Meet NYC Mayor Mamdani’s queer avengers

Zohran Mamdani made history last year as a Democratic Socialist who won New York City’s mayoral election. The now-mayor’s win wasn’t just a victory for progressives; his campaign promised to allocate resources for queer and transgender New Yorkers as well as incorporate policy guidance by high-profile LGBTQ+ organizers.Now halfway through his first year in office, Mamdani is attempting to live up to the lofty LGBTQ+ policy agenda that endeared him to trans New Yorkers. In that time, he’s already established the city’s first-ever office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs and appointed trans civil rights attorney Taylor Brown as its inaugural director. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announcing Taylor Brown as head of NYC’s new office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.CBS New York“This role and, especially being housed in the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice, where my office sits, really does feel like the perfect intersection of everything I’ve been working on in my professional career, and just based on my personal experience,” Brown tells The Advocate. As a trans woman who grew up in a rural town in North Carolina, Brown says her fight for trans rights has always been personal. Previously working for the ACLU, Lambda Legal, and the New York State Office of the Attorney General under Letitia James, Brown has spent her life fighting for equal protections for trans people.“I’m well aware of the disparities that have existed for my communities in this office, diversity of intersectionality, as well as the contemporary challenges that we face with ongoing hostilities from the federal government,” Brown says. Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, commissioner of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services.courtesy Smith-CruzAmong Mamdani’s other historic LGBTQ+ appointees are Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, a Black lesbian archivist, librarian, and dean of the Barnard Library, as commissioner of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, and Fire Commiss