POLITICS
Erik Bottcher Steps Up for a Lead Role
Longtime aide to Quinn, Cuomo, and Johnson makes a run for City Council
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
Going back more than a decade, Erik
Bottcher has held a series of city and
state government posts that afforded
him a high profi le in New York’s political
scene and, especially, within the LGBTQ
community.
In 2009, he joined City Council Speaker
Christine Quinn’s offi ce as LGBTQ and HIV/
AIDS liaison during the fourth year of her run
at the Council’s helm. Two years later, Bottcher
was brought on board at the dawn of Andrew
Cuomo’s governorship, when a top priority for
the 2011 legislative session was enactment of
New York’s marriage equality law. In 2015, he
moved back to the Council, this time as chief of
staff to another speaker, Corey Johnson, who
like Quinn represented District Three, which
runs up Manhattan’s West Side from Greenwich
Village to Hell’s Kitchen.
Now Bottcher hopes to succeed the termlimited
Johnson in District Three in a race that
will essentially be decided in the June 22 Democratic
primary.
For all his experience and with an easygoing,
genial demeanor, Bottcher, at 41, is not the
product of a charmed life.
As a young teen, growing up in upstate
Wilmington, just outside Lake Placid, he struggled
— both with shame at realizing he was gay
but also with taunting from fellow students in
a high school where he found no institutional
support or even friends with whom he could
confi de his anxieties and depression. Bottcher
suffered through several attempts, increasingly
serious, to take his life — but fortunately was
able to get help in a month-long youth treatment
facility in Saratoga and in after-care once
he returned to his family.
The battle he waged with mental health issues
— he has since that time taken anti-depression
medication every day — deeply informs
his policy views on a range of issues from
homelessness and supportive housing to criminal
justice reform.
“The humanitarian crisis unfolding on the
streets of Council District Three is something
we should all be ashamed of,” Bottcher told
Gay City News. “We’re letting people die on the
streets.”
That tragedy, he explained, is due to “untreated
mental illness” compounded by “the lack of
supportive housing, a broken bureaucracy, and
an inadequate shelter system.”
From his own experience with mental health
challenges, Bottcher said, he knows that many
long-term homeless people living on the streets
and in subway cars began with problems that
Erik Bottcher outside an early voting site at Madison Square Garden in October.
may have been modest and treatable but grew
to seem unmanageable after years or even decades
of not being addressed.
Bottcher’s diffi culties as a youth did not result
from lack of a supportive family. Even before
his troubles became evident, he recalled,
his father came into his bedroom one evening
to tell him, “I just want you to know that your
mother and I will love you no matter what.” His
parents suspected their son might be gay, and
his father’s unbidden reassurance was “good
parenting,” Bottcher said.
His experiences in school were another matter.
“It all came together at once,” he said. “The
realization that you might be gay and the realization
that you are gay. And the shame that
goes along with that. People telling you that you
look gay. And then, in ninth grade, somebody
walks up to you and tells you you are a fag.”
Bottcher considers himself lucky to have enjoyed
his family’s love and to have secured access
to mental health treatment and medication.
“A very small percentage of Americans and of
New Yorkers have that,” he said.
Over time, Bottcher could see “the light at the
end of the tunnel” — that life wouldn’t always
be his upstate high school. He attended George
Washington University in the nation’s capital,
and two days after graduating in 2001 moved
to New York City.
DONNA ACETO
Bottcher’s personal recognition of the disparities
in access to mental health resources
— and to healthcare generally — is refl ected
in an impatience at the pace of remedying that
situation. The street homeless, many of whom
suffer from mental health crises, he said, represent
the common perception New Yorkers have
of where the city is falling short. In fact, a far
larger group — 80,000 in all, a quarter of them
children — spend their nights in shelters and
transitional housing, and many of the adults
have jobs.
“They’re just priced out of the housing
market,” he said. “They are not a monolithic
group.”
The US, Bottcher argued, has, since Ronald
Reagan’s presidency four decades ago, failed on
“jobs, education, housing, mental health, and
systemic racism.”
He added, “To address homelessness, you’ve
got to build people homes.”
Asked whether Mayor Bill de Blasio has fallen
down on that front or simply not done enough,
Bottcher acknowledged the city’s effort but said
“the number of units hasn’t met the need.”
At the same time, he credited the work that
the Council and speaker for whom he worked
have done in strengthening rent protections
and curbing vacancy decontrol that had turned
tens of thousands of housing units each year
➤ BOTTCHER, continued on p.9
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