Victory Fund's Annise Parker - Metro Weekly - July 16 2020

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“I’m not old enough for Stonewall, but I’m not that much past it,” says Annise Parker. “I was a fly on the wall for virtually every significant LGBTQ event in Texas in the ’70s and ’80s.” Activism has been a hallmark of Parker’s life, ever since the president and CEO of LGBTQ Victory Fund and Victory Institute attended her first political organizing event — the Texas Gay Conference — during her sophomore year at Rice University in 1975. A founding member of Rice University’s LGBTQ student group in 1979, Parker would later work for several LGBTQ organizations, including the Houston Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, the Lesbian/Gay Democrats of Texas, and briefly, as a Victory Fund board member shortly after the organization’s founding in 1994. A natural introvert and self-described loner who was raised in a conservative Republican household, nothing in Parker’s upbringing indicated that she would one day become one of the nation’s most prominent LGBTQ figures. But her parents and grandparents taught her the importance of civic engagement from a young age, a lesson she later incorporated into her own activism, much of which took place after regular work hours. “I was an oil company employee by day, activist by night,” she says. “I was spending 40 hours a week at work, and 10 to 20 hours a week as an actively gay volunteer. Throughout the ’80s, I was arguably the most visible lesbian activist in Houston.” In 1991, Parker ran for a Houston City Council seat, in hopes of providing political representation for the city’s LGBTQ community. Outraised financially and outmaneuvered strategically, she suffered one of her worst political defeats. Four years later, she ran for special election to an at-large seat, finishing third among 19 candidates. The early losses taught her valuable lessons about campaign organizing, messaging, the importance of fundraising, and creating political alliances — all of which she utilized in a successful bid for an at-large seat on the Council in 1997. Parker would be elected by the citizens of Houston eight more times, serving as an at-large councilmember, the city controller, and ultimately, its mayor for three terms. When she assumed the mayoralty of the country’s fourth-largest city in January of 2010, she also became the first out LGBTQ mayor of a major American city. In January 2018, Parker, who lives in Houston with her wife of 30 years, Kathy Hubbard, assumed the helm of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, a political action committee that seeks to get LGBTQ people elected to public office, and Victory Institute, its educational nonprofit arm, which provides training and specialized programs to potential political office-seekers and support to LGBTQ officeholders to better ensure their success. Parker’s oversight of the Victory Fund has come amid a surge in the number of LGBTQ individuals seeking political office, as well as an increase in the number of LGBTQ elected officials. In the United States, that number currently stands at 855, covering officeholders from both major political parties as well as nonpartisan elected leaders in local, legislative, and statewide offices in 47 of 50 states and the District of Columbia. “There are almost 900 openly LGBTQ candidates who are running across America this year,” she says. “Victory [Fund] has engaged, at least at a minimal level, with about half of them. And we’ll probably end up endorsing about 300 of them as the most viable candidates.” 24 JULY 16, 2020 • METROWEEKLY.COM
While the Victory Fund doesn’t concern itself with the specifics of policy positions or partisan politics — instead leaving that up to individual candidates — Parker does note that President Donald Trump has served as a motivating factor for many LGBTQ people, particularly those who are Democrats, to pursue public office. But she largely eschews political handicapping and punditry in favor of an eagle-eyed focus on the organization’s larger goal of growing the number of LGBTQ officeholders. “Our elected officials represent 0.17 percent of all elected positions,” she says. “So if we’re supposed to represent 4.5 percent of the population, we’d have to elect more than 22,000 officials across the country just to be at parity. That's a long way to go. “Our goal is to have representation in every state house, and then, ultimately, in every State Senate in America, and to grow that to that critical mass, which, in our definition, is about three officials,” she adds. “It makes a difference when we send one. It slows down the bad bills and changes the discussion. But it doesn’t really change the outcomes of bills. But three seems to be a magic number. Your allies can join you, and you can act in concert to advocate for certain causes. “We’re also focusing a lot this year on state Senate races, because redistricting is coming up. There are a lot of places where the state Senate is just like the U.S. Senate, where they have a filibuster rule. You get one person in, and they actually can stop the bad stuff.” METRO WEEKLY: Let’s start with your childhood. ANNISE PARKER: I grew up in Houston. I'm a Houstonian. And both my parents were born in Houston. And even though Houston’s a big, sprawling city, I grew up out in the rural outskirts of Houston. And so I had the best of both worlds. I had the opportunity to be near a big, vibrant city. But I grew up near cows and horse pastures. MW: How many siblings do you have? PARKER: I have one one sibling, who’s 15 months younger. MW: What were your parents like? PARKER: One of the blessings in my life is that both my mother and my grandmother were college graduates. Both my grandmother and my mother worked outside the home. So I was raised to be independent with the expectation that I would be able to support myself. I was born in 1956. So for a child of the fifties, that was an unusual expectation. MW: What were you like as a child? PARKER: I am an introvert. I was painfully shy. Very, very serious. And like most introverts, I was a loner. I was happiest when I was by myself, whether that was roaming around in the woods and pastures, or curled up with a book. When I was in the sixth grade, so that would have been about 12, my family moved to Mississippi. Then we went to South Carolina and ultimately moved, for my Dad's job, to an army base in Germany. I went to three middle schools and three high schools. I graduated high school in Charleston, South Carolina, my second time through Charleston, and I came back to Houston to go to Rice University in Houston. I was a National Merit Scholar — I knew I could go anywhere. I wanted to go to Rice. I wanted to come back home. MW: What did you study? PARKER: I had a triple major in the social sciences: I finished degree work in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. MW: Did you have any interest in politics back then? PARKER: I never wanted to go into politics myself, because, remember, I was shy and introverted, and that was not my thing, but my parents were faithful voters. I have early memories of standing in line with my folks to vote back when it was a really big deal, when the voting machines were impressive. You walked in, and pulled this big red handle and the curtains closed behind you, and the fact that they would stand in line waiting to vote — it impressed me. My parents were active community volunteers, as were my grandparents. And so I was expected when I was growing up to be part of community activities or volunteer. So I went to college. I was out. Actually, I came out when I was in high school in Germany. I was determined to be publicly out. So during my freshman orientation at Rice, I told my orientation group that I was lesbian and I was out throughout my college career. I attended my first LGBTQ political organizing event in 1975. It was still the very early days of the LGBTQ rights movement. And the funny little difference doing political organizing for the LGBTQ community then and now, is that we couldn’t communicate with each other. We were all on little islands. We shared telephone contact lists like they were made of platinum. And there were so many people who were so deeply, deeply closeted that you guarded your list of other gay people with your life. It was a very different way of organizing. And there weren't a lot of us. I was part of the lesbian group on campus that started in 1976. I didn't start it, but there were a dozen of us who were involved in it. And I’m one of the founding members of my university's LGBTQ student group, started in 1979, the year after I graduated. And for several years, I was the point of entry. They would publish — on campus, the beginning of each semster — an ad in a school paper that, if you're gay and you want to be connected to the LGBTQ student group, here's the number you call. And it was my home phone number. It didn't have my name on it, but it was my own phone number. So, you know, I'd get the idiot prank calls for a while. MW: You learned political engagement from your parents when you were younger. Did they ever talk about their political beliefs? “I showed [my mom] the video of me on the national news. And she looked at me, and said, ‘You look very pretty on TV.’ I WAS TALKING ABOUT BEING OPENLY GAY AND FIGHTING BIGOTS IN HOUSTON. BUT SHE JUST TOLD ME I LOOKED NICE ON TV.” JULY 16, 2020 • METROWEEKLY.COM 25
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Victory Fund's Annise Parker - Metro Weekly - July 16 2020

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