwich Village waterfront historic district to preserve that neighborhood's history and to prevent inappropriate development. In Clinton/Hell's Kitchen, Duane helped found a neighborhood group dedicated to fighting to preserve this residential neighborhood which borders Times Square from a rezoning by the City and developer speculation. Duane and a coalition of neighborhood activists were successful in preventing the City from rezoning a large stretch of the neighborhood to combine it with the Midtown Business District and encourage high-rise development there. Duane has been an outspoken opponent of plans to build a large and costly new Yankee Stadium or domed football stadium on the West Side of Manhattan in the district he represented, sponsoring legislation in the City Council which would have required the approval of the voters for any such plan. As a community activist, Duane was also an opponent of Westway, the plan to build a multi-billion dollar underground highway in landfill in the Hudson River, with massive hi-rise development atop it. Duane has instead fought to secure maximum public park development along the Hudson River waterfront along with the construction of a modest boulevard to replace the demolished West side Highway. In this capacity, Duane has helped stop plans for an aircraft carrier/heliport to be sited along the Hudson River waterfront in Clinton, remove commercial developments and buildings blocking access to the waterfront in Chelsea as well as preventing the siting of a giant sporting goods store on the waterfront, secured commitments from the State for the development of large new playing field spaces at Pier 40, the largest pier on the Hudson River waterfront, and secured commitments for the relocation of municipal sanitation facilities from the Gansevoort Peninsula, the largest piece of natural land in the Hudson River Park, for future use as a public beach and public recreation area. On the City Council, Duane served as Chair for two and a half years of the Subcommittee on the Private Uses of Public Space, where he scrutinized and often called attention to the city's increasing privatization of parks and other public spaces. In his last year on the Council, Duane served as the Chair of the Permits, Dispositions, and Concessions Subcommittee, where he successfully prevented the City from selling off several community gardens which it wished to dispose of, as well as fighting for sensible use of city-owned property and for neighborhood supported urban development plans.

Duane has fought to increase funding and services for people with AIDS. In 1997, the New York City Council passed Duane's Division of AIDS Services (DAS) Bill. This bill made DAS a mandatory city agency, and also required staffing levels be increased, a client's bill of rights be created, and an advisory council including DAS clients be instituted to advise the management of the agency. The bill was created partially in response to Mayor Giuliani's proposal to eliminate DAS, and his subsequent defunding and elimination of staffing from the agency. Duane has served since 1998 as a member of the New York State AIDS Advisory Task Force, and there as well as on the State Senate he has fought against measures which would criminalize consensual sexual behavior, mandate the reporting of names of people with HIV to government agencies, force the testing of certain categories of people for HIV, or require the notification of partners of people who have tested positive for HIV. In 1993, Duane persuaded the City of New York to join a boycott of Astra Pharmaceuticals, in protest of their price gouging of Foscarnet, one of the few drugs which treats AIDS related blindness.

A long time tenant activist, Duane was a leader in the fight to prevent the rollback of rent control, rent stabilization, and loft tenant laws, and to secure succession rights to rent-protected apartments for life partners and family members. Duane was a leader in the coalition which brought about the landmark New York State ruling in the Braschi case in the late 1980's, which found that domestic partners have the right to succeed their partners in rent-regulated housing in the State of New York. This led to changes in policy at the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal, the New York City Housing Authority, and the Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development recognizing the rights of domestic partners and other non-traditional family members to remain in their homes after the death of a loved one. In 1997 Duane helped organize the Village Coalition on Housing to fight efforts to rollback city rent laws and to organize tenants to fight for better services from landlords. On the City Council, he sponsored legislation to expand access to the Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption (SCRIE) Program, and in the State Senate he has co-sponsored legislation to create a similar program for people with disabilities living on a fixed income. One of Duane's first pieces of legislation passed by the New York City Council was a bill which prohibited discrimination by landlords against tenants who receive Section 8 subsidies. Active in the fight to better the quality of life for all New Yorkers, Duane also amended the Nuisance Abatement Law, decreasing the number of instances of illegal activity required to close down a business. This allowed local police to shut down a number of small stores in Greenwich Village which were supplying drugs to dealers operating in Washington Square Park.

