Windy City Media Group Frontpage News

THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

home search facebook twitter join
Gay News Sponsor Windy City Times 2023-12-13
DOWNLOAD ISSUE
Donate

Sponsor
Sponsor
Sponsor

  WINDY CITY TIMES

Lifetime partners share their bliss with a sunflower
by Gretchen Rachel Hammond
2016-08-17

This article shared 1467 times since Wed Aug 17, 2016
facebook twitter pin it google +1 reddit email


The image of the sunflower has always been equated with happiness.

For kids, its popularity is the botanical answer to a dinosaur. Sunflowers regularly dominate childhood drawings hung on kindergarten classroom walls or proudly displayed on household refrigerators. Between the Crayola-colored bright yellow petals atop of a towering green plant, an equally dazzling smile is often included.

However, for two contented life partners living in a quiet Southeast Side neighborhood of Chicago, just across from the Indiana border, the sunflower has become the focal point of a project that began as a way to combat the industrial pollution discharged by the furnaces and refineries that are stacked along the lakeshore just a few miles from their home.

Rita Alvarez and Kathy Fitzgerald have been fighting for change in their city, state and country all of their adult lives.

Their determination to transform careless bureaucracy or equally lackadaisical politicians into the kind of meaningful action that positively impacts thousands of people was how they met and became lovers for now 26 years.

Their home is the very definition of simple comfort which makes use of every inch of its humble space without ever looking cluttered. Even an oven, taken for granted by so many, cannot be found in their kitchen. One counter-top convection appliance and a single burner is all they need.

For Fitzgerald and Alvarez, happiness is not defined by collecting material goods which, in the end are far less sturdy or meaningful than the sunflower plants which line the entrance to their home.

It is defined through the companionship they provide to each other and anyone who touches their lives, however briefly.

When Windy City Times visited, the welcome provided was akin to that of an old friend.

The proud tour of their house was brief, but the story behind the couple who have made it into a place of unending love and the headquarters of a project that they hope will, one day, touch every light and sign post nationwide with the feeling they share was a detailed portrait of devotion.

In 1988, Alvarez began working for the Council for Disability Rights ( CDR ). Founded in 1970, the CDR "advances the rights of people with disabilities" through promoting "public policy and legislation, public awareness through education, information and referral services."

Their offices have since closed but the organization's website remains active.

By 1990, Alvarez was working tirelessly for the CDR advocating for disability rights and helping people with disabilities fight job discrimination.

"Kathy had become disabled three years before and she would come to the office as part of a grassroots organization of people with disabilities working towards getting things like accessible transportation and curb cuts," Alvarez said.

"None of that existed before the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] was passed [in 1990]," Fitzgerald added. "The CDR used to host our meetings."

"We didn't really talk but we would cross paths every now and then," Alvarez said. "In February 1990, my executive director, Jo, asked me if I would be interested in going on a trip to Washington, D.C. and acting as a support person for a quadriplegic in a wheel chair. She told me it was going to be big disability rights action and a march with thousands of people attending. Then she said that she thought the woman I'd be supporting [Kathy] might be gay."

"I was out myself but I never said anything," Alvarez added. "We had a few meetings at Kathy's house and, on March 10, we flew from Chicago Midway to Washington, D.C. I was terrified of flying but I wanted to do it because I knew this action could make a difference."

At the time, getting on the plane was a bigger ordeal than it is today, even without the unwelcome presence and often nasty interference from Transportation Security Administration ( TSA ) officials.

"The airline personnel were so rude," Fitzgerald said. "They would take our wheelchairs to cargo, transfer us into aisle chairs, strap us in and leave us there. There was no privacy. It was not at all comfortable."

"It's different now that they are trained," Alvarez noted. "But, back then, they had very little understanding."

Once Fitzgerald and Alvarez arrived in the nation's capital, they got to know each other through late-night discussions that began almost the moment after they had checked into their hotel.

"The march was quite the spectacle," Fitzgerald recalled. "All the way down Pennsylvania Avenue there were people with all kinds of disabilities."

On March 13, 1990, The New York Times reported that about 150 protestors converged on the Capitol Rotunda to meet with then-House Speaker Thomas S. Foley and, "Other Congressional leaders to demand quick action on the Americans with Disabilities Act."

