Noach Dear, New York City Councilman from Brooklyn, who claimed the Orthodox Jewish community as his constituency, and later became a Kings County Civil Court Judge, died on April 19, at age 66, of complications from Covid-19. He made his mark in 1986, when Intro 2, the bill that added sexual orientation to the list of classes protected from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations in New York City, finally became law, after activists’ and elected officials’ 15-year effort, by being the only member of the Council’s General Welfare Committee, where the bill originated, to vote against it.
On March 11, 1986, after 10 hours of testimony, the bill was approved for passage out of committee and onto the floor of the Council by a vote of 5 to 1, with Dear as the sole dissenter. A number of Dear’s Chasidic constituents came to the hearing and, when supporters testified, stood and turned their backs on the speakers to show their disrespect. When Rabbi Yehuda Levin, the Right to Life mayoral candidate, testified, LGBTQ activists, including playwright Harvey Fierstein, similarly stood with our backs turned toward him. During Levin’s inflammatory testimony, Committee Chair Sam Horwitz was obliged to point out to him that the bill, not homosexuality, was the subject of the debate.
On March 20, 1986, on the afternoon that the bill came before the full Council, Dear proposed amendments exempting four-family dwellings and religious or denominational educational or charitable institutions from its provisions, the first defeated by a 20 to 15 vote and the second, by a 22 to13 vote. That evening, the bill passed into law by a vote of 21 to 14, with our ally Ruth Messinger casting the vote that assured us of its passage. Dear, of course, continued to dissent.
On June 29, 1986, at New York City’s LGBTQ Pride March, the fairly new Gay Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) had as its contingent’s theme the Homophobes’ Hall of Shame and a poster of Dear, carried by this writer, was included.
Twenty-seven years later, my spouse Joe Saporito and I had an encounter with Dear, when, ironically, he presided at a Civil Court case that we brought against a landlady who refused to refund our security deposit when we moved out of her house. The defendant failed to appear and Dear decided the matter in our favor.