An outspoken advocate for access to reproductive health care and women's rights, Duane sponsored Clinic Access legislation passed by the New York City Council and has co-sponsored similar legislation in the State Senate. Duane has been a critic of both the Fire Department and the Police Department's institutional tolerance of sexual harassment, and in one case was able to force a Fire Department doctor accused of sexual harassment by a female firefighter into early retirement. Duane helped defend women's health clinics under attack by Operation Rescue. During the 1992 Democratic National Convention, when anti-choice demonstrators attempted to prevent access to clinics throughout New York City, he organized a city-wide escort training. Duane was arrested in 1992 during a demonstration at the Holland Tunnel protesting the Supreme Court's Webster Decision, which some saw as leading to a weakening of women's right to access to abortions. He is a co-founder of Chelsea for Choice and a member of National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. In 1998, in response to a wave of mishandled sexual assaults in New York City schools, Duane called for the institution of a system of sexual assault reporting and counseling in city schools, requiring each school to have at least one staff member specifically trained to handle a report of a sexual assault by a student. Duane also fought, as a Council budget negotiator, to increase funding for agencies doing Alternative To Incarceration Programs, which particularly affect women.

Duane has fought to expand the rights and protections for lesbian and gay New Yorkers and all New Yorkers, gay and straight, in domestic partnerships. In 1993, he convinced the City of New York to join in a nationwide boycott of the State of Colorado after an anti-gay initiative was passed there, which was later struck down by the Supreme Court. In 1993, he and a coalition of activists succeeded in pushing then-Mayor Dinkins to provide domestic partner benefits to city employees. In 1992 and again in 1997, he was able to defeat legislation at the City Council which would have only granted domestic partners the right to register their partnerships with the City of New York, rather than codifying in law their right to benefits. Duane long sponsored legislation which would do so, and in a dramatic reversal, in 1998 Mayor Giuliani proposed legislation doing roughly the same thing. Duane also introduced landmark legislation in the City Council which would require businesses with contracts with the City of New York to provide the same benefits to the domestic partners of their workers as they do to married partners, as well as a first-of-its-kind bill which would require the City of New York to recognize domestic partners registered outside of New York City, making the rights and privileges of the institution more akin to those of marriage. He has succeeded in pushing a variety of quasi-public New York State and City agencies to provide domestic partner benefits, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Economic Development Corporation, and the New York Power Authority and has fought the exclusion by the State Senate, unique among direct State agencies, of benefits for the domestic partners of its employees. Duane is also a staunch advocate for the rights of disabled New Yorkers. In 1993, Duane organized a campaign which defeated a Council bill that would have repealed part of the human rights law for people with disabilities. In 1997, the City Council passed Duane's resolution calling upon the Taxi and Limousine Commission to establish a pilot program for accessible taxis and liveries in New York City. He marched in the first Disabled Independence Day March, and has marched every year since.

In 1994, Duane unsuccessfully ran for Congress in the 8th Congressional District, which includes the West Side of Manhattan as well as parts of Brooklyn. He was the first openly gay, openly HIV-positive candidate for Congress. In 1997 he was re-elected to the City Council with approximately 94% of the vote, and in 1998 he was elected to the State Senate with approximately 86% of the vote. Before election to the State Senate, Duane also served in the National League of Cities (NLC), where he was a member of the Board of Directors and President of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Local Officials (GLBLO) caucus. Duane also served as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Network of Lesbian and Gay Elected Officials (INGLO).

A resident of Chelsea since 1975, in 1982 Duane was elected to his first of four terms as Democratic District Leader in the 64th Assembly District. Duane was also a member of his local community board where he served for seven years. Duane was born in 1955 at the old French Hospital on 30th Street in Chelsea. Raised in Queens, he is a lifetime New Yorker. He attended Lehigh University, where he earned a degree in Urban Studies and American Studies.

Standing Committee Assignments 1999: Crime Victims, Crime & Corrections (Ranking Minority); Alcoholism and Drug Abuse; Codes; Elections; Energy and Telecommunications; Judiciary; Tourism, Recreation and Sports Development; Water Resources VOTE IN 1998 GENERAL ELECTION