Interim leader sets out to make a difference in election year for NC’s LGBTQ+ community

Eliazar Posada re-adjusts the gray beanie on his head as he talks about coming out to his mom on the ride home from their getting coffee in 2013.

Posada, now 31, was a sophomore at Campbell University, working full time while studying political science and government. He knew in middle school that he was gay, and his older brother knew, but he had waited to tell the rest of his conservative family.

“The conversation started with, ‘I thought I had a son,’ and ended with, ‘I hope I can be proud of you one day’,” Posada recalled.

“It was 47 minutes of that,” he said, through which he stared at the clock in his Chevy S-10 pickup truck to keep his composure.

His mom has since “turned the leaf quite a bit,” adjusting her expectations that he would have a traditional marriage and kids.

“As a parent, you have to go through your own grieving process for the person that you thought (you knew), and I kind of get that,” Posada said. “So from one moment to the next, what you thought was going to happen with your kid, or who your kid was gonna be ... that changed.”

This month, Posada was named interim executive director of Equality NC, after former executive director Kendra Johnson left. His tenure is six months right now, while the nonprofit LGBTQ+ advocacy group seeks a permanent hire.

It wasn’t a step that he planned to take, said Posada, who was born in Florida to immigrant farmworkers from Mexico and raised in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. He considered law school after graduation, but took a year off because of the expense and volunteered with the nonprofit El Centro Hispano in Carrboro.

Like his mother, who advocated with farm owners to ensure fellow workers had what they needed, Posada has built a career focused on service and advocacy, first as an El Centro Hispano organizer in Carrboro and Raleigh, and later as the group’s executive director.

In 2022, he won a seat on the Carrboro Town Council, making him the state’s first openly LGBTQ+ Hispanic person to be elected. He left El Centro to avoid a conflict of interest and started a consulting company focused on helping nonprofits. A friend shared an Equality NC job posting for an organizing director, and he got the job in May 2022.

In November, he was re-elected to a four-year council term.

At Equality NC, he is now responsible for fundraising, lobbying donors and politicians, and leading the work to implement strategy and policy. Posada and his staff are drafting the nonprofit’s roughly $1.6 million budget now, with an eye on the 2024 election.

“My time here is really looking into how do we move that needle in our work? How do we make sure that we are setting up to reach out to as many voters as we can? We are communicating with our legislators on both sides of the aisle,” Posada said.

The interview

Posada spoke with The News & Observer about what’s ahead for North Carolina politics and his own future. Here are excerpts.

You’ve never expressed an interest in state politics. Why make this move now?

I always have tried to make a difference for the community that I’m trying to serve, and it wasn’t until I really started working with local government and working on policies that I started thinking of how much local government can really impact people’s lives.

We need to strategize and make plans so that we’re not in this position (with white, conservative leaders who target minority groups) again, but we’re in this position now and change doesn’t happen overnight.

It’s not going to happen with us tweeting about how much we don’t like Joe Biden, and how much we don’t like Republicans. It’s going to happen when we actually get out the vote, we organize people, we talk about the issues, and put people up for election or for these different positions of power that we want to see ourselves represented in.

How important is this election?

We’re looking at some pretty consequential elections this year. We’re looking at a lot of work that needs to happen with school boards across the state, as SB 49 (the Parents’ Bill of Rights law) is being implemented.

Note: The Parents’ Bill of Rights gives parents more control over their child’s education, health and privacy in the classroom. The most controversial provisions require teachers to notify a parent before calling a student by a different name or pronoun, and bans K-4 instruction related to gender identity, sexuality or sexual activity.

With (Lt. Gov. and Republican gubernatorial candidate) Mark Robinson on the ticket, with some of these horribly anti-LGBTQ things that he said, and just targeting queer and trans youth and targeting queer and trans people, we realize that we need to combat that, and we need funding for it.

We have to combat all these different bills, but one party is not going to be our savior. We need to talk to everyone. It’s not a super-loved strategy by a lot of folks in our movement, and I get that, but at the end of the day, I’ll talk to anyone who will talk to me.

What’s your take on the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board’s decision to reject the name and pronoun notification rule in the Parents’ Bill of Rights and its ban on sexual or gender instruction in grades K-4?

Our director of Education Policy (Rebby Kern) has worked with a lot of school boards, Chapel Hill-Carrboro being one of them, on how to actually combat this horrible bill. It takes a lot of guts (to oppose the law), and I get that and I want to acknowledge that folks on the school board had some real chutzpah. We need more of that.

I was one of the folks that led the fight against it in the General Assembly, so I worked with representatives to either do amendments or to make it less horrible, or help them kind of craft questions that were being asked in committees. The legislation is just so ambiguous, because I don’t think they actually thought that they were going to be able to get it passed, because Republicans didn’t have a super majority at the time.

I want to see more school boards around the state ... folks in other places who see this and say maybe we can join this fight. We’ll see. After all, we are in North Carolina in the South. There’s more conservative school boards than there are progressive ones.

What do you do when you’re not working?

I proposed to (his partner) Humberto last year. We are saving up for the wedding (and) looking at the last weekend of October, first weekend in November in the mountains. And then we’re going to be starting the process for looking at adoption.

I’m rereading the Harry Potter series, so just mind-numbing things that I don’t have to think about anything else. … I just read this book called “Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa,” which is a personal story of a young immigrant, queer kid, growing up in Texas and navigating that, and then I also started, “How the Word is Passed.” It’s a really cool book. It’s heavy, but it really goes into deep areas of U.S. history (and) kind of dissects a lot of these places that we see as revered in the U.S.