Yanery Cruz started work as the City Council’s LGBTQIA+ Caucus first-ever executive director on April 8, stepping into a role that didn’t exist before and that the caucus’s six members believe is long overdue.
Cruz is an Afro-Latina trans woman who spent years building relationships inside New York’s grassroots LGBTQ advocacy world before landing at City Hall. Her most recent post was with the New York Transgender Advocacy Group, where she learned the mechanics of policy from the ground floor up.
“At NYTAG, I got to learn a lot about policy and how to work with stakeholders,” Cruz said.
That background isn’t incidental. The caucus has been operating for years on almost nothing. No dedicated staff. No institutional memory that stays when members’ own aides turn over. Cruz is supposed to fix that, functioning as a direct, sustained link between queer New Yorkers and the lawmakers who can actually write legislation, hold hearings, and move money.
She’ll work primarily out of Speaker Julie Menin’s office. That’s not a small detail. It means the caucus isn’t floating somewhere on the organizational chart without a home. Menin’s backing gives Cruz access and proximity that a standalone office buried in the committee structure wouldn’t have.
“We want to hear their concerns and bring those concerns to the caucus and members, but also to the speaker,” Cruz said.
But the bigger coordination question opened up on April 9, one day after Cruz’s start date, when reporting in Gay City News surfaced her plans to reach out almost immediately to the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs. That office is also new. Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood it up less than a month ago, with Taylor Brown as its executive director. So New York City is now running two parallel structures intended to serve the same constituency, built at nearly the same time, by two branches of government that don’t always agree on much.
Whether that’s an asset or a recipe for turf battles, nobody’s saying publicly yet.
Cruz said she doesn’t see it that way. She’s describing her job as connective tissue, not competition.
“The City Council and mayor’s office will be working very closely with one another when addressing the concerns of LGBTQIA+ constituents,” Cruz said.
It’s a diplomatic answer. It’s also the only sensible answer at this stage.
She’s frank about how sprawling that constituency is. Queer New Yorkers don’t fit a single profile. They’re trans teenagers in Flushing, undocumented immigrants in Jackson Heights, elderly gay men in Hell’s Kitchen who’ve been fighting the same fights for forty years, disabled residents who can’t get to an advocacy meeting. Cruz said she’s specifically focused on pulling smaller grassroots organizations into the conversation, because those groups are often the ones who actually understand what’s happening on the block.
“They are the ones that are really on the ground having these conversations with our community,” Cruz said.
That orientation matters given what’s sitting in her inbox. Access to gender-affirming care has grown less reliable in New York even as the city bills itself as a refuge. Some hospitals have quietly pulled back on services. Federal pressure on healthcare providers hasn’t eased. The American Civil Liberties Union has been tracking rollbacks in states across the country, and GLAAD’s research documents how that pressure is reshaping the landscape even in blue cities.
The caucus now has a full-time staffer whose explicit job is to turn those problems into city-level action. That wasn’t true before April 8.
Cruz isn’t pretending the work is going to be clean or fast. She told amNewYork that the access she’s building is intentional, meant to make sure community voices don’t just get heard but actually reach the people making decisions.
“We want to hear their concerns and bring those concerns to the caucus and members, but also to the speaker,” Cruz said.
The next test is how the coordination between the caucus office and the mayor’s new Affairs office actually functions once both are fully operational. Brown runs the executive side. Cruz runs the legislative side. They’ll need each other.