The Tenth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, the greatest city in the world, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If this is your first time here, welcome, and thanks for coming by. A longer explainer about what’s going on here is in the first episode, but listen in whatever order you like. Do not feel any obligation to listen to the Mayor’s podcast, it’s incredibly bad, and anyway, I’m listening to it, and I’ll tell you what you need to know. Today, I’m talking about the 10th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled

Queer All Year: The Business of Pride and the Economics of Equality in NYC, released June 15th, 2023.

Trigger warning that this episode talks about the anti-LGBTQ+ legislative efforts in Florida throughout the episode, and also there’s at least one instance of someone describing experiencing anti-gay bigotry towards the end. No worries at all if you’d rather not hear any or all of that, and also, look, if you’re tired of the mayor, just generally, I can completely understand that as well. Take your time, this will be here whenever you would like to listen, or not at all.

A whole bunch of clips of people of people Adams, without naming them, identifies as LGBTQ+ members of city hall and business leaders, play at the top, talking about how inclusive NYC is and how much NYC wants to protect LGBTQ+ citizens of the city, which is nice.

Today Adams is interviewing Kellie Parkin, the Executive Director of the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce New York. And that’s how they put it. The Chamber has existed for like 20 years, and probably the name dates to before Q or + were commonly included in the lineup.

So, an interesting thing about Chambers of Commerce. I think that people generally have a sense that CoC’s are somehow official or formal, possibly even governmental. But in the US, CoC’s are just groups of businesses that come together to lobby for the interests of their business members. That’s it. Some of them are more formal than others. Some are non-profits, some not. Some are for specific industries, or geographical areas, some are for specific demographics of business owners. Best I can tell the nglccNY, as they shorten it, is not a nonprofit, or at least their website makes no mention of their 401c3 status, but it does make repeated mention of their status as a provider of certification opportunities for certified LGBT business enterprise suppliers, and the registered trademark for that phrase is always included.

The application for businesses appears to cost 900 dollars.

The mayor begins by complimenting Kellie’s necklace, which is, I think, the first time he’s done anything like that to a guest. It’s a little weird, in no small part because this is an audio medium, but it gets Kellie talking about where she got it, and she’s fresh from having all of the affiliate groups for her organization out to New Mexico, where she got this necklace.

Did you bring chambers from around the country, the mayor asks, as if Kellie had not just said that she’d been there for a meeting of all of the affiliate groups.

Her org is the New York chapter, and also the headquarters of the national chapter.

What’s the goal, asks the Mayor.

We’re like any other chamber of commerce says Kellie. Education, networking, business growth, for specifically LGBT owned businesses. Helping them to connect to our corporate partners that have expressed an interest in working with those businesses.

Kellie expresses that these corporations are interested in working with LGBT businesses because it’s good business. As well as maintaining your talent, retaining talent. And of course, the LGBT community intersects with all marginalized communities, so, she makes a point of saying, this is really about minority representation across the board.

She mentions that not everyone likes this and that comes with complications.

There’s another mashup of clips of unnamed people talking about how wonderful it is for LGBTQ+ people in NYC.

Is this an ad for New York? I mean, again, who is the audience for this podcast? If there’s a queer kid in, like, a rural area of the country who wants to be in New York, I literally cannot imagine a less convincing way of telling them to come here than having the weird mayor of New York City interview this lady about Gay Business.

Back from the clips, “I just moved here from Florida” says Kellie. Where due to the anti LGBTQ+ laws being signed, it’s hard for businesses.

Of the many concerns I have about Florida’s terrifying legal regime at the moment, the flow of capital is reasonably low on my list.

“We were really front and center when the governor came out with some of his horrific polices” says Adams.

Kellie asks the mayor a question, which is another first, I think, on this podcast, asking him what went through his mind when he said ‘we’re going to do something about this’ and start his billboard campaign.

(They don’t talk any further about this, but apparently in April, Adams trolled DeSantis by putting together “digital billboards” that will be “displayed in five major markets in Florida” that say things like “Come to the city where you can say whatever you want” over a sea of the word Gay, which is decently funny, but aside from the dunk, I doubt it actually, you know, makes anything better for gay people in Florida or NYC. Mostly it just sends NYC’s money to Florida’s billboard industry. It doesn’t make NYC less expensive to move to or live in, which is a barrier to entry for a lot of people, particularly if they’ve had discriminatory blocks placed on their employment thus limiting their earnings).

Anyway, in answer to the question, Adams talks about how we have to get rid of all bigotry.

Kellie seems truly upset about what’s happening in Florida, and I genuinely feel for her (I looked it up, she uses she/her pronouns, Adams didn’t ask, though, at least on air, nor has he done so on any episode so far). She talks about how her friends and loved ones that are still in Florida are under threat, that it doesn’t matter to the state that these are good people, the state wants to erase them.

“And the economics of the community - they’re huge spenders” says the mayor.

Good lord.

How can NYC’s Small Business Services improve services for LGBTQ+ businesses the mayor asks.

Well, Kellie says, she’s only been here four months. The mayor seems to learn this at the moment she says it, and I feel like a pretty good list of signs your podcast is a trainwreck could be compiled from events like these that happen on the Get Stuff Done Cast. She adds that she’s excited to look for more ways they can partner. “I didn’t even know there’s an office of nightlife!” she says. Ouf.

