LGBT Rights: Everywhere

I just saw something very disturbing.

It’s a short clip showing what happened in the streets of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, earlier today, when thousands of people turned out to shout down – and shut down – a modest rally for LGBT rights. Today is International Day Against Homphobia and Transphobia (IDAHO), and what makes today so important is right there for the world to see. See it for yourself here.

All too common
The scene is all too common: a small band of courageous activists, of people refusing to let an ignorant society circumscribe their lives, set upon, surrounded, and endangered by our antagonists. As the recently released annual Department of State Human Rights Report makes all too clear, what we saw today in Georgia could be practically anywhere around the world. Russia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, China, Albania, Belarus, Iran, Fiji, Iraq, Mexico – and scores more.

Or right here in the United States of America.

Time to Give OUT!

I remember that October day so clearly. It was 1987, the day of the second great LGBT march on Washington – and the first time I’d found myself with so many others like me.

Seas of … us.

A quarter century later, the internet has birthed ways of coming together that none of us dreamed of then. Millions of us. Coming together on-line, of course, isn’t the same as being in one place at one time. But the potential is huge.
A new way to give
Now there’s something brand new – and incredibly exciting – that can bring millions of LGBT people together around one of the most important things any of us – or any ally – can do. It’s called Give OUT Day and it’s coming on May 9, 2013.

Give OUT Day is this brilliant idea to have a single day on which LGBT people coast to coast donate to LGBT nonprofit organizations that help, serve, and save hundreds of thousands of LGBT people – every day. Without these groups, the LGBT movement would be pretty much nowhere. Without them, LGBT communities from California to Maine to Louisiana would be unrecognizable. So would many of our own lives.

Where history is made

I hardly need tell you that this is a big week. Not one but two landmark LGBT rights cases being argued before the Supreme Court. Discussion of our rights on every news-related website, in every magazine, on every newscast. All eyes – across the country – on who we are and whether our birthright to the same freedoms granted unquestioningly to others will be recognized and protected by our government.

Memories of Camp

The year, 1973. The place, Camp Makajawan, a Boy Scout camp secreted far up in rural, wooded Wisconsin. In my then 12-year-old eyes, Makajawan meant mosquitoes, uniforms, and stifling, sticky heat – and the general torment of young gay boys like me. At that age, the thought of “being gay” never occurred to me. But while I was lucky to be just athletic enough to escape full-faggot status at school, somehow the Scouts saw right through that.

The other boys in my patrol called me the usual names. Older boys threatened with tales of awful “initiation” rituals. No one wanted to tent with me. I was afraid whom I’d run into on a trail or near the showers or the outhouses.

Not that I’m alone in having had a bad experience at camp, Boy Scout or any other.

“…Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall…”

There it was. Right there in the President’s inaugural address, about three quarters through. “The most evident of truths,” he stated, is “that all of us are created equal,” and that this truth “is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall….”

Seneca Falls. Selma. Stonewall. Sites of events that proclaimed, each so bravely in its day, that women, that African Americans, that LGBT people, stood in the embrace of equality – and moved America closer to its most vaunted and most precious ideals.

Seneca Falls. Selma. Stonewall.

True allies

The French in the American Revolutionary War. Abolitionists in the fight against slavery. Urban consumers boycotting grapes to support farmworkers. Ruth Brinker, a straight woman, founding Project Open Hand in San Francisco early in the AIDS years.

Allies. They’re critical in just about every social movement I can think of, especially social movements that aim at justice for a group that’s unpopular or wields little political power.

The LGBT movement lost a giant ally earlier this week when Jeanne Manford, the founder of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, died at age 92. She started by standing up – 40 years ago – for her gay son, marching in the New York Pride Parade with a sign reading simply “Parents of Gays Unite in Support of Our Children.”

Helping Ourselves: A BAR Op-Ed

A few days after Thanksgiving, I stepped out of a modernist East Side building into a cold New York evening – elated. The building houses the rather grand offices of the Ford Foundation, generally regarded as the world’s most influential private foundation. And Ford had good news for the LGBT community.

A foundation steps up
That day, Ford had gathered people from the foundation and LGBT advocacy worlds to launch a major new initiative called “Out for Change.” It came with a commitment to grant $50 million over the next five years to LGBT causes.

Advocates like Horizons Foundation and the national Funders for LGBTQ Issues have long called for more private foundations to fund LGBT causes. While that advocacy has helped bring millions of dollars to our community over the years, total LGBT funding remains but a small fraction of one percent of all foundation grants. So the dollars alone promised by Ford will help. Equally important, Ford pledged to put its considerable institutional weight to work as well and encourage other wealthy private foundations to fund more LGBT work.