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

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
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