Gary Parker at the helm

Gary Parker outside his Midtown office last week

Veteran gay activist builds bridges to unify diverse communities

By Chris Lombardi

His last name is Parker. He’s slender and soft-voiced and sometimes melts into the background. On nights and weekends, he regularly does the impossible for New York’s LGBT people. Rumor has it that, on occasion, he even sleeps.

But while he might be mistaken to some, perhaps, as a gay Spider-Man, Gary Parker is just a regular guy—though an awfully active one, as district manager of Community Board 5, co-president of Brooklyn Lambda Independent Democrats (LID) and convener of Different Voices, a coalition of the city’s gay progressive political clubs. What many may not know is that, in the 10 years since he graduated with a master’s degree in community organizing from the Hunter College School of Social Work, Parker has quietly morphed into one of the city’s power brokers, the secret weapon of midtown residents and the LGBT community alike.

At C.B. 5, the 39-year-old Parker has become known for bringing disparate interests to the table and finding areas of common ground. For LID, he often finds ways to bring outer-borough legislators in on bills important to LGBT voters, while leveraging the club’s political clout on behalf of local service providers. Furthermore, he managed to pull together the fractious LGBT progressive political clubs into Different Voices, which has already made an appreciable difference on city, state and federal levels.

Colleagues and officials talking to Chelsea Now praised Parker for his quiet intensity and ability to find common ground among disparate groups, but Parker noted that everything comes down to that social work training—and to what he learned from his mother, Stella, whom he calls “a lesbian role model.”

Gary had two moms

Parker grew up in Methuen, Mass. (population 50,000), which in the 1970s felt more like the 1950s, he said in an interview with Chelsea Now over lunch last week. He and his sister, Laura, had no idea their mom, Stella Parker, and Terry Martin, their “landlord,” were actually lovers and partners.

“They didn’t want my sister or me to figure it out,” Parker said. “They were afraid that if anyone found out, that the next thing that would happen was their family would be pulled apart.” Such fear is often realistic even today, he said.

When Parker was 16, Stella Parker told her kids that they were moving to New Hampshire. “She told us that Terry had ‘raised the rent’ so much that we couldn’t afford to live there any more,” he said, an apt metaphor for her grief about her break-up with Martin.

Forgetting the sandwich before him for a moment last week, Parker looked down at the table and up again, his voice soft. “I feel terrible that she had to lie to her children about her situation. No one should have to live with that kind of fear and oppression.”

His life’s work, he says, is on behalf of his entire immediate family, since Laura is a lesbian. “And she has a daughter, Olivia, who the odds say may also be a lesbian. When she grows up, I want her to have all the protections possible.”

However, Parker laughed, “she may also defy the odds and turn out to be heterosexual. And if that’s the case, I will love her, cherish her and march with her in Heterosexual Pride Parades—whatever she wants.”

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has known Parker for more than a decade through activist and political circles, echoed his sentiment. “His sister and her kids—you see them together and you see a little of what drives him, that he wants all families to be protected equally,” she said.

In the meantime, there is a lot of work to do, and Parker is on it.

Activist from Moscow to Brooklyn

According to Quinn, Parker is an important role model for those wanting careers in public service. “His life says you can live a happy and fulfilled life as an activist.”

Parker’s activism began in 1986, when he went to Moscow and co-created an anti-nuclear stage play called “Peace Child” with a half-Soviet, half-American cast. That fall, when he started at Brooklyn College, he joined the school’s LGBT association right away. Soon he brought Stella, out as a lesbian mom, to speak to the group.

“She’s a fighter, a survivor,” said Parker. “I’m really in awe of how she managed to raise two relatively well-adjusted children in such a situation.”

After getting his degree in social work from Hunter in 1997, Parker soon found his way to the office of Assemblymember Deborah Glick and worked as her community liaison.

“He’s incredibly bright, hard working and creative,” Glick told Chelsea Now by phone from Albany this week. “And you can really see his social work training, especially with constituents who…call [a little too] frequently. He would really listen.”

Similar testimonials were offered by everyone Chelsea Now spoke to, including Stonewall Democrats President Dirk McCall, who called Parker “just brilliant,” and Laura Morrison, chief of staff to State Senator Thomas Duane, who said, “How do you say enough about how warm and generous and funny he is?”

At Glick’s office, Parker became a spokesman on LGBT issues, as in 2000 when he testified at the City Council in favor of amending the city’s human rights law to include gender identity. “It was an amazing, uplifting experience,” said Parker. “I was able to advocate for some of our community’s most vulnerable members.”

When he left Glick’s office in 2003 to work in New York University’s community relations division, Parker found he missed his former job’s political impact. So, he joined his local LGBT club, the venerable Brooklyn LID. Six months later, he was its co-president.

Fellow social worker Christopher Murray, the club’s other president, told Chelsea Now that Parker is not as mild as he seems. “He’s tough, kind of a bantam-weight fighter,” said Murray. “His affability masks the intensity of his commitment.” And Parker’s training as an organizer, said Murray, has helped LID reach out to all sectors in famously diverse Brooklyn. “The gay community, the Caribbean community, recent immigrants from China—Gary talks to them all.”

