Christine C. Quinn

Christine Callaghan Quinn (born July 25, 1966) is an American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, she formerly served as the Speaker of the New York City Council. The third person to hold this office, she is the first female and first openly gay speaker. As City Council speaker, Quinn was New York City's third most powerful public servant, behind the mayor and public advocate. She ran to succeed Michael Bloomberg as the city's mayor in the 2013 mayoral election, but she came in third in the Democratic primary.

Life and career
Quinn attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She served as head of the Housing Justice Campaign for the Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development. Quinn entered politics to manage the City Council campaign of Thomas Duane in 1991, after which she was Duane's Chief of Staff for five years. She later became the Executive Director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, and was appointed by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a member of the NYC Police/Community Relations Task Force.

Quinn ran successfully for the City Council in 1999. As of 2007, she still represents the Council's third district, representing Chelsea, Greenwich Village, and Hell's Kitchen, as well as parts of SoHo and Murray Hill. In January 2006, at the age of 39, after serving on the City Council's City Council for almost 7 years, Christine Quinn was elected City Council Speaker.

Before becoming Speaker, Quinn served as chair of the Health Committee, during which she sponsored the Equal Benefits Bill and the Health Care Security Act, which requires that City contractors provide parity in benefits between married spouses and registered domestic partners. This and the Health Care Security Act (which ensures health care for grocery workers) were passed over Mayor Michael Bloomberg's veto. However, the courts threw out the Equal Benefits Bill for conflicting with existing competitive state bidding laws. Quinn led the Council's opposition to Bloomberg's unsuccessful West Side Stadium plan.

Preceding the controversial lecture by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University, Quinn wrote to the university requesting that his invitation to speak be withdrawn.

Quinn is widely rumored to be planning a campaign for Mayor of New York City, possibly in 2009. In 2006 and 2007 she angered some New York City progressive activists by appearing to back away from her previous issue positions toward the political center, as in the case of her opposition to expanding housing subsidies for people living with HIV, and in the case of her support for proposed New York City Police Department regulations that would tighten permit requirements for parades and demonstrations.

NY St. Patrick's Day Parade boycott
Quinn announced in 2007 that she intended to march in the LGBT section of Dublin, Ireland's St. Patrick's Day Parade. She was invited to Dublin due to the Ancient Order of Hibernians's policy against gays and lesbians marching openly (i.e. displaying overt symbols of their sexual identity) in the New York parade. She tried to broker a deal with the organisers in 2006 to allow her to wear a gay pride pin, but failed and has since boycotted the event.

Quinn was named the third-most powerful woman in New York, behind Hillary Rodham Clinton and Diane Sawyer She resides in Chelsea, Manhattan with her partner, Kim Catullo.