"When we got there, many of the people who were paraplegics got out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the steps to the Capitol," Fitzgerald added. "It was incredibly emotional. Once we were in, we created a human chain blocking off the public access to the Rotunda. They told us that the police were coming and anyone who didn't want to get arrested should step back."

"I had never been arrested," Alvarez said. "I kept saying 'I can't get arrested.' But it worked out because there were other able-bodied supporters who had been through this before."

The New York Times stated that "More than 100 protestors in wheelchairs were arrested. The process took about two hours."

"There were no buses with wheelchair access, there were no police vehicles that had ramps," Fitzgerald explained. "There was one policeman for every person under arrest who had to walk with us to the police station. They put us in one room. The people that they could, they [handcuffed] and, after several hours they let us go."

Meanwhile, Alvarez had returned to the hotel to help those people who had not been taken into custody.

"I was so worried about Kathy," she said. "But I knew she had done this kind of work many times before."

Fitzgerald added that, locally, her work involved blocking the entrances to Greyhound buses or Metra stations. She was more than used to equally provocative reactions from both the police and the public.

"The whole idea was to make the public uncomfortable enough that they would act," she noted. "Still people getting off the buses would yell at me incessantly."

Ultimately, the public took notice and, finally the politicians.

Fitzgerald, Alvarez, the CDR and thousands like them were victorious when, on July 26, 1990, the ADA was signed into law prohibiting employment discrimination and, in 2015, updated to include enhanced access to public accommodations and services.

In Chicago, there are still occasions that Fitzgerald must fight for a curb cut or remind a business that they have an obligation to provide her with access.

However, certainly in their neighborhood, the couple have found people not only to be accommodating but also enthusiastically supportive when they walk down their local street with their hands locked together in a singular determination that their love be visible.

That love was another significant result of the 1990 Washington, D.C, trip.

"Three days into it, we were sitting in the parking lot in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown," Alvarez said. "It was a warm evening and we were just reminiscing. I told Kathy I loved her.'

"We came home on March 17," Fitzgerald said. "She held my hand under the blanket on the plane and I told her to come home with me."

"We haven't been apart since," Alvarez added.

However, despite their now legally being able to marry, Fitzgerald and Alvarez have their reasons for simply remaining life partners whose love does not need to be endorsed by a piece of paper from the City Clerk.

"Rita is also my personal assistant," Fitzgerald said. "So she gets a salary from the state to manage my care. Until things are different, if we got married, we'd get penalized and we can't afford it."

"If I wasn't Kathy's life partner, she would only be able to depend on somebody for eight hours a day," Alvarez added. "I don't know how people can survive on their own after that."

It is an issue that has been made significantly worse by the Springfield budget impasse and Gov. Bruce Rauner's budget cuts. Even more concerning would be life under a Donald Trump presidency—a man who has made his hatred towards disabled people infamously clear.

"There are people who aren't fully aware of people with disabilities and their place in the world," Fitzgerald said. "Someone like Trump could turn the clock back to that time when people had a negative attitude towards us. He could stop funding so people cannot have care."

"When Gov. Rauner came into office it affected us," Alvarez added. "Kathy's eight hours of care comes through the Department of Human Service's Office of Rehabilitation Services. Gov. Rauner has said 'no' to paying a single caregiver over 40-hours-per-week. If you need help over that amount of time, you have to find someone else. Before he came into office, I had been Kathy's only caregiver for many years. Other people with disabilities now have to find multiple caregivers. So they are bringing in people they don't know, people who steal from them, threaten them. If they can't get help, then they are stuck."

Yet, if there is one thing Alvarez and Fitzgerald have done throughout their lives together, it is to find a bright side to every situation.

What could be brighter than a sunflower?

"The Southeast Side has, for a long time, been an industrial area," Alvarez explained. "Steel mills, scrapyards; we were right in the middle of the Petroleum Coke [pet coke] controversy. When we first moved here in 1997 we noticed all this residue on the deck and the siding of our house. Kathy has asthma and she was having trouble breathing. We called the EPA ( Environmental Protection Agency]. Someone came over and nothing was done."

Alvarez noted that it was not until the community stepped up in 2013 that regulatory action over the spread of pet coke dust ( a byproduct of petroleum refining ) was taken by the EPA.

CBS reported that, as late as May 2016, residents were still concerned that a series of class-action lawsuit victories won by Southeast Side residents and promises by refining companies to install dust suppression systems had not gone far enough to protect air quality in the community.