Always overdress

Over time, said Murray, he and Parker developed some LID rules, about what works in politics: “Always overdress. Never drink at political events. Never say anything in written form that you wouldn’t want to see published. The front-runner usually wins. And the person with the most money usually wins.”

Following these maxims has helped the venerable club get to a point where it can tap Brooklyn legislators with ease. Morrison, of State Senator Duane’s office, credits Parker with the growing number of Brooklyn legislators now supporting top LGBT state legislation. Meanwhile, Parker has worked to connect local agencies serving the LGBT community, from the Anti-Violence Project to the Rainbow House mental health center, with officials who could help them.

In early 2004, Parker got a job offer he couldn’t refuse: district manager of C.B. 5. Declaring himself “in awe of the district,” whose boundaries run from “from Union Square to Times Square to the Flatiron,” he admits that balancing its diverse interests is not easy. Within C.B. 5’s boundaries are powerful banks, real estate developers, artists, garment workers and senior centers, among other interests.

“Midtown is a microcosm of the rest of the city,” said Parker. “There is a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. We’re losing affordable housing, while condos are being built at unbelievable rates.”

David Diamond, who just completed his term as chairperson of C.B. 5, said Parker has really grown with the job. “When Gary came, he was new to being a manager, but he’s amazing, and he’s been an invaluable partner,” Diamond said.

Diamond also praised Parker’s upgrade of C.B. 5’s Website, as well as his ability to get diverse community groups to the table. For example, he said, when the Museum of Modern Art was about to move into its new building on 53rd Street, “we had set up all these meetings, but Gary brought his particular take and made it work.”

Veronika Conant, president of the 54th Street Block Association, agreed. “Gary was a real help,” she told Chelsea Now last week. Opening receptions, the arrival of artwork, all created noise and trash problems, she said. “My bedroom, it looks out onto one of MOMA’s three—three!—loading docks, so I could see everything.”

Parker, she said, listened to her association and then brought to the next meeting more than the usual assortment of officials. “We had [Senator Liz] Krueger, we had [Richard] Gottfried, we had [Manhattan Borough President] Scott Stringer.”

More recently, said Conant, when her neighbor’s renovations caused “grinding till midnight” in violation of city noise restrictions, Parker came to her apartment to see, and brought Councilman Dan Garodnick with him.

“After spending the day as a district manager, it would be well within his rights for Gary to just go home and go to the gym, or whatever, instead of what he does: organizing and helping constituents,” Quinn told Chelsea Now.

Creating an LGBT umbrella

And only Parker, said Quinn and others, could have created Different Voices.

When he started at LID, Parker said, “I asked, why don’t all the LGBT political groups all form a coalition? They told me it was impossible,” that these are groups that snipe at each other, not work together. But after 2004, when President Bush proposed amending the U.S. Constitution to permanently deny marriage rights to same-sex couples, it got a lot easier.

“I must thank President Bush,” said Parker, “for acting in a way that made all the groups realize what the stakes were.”

Three years and many, many meetings later, Different Voices includes six other groups in addition to LID and Stonewall, including Queens and Staten Island–based clubs and nonpartisan groups like Out People of Color Political Action Committee (OUTPOCPAC). The group’s actions have included mass protests, including at Mayor Bloomberg’s 2006 inaugural ceremony, to protest the city’s appeal in the Hernandez v. Robles same-sex marriage case, which dealt with equal marriage rights for gay couples. But most of Different Voices’ work is with Democratic candidates—including, last fall, meeting with presidential front-runner and U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton.

“That meeting is an example of why we need a coalition,” said Parker. “Senator Clinton would not have met with any single gay political club. But when the entire front line of the LGBT community calls and demands a meeting, we’re harder to ignore.”

Veteran gay politico Ethan Geto, now the Clinton campaign’s senior LGBT adviser, couldn’t agree more.

“The Senator had previously supported DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act],” Geto told Chelsea Now this week. “But at that meeting, she told [Different Voices] she would support, not try to block, a marriage bill in New York State.” Perhaps even more significantly, he said, her recent policy statement on marriage advocates the extension of all federal marriage benefits to couples with marriages or civil unions from any state.

“All because of a conversation started at that meeting that Gary initiated. He’s had an impact,” said Geto.

Calling Parker “one of the emerging stars of the gay rights movement,” Geto said that the young man should consider becoming a candidate himself.

“We’d love to see him in public office,” said Geto. “He’s a bridge builder, he’s a diplomat, he’s respected so widely by so many different types of people, and he himself is not a self-aggrandizing sort of person, which is itself very appealing.... It could be very unifying for the community.”

But when Parker hears talk like that, he said, all he wants to do is go home to Brooklyn and his partner of two years, artist and illustrator Kevin Schneidler. (Asked about his own personal marriage rights, he said, “I want to marry in my home state, and will keep fighting until that is possible here. But first, one of us has to propose”).

Parker said that he will continue to fight for the LGBT community, but “the only thing I’m running for,” he said with a shy smile, “is cover.”