“Pride month!” the mayor just sorta yells.

“Yes!” Says Kellie.

“How can we leverage pride month?” asks the mayor which seems to just sorta cement the idea that he thinks of gay people as walking wallets. Your podcast host is bracing himself for the next time he asks this question of a representative of a historically marginalized group.

Kellie, despite her position, actually does a pretty admirable job of steering away from the financial aspects of this question and centering advocacy for LGBTQ+ people and communities as one of the main aspects of Pride. And also, she reminds the mayor, it’s important to remember that “We’re queer all year.” “Ha ha” says the mayor, “That’s a bumper sticker.”

OUUUUUF.

They meander in somewhat vague ways about the future of all of this, and also Kellie tells a pretty harrowing story about getting screamed at for being gay a couple weeks ago at a Yankees game. But she says she’s happy to be here, where it is a truly accepting environment.

The mayor asks her what her plans are for Pride, and Kellie says she’s looking forward to Dyke march, so Kellie’s clearly cooler than I gave her credit for.

That more or less winds things up, there’s another series of clips of unnamed people to take us out. I do want to highlight that the mayor talked a bit about marriage equality, which, to his credit, he was an early supporter of, and voted for when he was a state senator, even on the vote when it didn’t get through. He brings it up less frequently than I’d expect and it makes it all the weirder that it seems like he didn’t have anyone he could ask to be on his podcast for Pride Month except this woman who just moved here from Florida, especially in a city with as many queer icons, advocates, artists, etc etc etc as NYC has. It makes it all the weirder that they were discussing gay issues through the lens of business. It’s weird that business is being discussed without any business owners in the room. It is weird that this episode talks about the economics of Pride without talking to an economist or someone involved in the planning or implementation of Pride. It’s weird that a former cop is talking about Pride at all; Pride started with the Stonewall Riot against police brutalization of the gay community in New York.

But then Adams is a really weird guy. And, as much as I’m trying to figure him out by listening to his podcast, sometimes the best I’ve got is “dude’s weird.”

But before I move on, I do want to say something here about how whatever Adams is doing with this podcast intersects with Queer NYC. And I’ll be personal here. I’m experiencing possibly the weirdest midlife crisis I can imagine. I’m about to turn 46. Both my parents died in the last couple years, after long and extremely brutal illnesses. The pandemic has thrown everyone into cycles of loneliness and extreme trauma, this of course includes me. The result, for me, is a sense of identity placelessness. Which naturally leads to exploration, investigation, questions. One podcast leads to another. I’m being deliberately vague here, because I don’t really know where I’m going with all this, but I guess I’m saying that once you start looking into the ways you were defined that you didn’t really choose, it becomes glaringly obvious that most of the identities that society applies to you without your input, those are mostly for the benefit of certain parts of society, not you. And some of those parts of society are Not Good.

About the worst, most toxic parts of me are those that are unthinkingly male identified. The ones that have taken on the toxic parts of toxic masculinity. Now, that’s not to say that maleness is inherently bad, or that if you identify fully with maleness you must be toxic or something stupid like that. But it is saying that the way our society (if you’re listening to this, I’m just assuming you’re in more or less the same society as me; forgive me if that’s wrong) the way our society insinuates maleness on to people identified as male is often extremely bad and that male identified people can pick up a lot of bad stuff from that. And that I don’t feel heavily identified with being male. Or female. Or anything but relatively placeless.

Where’s all this going? Who fucking knows. I may wind up back where I started, or in another place altogether. Feeling placeless, though, can be incredibly scary and lonely. But I feel blessed to be having these thoughts, and to be asking these questions, in New York City. It’s a huge fucking privilege to be here, to be able to afford being here and to have the access to a city full of vibrant examples of queerness and queer joy. To be able to go to queer spaces.

I’m 46 I’m not going to a lot of any spaces. Most nights I’m going to bed. But in the same way that New York is a lot more survivable when you realize that at any one time you’re only 15 minutes from Grand Central Station and a trip upstate to clear your head, even though you’ll take that opportunity at most once every few years? The fact that I can walk to multiple spaces if I want that are just coded: come as you are? That’s incredible.

And that sense is just not here in this stupid podcast of the mayor’s about making money off of queer people, but never once mentioning their joy. The mayor may be having a good time, but he makes it all sound so fucking transactional and dull.

So what was Eric Adams up to during the period of time between the release of the last episode of his podcast, May 25th, 2023, and this one on June 15th? To do this I lean heavily on the reporting of two fantastic New York City outlets, The City, and Hell Gate, both of which I support financially, and I encourage you to do so as well. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

Possibly answering the question “why did the mayor have to resort to interviewing a person who moved to NYC four months ago about gay business ownership in NYC,” multiple LGBTQ+ political clubs in the city announced, for the second year in a row, that they would not attend the mayor’s pride reception at Gracie Mansion, citing his decisions to bring anti-gay figures into his administration, and a lack of communication with those groups about the issues they’ve raised to him.

Newly released data showed that, despite stop and frisk being declared illegal in 2013, the first quarter of 2023 saw the most stops since 2015 and 93% of those stopped were Black or Latino. Whites, who make up 31% of the population of NYC made up just 6% of the stops.

Eric Adams started walking in to his press conferences to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind.

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Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

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stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

See you next time.