"A couple of years ago, we had started planting these mammoth sunflowers," Fitzgerald said. "The kids in the neighborhood loved them and it was then that I started to do some research."

Fitzgerald discovered that sunflowers are not just about a pretty face. They can actually absorb toxicity. Their phytoremediation effect is so powerful that they have been used to help clear radiation in Chernobyl and following the 2011 leak from a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan.

"We have four grandchildren," Fitzgerald said. "I wanted to do something for their generation. These sunflower plants not only clean the soil, they bring back the bees and other wildlife. I wanted to try and figure out a way to spread this information around so other people would start planting sunflower seeds."

Fitzgerald has begun the process of founding a nonprofit with a huge goal.

"I want to see mammoth sunflower plants growing along every pole in the city and then the nation," she said. "We met with our Alderwoman, Susan Sadlowski Garza, who is just enamored with the idea. We have a website now, a Facebook page and we are selling seeds to raise money. We tell people just to plant the seeds right in the ground. They are amazingly resistant plants. They don't need a lot of water. Once the heads are fully formed, the seeds will emerge. You can harvest those seeds, replant them, or eat them."

The Sunflower Project has already had a positive effect on the neighborhood and is beginning to spread beyond the Southeast Side as the fledgling nonprofit has picked up board members from as far north as Rogers Park.

The couple have even printed signs asking people not to mistake the baby sunflower plants as weeds and to give them every chance to grow to their full potential of up to 12 feet.

"We are telling people to plant them in alleys and other public places," Fitzgerald noted. "When we spoke to our alderwoman about planting them along Union Avenue in the business district, she was very excited."

"We have a new school opening up four blocks east of us," Alvarez added. "So we are going to talk to the principal about the project."

As close as Fitzgerald and Alvarez live just across from the Indiana state line, it could soon become a multi-state endeavor.

However, Fitzgerald and Alvarez have no plans just to leave it at that. Much like the love they found at the same time they faced arrest in the Rotunda of the Washington, D.C., Capitol building, the heights that their Sunflower Project could reach seem limitless.

"If we can spread the world, we can get a sunflower on every pole in the nation," Fitzgerald said. "Our hopes in doing fundraisers in the fall for next year's planting and information blitz will depend on the amount of money we can raise towards our efforts. It is rather costly to file for the 501C3 but our goal is to raise enough money to get all of that paperwork filed before 2017, unless we are so fortunate as to get big donors. So we are starting out small, then we can move to other countries."

www.facebook.com/cleanair2015/ .


This article shared 1467 times since Wed Aug 17, 2016
facebook twitter pin it google +1 reddit email

Out and Aging
Presented By

  ARTICLES YOU MIGHT LIKE

Gay News

After 30 Under 30: MAP Executive Director Naomi Goldberg
2024-03-25
NOTE: In this series, Windy City Times will profile some of its past 30 Under 30 honorees. Windy City Times started its 30 Under 30 Awards in 2001, presenting them each year through 2019. This year, ...


Gay News

Kara Swisher talks truth, power in tech at Chicago Humanities event
2024-03-25
Lesbian author, award-winning journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher spoke about truth and power in the tech industry through the lens of her most recent book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, March 21 at First ...


Gay News

Almost 8% of U.S. residents identify as LGBTQ+
2024-03-16
The proportion of U.S. adults identifying as LGBTQ+ continues to increase. LGBTQ+ identification in the U.S. continues to grow, with 7.6% of U.S. adults now identifying as LGBTQ+, according to the newest Gallup poll results that ...


Gay News

Women's History Month doesn't do enough to lift up Black lesbians
2024-03-12
Fifty years ago, in 1974, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) was founded in Boston by several lesbian and feminist women of African descent. As a sisterhood, they understood that their acts of protest were shouldered by ...


Gay News

No 'explanations' needed: Affinity remains a haven for Chicago's Black queer community
2024-03-12
Back in 2007, Anna DeShawn came out while she was studying for her undergraduate degree. At around the same time, she searched online for "Black lesbians in Chicago." Her search led her to Affinity Community Services, ...


Gay News

Affinity Community Services' Latonya Maley announces departure
2024-03-06
Latonya Maley, executive director of Affinity Community Services, announced March 6 that she would be stepping down from her post. The announcement came from a statement with Affinity board members. Maley said that, "It has been ...


