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

COURTESY OF VICTORY FUND
ious communities of interest were putting forward candidates,
and I was recruited to be the candidate for the LGBTQ community.
I wasn't really ready to run, wasn’t a good candidate, lost
the race, got absolutely shellacked. I crawled into a fetal position
for a while after losing.
I’d much rather be helping out other candidates, which I'd
been doing for many years by that point, than running myself.
But in 1995, this time on my own, I decided I wanted to run
in a special election, a six-week campaign [for City Council]. I
finished third out of 19 candidates. The first and second place
finishers had both already been elected to other things. And one
was a Democrat and one was a Republican, even though this was
a nonpartisan race. So they had name I.D. They had networks.
They knew how to do fundraising. I finished third. And what I
realized was that I knew more about the city than they did. I was
a better candidate than they were, but that I needed to do certain
things to be successful if I was going to do it again. And so the
next time I ran, two years later, I won my seat on the Houston
City Council, the first of nine consecutive races.
The most important thing I had to do was figure out — in the
first two races, every time my name was printed, it said, "Annise
Parker, gay activist," and occasionally, "Annise Parker, lesbian
activist, running for Houston City Council.” And I couldn't ever
get past the perception, that everybody, if they got their information
from the media, every time they saw it thought I was a
single-issue candidate. I had to learn how to raise money. I had
to upgrade my campaign team. And I had to master my own narrative
about who I was. And in order to do that, I had to change
the media coverage.
We had two newspapers and three TV stations back then.
I made a portfolio of the coverage from those two races and I
made appointments with the editorial boards or the editor of
each of those entities, and I took the portfolio in. And that race
where there were 19 candidates and I said to the newspaper,
“Look, here’s your listing of everyone in this race. And here's
what we do for a living. You actually put what every one of
their occupations is. Me? You say I'm a lesbian activist, or a gay
activist. I've worked for Mosbacher Energy Company for, at his
point, 18 years. I don't see anywhere on here where you refer to
anybody else by what they do as volunteers, or by their sexual
orientation. I’d be perfectly happy, whichever way you decide to
do it, just be fair.”
I kept having those conversations over and over again. And
the third time I ran — you know, I could say I'm persuasive, but
I think the world changed, too — they stopped. The newspapers
would figure out a way to make reference to my sexual orienta-
“DONALD TRUMP HAS BEEN THE BEST RECRUITER FOR
DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES AT EVERY LEVEL OF THE
BALLOT YOU COULD POSSIBLY HOPE FOR. They may
have been inspired because they’re so appalled by him and
his policies. But the ones who win are the ones who offer a
plan that voters can identify with.”
JULY 16, 2020 • METROWEEKLY.COM
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