Torres and his mother talked for a while, and then he told her that he had to leave. “I’m being honored tonight,” he said.

“Again?” she asked.

The event, called “Young Gets It Done,” was at Up & Down, a night club on West Fourteenth Street. The Manhattan Young Democrats were recognizing Torres for his efforts to expand jobs programs for public-housing residents, provide more mental-health services for L.G.B.T. people, and improve relations between the police and the community. He sat on a stage with Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul and Representative Sean Patrick Maloney. Several hundred people were in attendance, and the mood was ebullient. Hillary Clinton seemed comfortably ahead in the polls, and when Robby Mook, her campaign manager, walked onstage they cheered. Torres took gulps of red wine to calm his nerves as he waited for his turn to speak, but once he took the microphone he seemed at ease. “I’m a Bronx boy to the core,” he said. “But it’s an honor to accept an award from the Manhattan Young Dems.”

He had just returned from the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, where, he told the audience, a stranger had asked for his autograph: “I was flattered but confused. I said, This woman is from the opposite end of the country. Why would she want my autograph? And she kept pressing me and pressing me and pressing me. Then suddenly she realized, Wait a minute. You’re not the real Trevor Noah!” The crowd laughed. Torres spoke about the challenges he had confronted growing up, and closed with a message for his fellow-millennials: “Even in our moment of greatest darkness, there is light. And there is hope. And there is hope not only for our own lives, but we should be hopeful about our ability to change the world.”

Torres attended Lehman High School, in the Bronx, which was then one of the largest public high schools in the city, with more than four thousand students. Even so, the principal, Robert Leder, knew Torres. “He was very bright and very involved,” Leder told me. One day, during his sophomore year, Torres announced, during a school forum on the definition of marriage, “I’m proud to be a gay American.” (As he put it, “I had a Jim McGreevey moment.”) He had realized that he was gay when he was in the seventh grade, but he hadn’t told anyone, for fear of being targeted. The news shocked his family. He says that he and his mother “never spoke about the subject again until I ran for public office.”

Torres was not always a disciplined student—he regularly skipped class—but in the tenth grade he joined the law team. Each week, he and the other students made an hour-long trip to the offices of Clifford Chance, a corporate law firm in midtown Manhattan, where attorneys coached them, and he got his first glimpse of life beyond the Bronx. His mother bought him thrift-store dress shirts for these meetings; he ironed them at night in the kitchen. In his junior year, he became the team captain, and twice he led Lehman to the city moot-court championship, beating élite schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

Every year, James Vacca, the district manager of the local community board, invited a Lehman student to be his “district manager for a day.” When Torres was sixteen, Leder recommended him. On the day he spent with Vacca, Torres spoke at a senior center, helped mediate a dispute between Lehman and a local gym over students’ access to its facilities, and attended a community-board meeting that included a discussion of plans for the golf course near Throggs Neck Houses. By the end of the day, Torres knew that he wanted to work in politics. In 2005, Vacca ran, successfully, for the City Council, and Torres campaigned door to door for him.

Torres enrolled in New York University in the fall of 2006, but he fell into a severe depression and dropped out at the start of his sophomore year. He moved home and took a part-time job in Vacca’s office, but he was often late for work. He struggled to find mental-health care, which can be extremely difficult for low-income families in the Bronx to attain. Eventually, he was able to obtain an antidepressant, and began to recover. He started working seven days a week, and focussed on housing: he visited constituents’ homes, took pictures of building violations, and pressed landlords to make repairs. In early 2013, when a council seat in a neighboring district opened up, Torres, then twenty-four, decided to run for it, with Vacca’s support.

The Fifteenth District includes Fordham University and the Bronx Zoo. A hundred and sixty-eight thousand people live there, more than the population of New Haven. Nearly forty per cent of the residents are immigrants, and the median household income is twenty-three thousand dollars a year. The central Bronx had been badly underserved; since 2003, four state legislators had gone to prison, for crimes including bribery, embezzlement, and fraud. Ronn Jordan, a longtime activist, had been planning to work on behalf of another candidate, but a friend asked him to talk to Torres. Jordan recalls that, after they met, “I said, This is the guy who’s going to be exactly what this community needs.” He added, “Ritchie’s time in Vacca’s office served him well, because he was doing housing organizing. I think that is where politics needs to go now: to organize and be out in the communities that you represent, to give people the opportunity to get to know you. Because, other than that, most people don’t know what a council member does.”

Jordan, who is now fifty-two and uses a wheelchair, taped Torres campaign posters to his chair and sat outside a subway station each morning, asking strangers to sign a petition to get Torres on the ballot. “Who’s going to say no to a guy in a wheelchair?” he said. “I collected a lot of signatures.” When they campaigned together, Torres was occasionally mistaken for another famous person. “Sometimes kids would yell, ‘There’s Obama! There’s Obama!’ ” Jordan said. “We’d have to tell them that he wasn’t the President.”

Although the Bronx is solidly Democratic, its residents tend to be more socially conservative than those in Manhattan or Brooklyn. Torres calls it the “Bible Belt of New York City.” When his mother made campaign calls, one person told her, “Your son is going to Hell!” But Torres did not hide his sexuality; instead, he pledged to secure services for the borough’s L.G.B.T. population. Almost every candidate who wins elected office in the borough has the endorsement of the Bronx Democratic Party, but in this race the Party stayed neutral. The City Council’s Progressive Caucus supported Torres, as did the city’s largest unions. He also had a knack for retail politics. He called on more than six thousand voters in the district, and was often told, “I’ve never had a candidate knock on my door before.”

The Fifteenth District has an especially low voter-turnout rate, and Torres received fewer than twenty-eight hundred votes in the primary, but it was enough to beat five other candidates. He won the general election with ninety-one per cent of the vote, and became the first openly gay person to hold elected office in the Bronx.

“Try to ignore the hot-dog smell.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Before Torres took office, City Council members were already maneuvering for committee assignments. While his new colleagues sought more prestigious posts, such as the chair of the Committee on Finance or of the Committee on Land Use, Torres made it known that he wanted to head the Committee on Public Housing. The job had traditionally been a low-profile position, with little power. Other committees have legislative authority over city agencies, but the public-housing committee cannot pass bills dictating how the New York City Housing Authority operates, because NYCHA was created by the state. The council’s speaker appoints the committee chairs, and when Melissa Mark-Viverito, one of the leaders of the Progressive Caucus, assumed the role, Torres was given the job he wanted. “It seemed so obvious that I don’t think we gave it that much thought,” Brad Lander, who represents Park Slope and is a co-founder of the caucus, said. “It was already clear that he would not only bring his passion about the issue but his smarts to figuring out how to make that committee as relevant as it possibly could be.”

NYCHA oversees the largest public-housing program in the country, and the chair of the City Council’s Committee on Public Housing oversees NYCHA. “At some level, it’s absurd,” Torres told me. “At age twenty-six, I was chairing the committee that oversees the largest landlord in New York City.” More than four hundred thousand people live in the city’s public housing; ninety per cent of them are African-American and Latino, and the average household income is twenty-three thousand dollars a year. The income from rents doesn’t cover the cost of operating the buildings, and so NYCHA depends on funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to make up the difference; this year NYCHA will receive $1.2 billion to operate and repair its complexes. In the nineteen-eighties, President Ronald Reagan slashed HUD’s budget, and its contribution to NYCHA shrank significantly. The state and the city, which helped to fund the housing authority, cut their contributions, too. By now, the buildings have been neglected for so long that, by NYCHA’s own estimates, it would cost seventeen billion dollars to make all the necessary repairs.