Gay News

LPAC celebrates historic wins for LGBTQ+ candidates in Super Tuesday primaries
2024-03-06
From a press release: Washington, DC—Today, LPAC,the nation's leading organization dedicated to electing LGBTQ+ women and nonbinary candidates to public office, proudly announces the outstanding victories of 67% of endorsed candidates ...


Gay News

THEATER 'R & J' puts a female, queer spin on Shakespeare
2024-03-05
Romeo and Juliet is the theatrical gift that keeps on giving. It's been reworked for the masses numerous times, whether in direct adaptations or musicals such as West Side Story. Shakespeare's plotline points have even inspired ...


Gay News

Without compromise: Holly Baggett explores lives of iconoclasts Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap
2024-03-04
Jane Heap (1883-1964) and Margaret Anderson (1886-1973), each of them a native Midwesterner, woman of letters and iconoclast, had a profound influence on literary culture in both America and Europe in the early 20th Century. Heap ...


Gay News

THEATER When growth is paramount: Jim Corti helps fuel Aurora theater expansion
2024-03-01
Out actor/director/choreographer Jim Corti made his Broadway debut in 1974, in the ensemble of Leonard Bernstein's musical Candide. Director Harold Prince's acclaimed Tony Award-winning revival is often cited as a ...


Gay News

There she goes again: Author Alison Cochrun discusses writing journey
2024-02-27
By Carrie Maxwell When Alison Cochrun began writing her first queer romance novel in 2019, she had no idea it would change the course of her entire life. Cochrun, who spent 11 years as a high ...


Gay News

Brittney Griner's jersey retired at Baylor University
2024-02-20
On Feb. 18, Baylor University retired Brittney Griner's #42 jersey. Griner—a two-time AP national player of the year, two-time Olympic gold medalist and the NCAA women's career blocks leader (with 748)—attended a Bears home game ...


Gay News

Second Glance Productions hosts LGBTQupid Soiree
2024-02-16
In celebration of Valentine's Day, Chicago based film and media production company Second Glance hosted The LBGTQupid Soiree. The event, which was focused on spinning attitudes on this particular day, was presented at The iO ...


Gay News

SHOWBIZ Elton John, Hannah Gadsby, video game, Jennifer Lopez, queer thriller
2024-02-16
Video below - Sir Elton John has sold his Atlanta home and is now auctioning off more than 900 of his personal items that were kept in the 13,500-square-foot condo, The Daily Mail noted. The massive collection includes rare ...


Gay News

WORLD South Africa murder, lesbian couple, Brianna Ghey, Eurovision
2024-02-16
In South Africa, LGBTQ+-rights groups condemned the brutal murder of Diego Jacobs, a queer man in Cape Town, The Washington Blade reported. Reports indicate Jacobs, 21, was brutally murdered (reportedly by a former neighbor) on Feb. ...


 


Copyright © 2024 Windy City Media Group. All rights reserved.
Reprint by permission only. PDFs for back issues are downloadable from
our online archives.

Return postage must accompany all manuscripts, drawings, and
photographs submitted if they are to be returned, and no
responsibility may be assumed for unsolicited materials.

All rights to letters, art and photos sent to Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago
Gay and Lesbian News and Feature Publication) will be treated
as unconditionally assigned for publication purposes and as such,
subject to editing and comment. The opinions expressed by the
columnists, cartoonists, letter writers, and commentators are
their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature Publication).

The appearance of a name, image or photo of a person or group in
Nightspots (Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times
(a Chicago Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature
Publication) does not indicate the sexual orientation of such
individuals or groups. While we encourage readers to support the
advertisers who make this newspaper possible, Nightspots (Chicago
GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay, Lesbian
News and Feature Publication) cannot accept responsibility for
any advertising claims or promotions.

 
 

TRENDINGBREAKINGPHOTOS







Sponsor


 



Donate


About WCMG      Contact Us      Online Front  Page      Windy City  Times      Nightspots
Identity      BLACKlines      En La Vida      Archives      Advanced Search     
Windy City Queercast      Queercast Archives     
Press  Releases      Join WCMG  Email List      Email Blast      Blogs     
Upcoming Events      Todays Events      Ongoing Events      Bar Guide      Community Groups      In Memoriam     
Privacy Policy     

Windy City Media Group publishes Windy City Times,
The Bi-Weekly Voice of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Community.
5315 N. Clark St. #192, Chicago, IL 60640-2113 • PH (773) 871-7610 • FAX (773) 871-7609.