Representative Ritchie Torres is a fighter from the Bronx who has spent his entire life working for the community he calls home. Like many people in the South Bronx, poverty and struggle have never been abstractions to him, and he governs from a place of lived experience.
Ritchie’s mother single-handedly raised him, his twin brother, and his sister in a public-housing project. She paid the bills working minimum-wage jobs, which in the 1990s paid $4.25 an hour. While Ritchie grew up with mold, lead, leaks, and no reliable heat or hot water in the winter, he watched the government spend over $100 million dollars to build a golf course across the street for Donald Trump. In 2013, at the age of 25, Ritchie became New York City’s youngest elected official and the first openly L.G.B.T.Q. person elected to office in the Bronx.
As a child of the Bronx who grew up in public housing, I was often too scared to come out of the closet in my youth. Now, as the first openly LGBTQ+ Afro-Latino Member of Congress, I feel the weight of history on my shoulders. I know firsthand the discrimination members of the LGBTQ+ community face, and am determined to make positive change for my community.
We are closer than ever before to realizing the full vision of equality in America, but we must continue to combat LGBTQ+ discrimination with federal action. Millions of Americans still live in fear of losing their jobs, homes, or livelihoods because of who they are and whom they love. My lived experience as a gay Black man from the Bronx motivates me to fight every day until we are fully equal in the eyes of the law.
I’m proud that my first bill to pass the House advances the fight for full equality for the LGBTQ+ community. It requires financial institutions to compile and maintain certain data on applications for credit from LGBTQ-owned businesses, which codifies the term “LGBTQ-owned business” into federal law. Collecting this data is crucial for identifying business development needs and opportunities for LGBTQ-owned businesses, which add over $1.7 trillion to the U.S. economy each year.