2020 Pinnacle Awards: Cindy Wilker

President, LGBTQ Center of Bay County

As a ı6-year-old high schooler, Cindy Wilker was instructed by two uniformed deputies to open her locker. The men rifled through its contents and confiscated as evidence notes that Wilker had received from a girl she was dating.

The deputies put her in a cruiser and took her to the sheriff’s office. Her father, a schoolteacher, was summoned. Furious, he gave his daughter two options. She could leave home or she could agree to be enrolled in a Christian school and get fixed. She left and has been finding her way ever since.

Wilker enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in ı980, believing that it would afford her an escape from poverty. She envisioned becoming a Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyer and planned, after separating from the military, to practice immigration law. She had grown up in Pueblo, Colorado, among migrant and immigrant farm workers.

After completing basic training at Parris Island, she believed she could handle anything, but she had yet to meet her commanding officer.

“I was in a unit with 500 men and myself, and that was a living hell,” Wilker recalled. “For two weeks straight, I would go into my CO’s office and he would kick over his spittoon and say, ‘Clean that up, would you? Would you, maggot, would you clean that up?’ And I would clean up that tobacco juice, and I would make that bastard his coffee. It was clear they didn’t want me around.”

Wilker got out, and she got lucky.

“I met a man who pretty much turned my life around,” she said. “Gary Krone was an investor on the Chicago Board of Options and invited me to be a runner. I wasn’t going to get dirty, I would be working in a heated and cooled place, and when he gave me a Mastercard, I said, ‘Wahhh, I just hit the jackpot.’ ”

Wilker followed Krone to New York City when he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She grew into a role as a researcher and discovered that she had an ability to find patterns among businesses that could work together.

In 20ı4, she hooked up with Tom Davidson and the Davidson Capital Group in WaterColor. His customers included Texas financier T. Boone Pickens and Joe Craft, owner of one of the biggest coal-mining operations in the country. Today, she works with developer Arthur Lazerow, who has projects in Maryland.

In Texas, she was part of a team working to put together a deal involving agricultural interests. Wilker didn’t much understand the language of the parties but was asked whether she thought there might be a hole in the deal.

“I said, ‘What happens if a tornado or a hurricane wipes out the business? You don’t have insurance for that,’ ” Wilker recalled. “And before the deal closed, guess what happened? A damn hurricane. I looked like a prescient genius. I was pressured to say something, and sometimes the best thing you can say is next to nothing.”

Deal-making has provided Wilker with some nice grubstakes and the freedom to try on assorted short-term jobs. She has taken advantage, traveling to remote destinations worldwide. Ask her and she will tell you about sitting down to dinner with a five-year-old, never buried, never frozen corpse in Tana Toraja. She harbors an unrealized desire to cormorant fish amid a waterborne culture in eastern China.    

In Chicago, Wilker worked briefly as an OSHA safety trainer before a wall overloaded with shelves containing hundreds of glass power-meter lenses collapsed on top of her, breaking her back and neck, damaging a hip and cracking her skull. She spent months in recovery.

Along her winding road, Wilker earned degrees at Drake University and at the University of Colorado, where she studied statistics and data collection and wrote a thesis on environmental racism.

Today, Wilker serves as the president of the groundbreaking LGBTQ Center of Bay County. The project got its start when two women asked her if she would help bring about a drop-in center where gay and lesbian students might feel safe and free to be themselves.

She has realized that objective and much more, empaneling a powerhouse board of directors, raising the profile of the LGBTQ community in Bay County, seeing to the first-ever Pride Festival in Panama City and forging alliances with organizations, including the NAACP, Feeding the Gulf Coast, Equality Florida and Florida State University.

Working with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, she has seen to it that a mobile clinic will visit Bay County and provide a previously unserved transgender population with medical care.

“I was dealing with a population of people who hadn’t been to the doctor in five or six years, many of them with mental health issues, many of them using medications from wherever they get them without being monitored,” Wilker said.

“Something had to be done. Health care is a human right. Everyone deserves access to health care.”