POLITICS
Carlos Menchaca Prevails in Brooklyn In three Bronx races, LGBTQ-favored candidates go down to defeat BY PAUL SCHINDLER
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n a primary that saw four of the incumbent gay city councilmembers unopposed and two of the seven-member LGBTQ Caucus out of action due to terms limits, the one councilmember who faced a challenge, Brooklyn’s Carlos Menchaca, handily withstood an aggressive campaign by Assemblymember Félix Ortiz and the county Democratic organization to unseat him after one term. With nearly 99 percent of the ballots counted according to an unofficial tally by the city Board of Elections, Menchaca had more than 48 percent in a five-person contest. Oritz garnered just under 33 percent of the vote. In three contests in the Bronx that pitted progressives against more conservative candidates, LGBTQ favorites fell short. Incumbent Fernando Cabrera, a stridently anti-gay minister who once traveled to Uganda to offer his support to homophobic forces there pushing a death penalty bill for gay people, bested challenger Randy Abreu, a former Obama administration energy official, by nearly 20 percentage points. State Senator Ruben Diaz, Sr., another fiery opponent of the LGBTQ community, captured nearly 42 percent in a five-person race to succeed term-limited Annabel Palma, outpacing out gay Elvin García, a former de Blasio administration official by 27 percentage points, and Amanda Farias, who also had LGBTQ support, by 21 points. In the race to succeed out gay Councilmember Jimmy Vacca, Assembymember Mark Gjonaj, who had supported Diaz’s run, edged out Marjorie Velázquez, who enjoyed strong support among LGBTQ and women’s groups, by about four percentage points. In Queens, in a contest to succeed Julissa Ferreras-Copeland, who unexpectedly decided earlier this year not to seek reelection, Assemblymember Francisco Moya prevailed over Hiram Monserrate, GayCityNews.nyc | September 14–27, 2017
Out gay Councilmember Carlos Menchaca, who represents Sunset Park and Red Hook in Brooklyn’s District 38, won a big victory in Tuesday’s primary.
who was expelled from the State Senate after a conviction for assaulting his girlfriend. Monserrate has been a nemesis to LGBTQ voters since he went back on a pledge to support marriage equality in 2009 after having long courted gay voters. Sunset Park-Red Hook: District 38 Menchaca, the first out gay legislator in Brooklyn as well as the Council’s first Mexican-American member, had been on the outs with the Kings County Democratic Party since he ousted incumbent Sara González in 2013. Allied with the area’s congressmember, Nydia Velázquez, Menchaca said he collaborated well with other elected officials, too, but never saw eye to eye with Félix Ortiz, who is one of the area’s assemblymembers. He also clashed with David Greenfield, a socially conservative councilmember who represents an adjacent district with a large Orthodox Jewish community. Greenfield is widely seen as an instigator in Menchaca being deposed as cochair of the Brooklyn Council del-
egation in early 2015. That move followed Menchaca’s high profile battle with the city’s Economic Development Corporation over redevelopment of the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park, an issue Menchaca said was eventually settled to the community’s benefit. Menchaca, in an interview with Gay City News last month, emphasized that his work as a councilmember is focused on empowering a poor community with a large immigrant population, both Latino and Asian, that has long been neglected by the powers that be. “This has been, for a long time, a forgotten part of Brooklyn without a lot of attention paid to building political infrastructure,” he said. “The Democratic Party, the county party has not focused on this area and instead had a particular kind of candidate-based infrastructure to keep electing a very particular person, like Félix Ortiz.” The types of reforms he hopes to bring to the Council, such as the borough’s members coordinating their economic development efforts to serve common goals, are
not welcomed by county leaders, he said. “The reform movement is not only alive and well but I represent it as an independent and a progressive,” he said, and then explaining the forces arrayed against him in the primary, he added, “Hence, the multiple challenges from the old guard.” One key to Menchaca’s victory this week may be in the level of voter turnout. Four years ago, more than 7,300 voters turned out in a district that often draws less than 4,000 voters. Without hotly contested citywide races this year, Menchaca was concerned that low turnout could help the candidate backed by the county organization. If voter turnout were to fall back to traditional levels, he said, “I will lose. I could lose.” Victory, he explained, would rely on “movementbased response at the ballot box in September.” Menchaca apparently got that response, with roughly 8,500 votes cast on Tuesday. Kingsbridge-Morris Heights-University Heights-Fordham: District 14 In the Bronx’s District 14, incumbent Fernando Cabrera, who is pastor at a local Christian congregation, easily held off a challenge from Randy Abreu, who was appointed to the Energy Department by Obama, to win a third term on the Council. Cabrera survives in politics despite a documented history of antigay agitation. In 2014, when he challenged pro-LGBTQ State Senator Gustavo Rivera in that year’s Democratic primary, a YouTube video he produced while in Uganda surfaced in which he praised that nation’s aggressively homophobic government as “the righteous” at the very moment its legislature was considering infamous “kill the gays” legislation. Though Cabrera deleted the YouTube post, a record of its still exists (and will be posted in this story online). Given Cabrera’s radical anti-gay
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