How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost its Way
6 min read
When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”
She should have done the latter.
Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.
Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on. Recently, the Times published a devastating exposé revealing how GLAAD succumbed to this temptation, enabling Ellis to live luxuriously at the expense of the group’s donors.
The trouble at GLAAD, however, is more than just a story of individual or organizational corruption. It’s also a story about how—in the years since LGBTQ people earned the right to serve openly in the U.S. military, get married, and not be discriminated against in housing and employment—an entire movement has gone tragically adrift.
According to documents obtained by the Times reporter Emily Steel, Ellis signed a contract two years ago enabling her to earn up to $1.3 million a year, far higher than the salaries of CEOs at charitable organizations of comparable size. She racked up nights at a Waldorf Astoria and other posh hotels and took 30 first-class flights in 18-months. A trip with a colleague to the Cannes Lions advertising festival, the purpose of which, according to GLAAD’s spokesman, was to “speak directly to companies about not turning their backs on the LGBTQ community,” cost $60,000. GLAAD also gave Ellis an annual $25,000 allowance to rent a summer house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and $20,000 to remodel her home office.
“The pattern of lavish spending is really despicable,” William Waybourn, GLAAD’s director from 1995 to 1997, told me. “I can remember crawling underneath beds in cheap motels trying to find a telephone connection to get on AOL.”
Today, GLAAD’s own statistics speak to its obsolescence. In 2013, GLAAD began publishing its “Studio Responsibility Index,” a meticulous tabulation of gay, bisexual, and trans characters in film and television. According to its latest report, surveying the year 2022, 28.5 percent of films released by the top 10 movie distributors contained an overtly LGBTQ character. For having an LGBTQ character in only 17 percent of its films, the studio Lionsgate was given a “failing” score. GLAAD has gone from criticizing negative media portrayals—once pervasive, now vanishingly rare—to demanding quotas for positive ones.
Like a censor in the days of the film industry’s Hays Code, GLAAD reviews film and television scripts for what it considers offensive content. At the same time, the group seeks out “strategic partnerships” (nonprofit-speak for corporate sponsorship) with some of the same companies whose content it ostensibly “monitors.” This practice creates an obvious conflict of interest. “We monitored all media and never took a dime from any of them,” Waybourn said. “Now it’s almost like blackmail. Either you support GLAAD or we’re going to come after you.” (In response to a request for comment for this article, GLAAD provided a lengthy statement asserting that the Times report “excludes much of our critical advocacy work and grossly mischaracterizes the organization” and citing three instances in which GLAAD had criticized “LGBTQ representation/other LGBTQ issues by a company that is also a financial sponsor.”)
As gay people have become more fully integrated into the mainstream of American life, prominent activist groups have excelled at perpetuating themselves. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading LGBTQ advocacy organization, issues a highly publicized Corporate Equality Index and, like GLAAD, accepts donations from the businesses it scrutinizes. It and other groups constantly gin up publicity on the faulty premise that life in the United States keeps getting worse for LGBTQ people. Last year, HRC declared, for the first time in its more than four-decade history, a “national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans”—an absurd pronouncement that diminishes not only the suffering of the thousands of gay men lost to AIDS but also the terrible treatment endured by LGBTQ people in the 64 countries where homosexuality is illegal and in some cases punishable by death.
Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra “the science is settled” on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.
Last year, though, GLAAD, HRC, and other organizations staked their reputations on a foolish crusade against the Times, condemning the newspaper’s careful and empathetic reporting on youth gender medicine as “irresponsible” and “biased.” GLAAD has placed the Harry Potter novelist J. K. Rowling and the journalist Jesse Singal, who has reported extensively on youth gender medicine (including in The Atlantic), alongside such people as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on a McCarthyite list of “individual public figures and groups using their platforms to spread misinformation and false rhetoric against LGBTQ people, youth, and allies.”
Meanwhile, LGBTQ organizations have slowly been erasing the people whose interests they were established to advance. Less and less do they even use the words gay and lesbian to describe their ostensible constituencies; more and more, they use queer, a historically pejorative term reclaimed by left-wing ideologues. Two years ago, as the Times’ Pamela Paul pointed out, a six-and-a-half-minute video introducing the current president of HRC omitted the words gay and lesbian entirely. GLAAD itself replaced its original name with its acronym in 2013.
In their dogmatism, many prominent LGBTQ groups have become disconnected from the people they purport to represent. For the first several decades of their existence, gay organizations relied on the generosity of gay individuals and small, gay-owned businesses. In 2022, according to the organization Funders for LGBTQ Issues, foundations donated $258 million to the movement. Fundraising for LGBTQ causes has had an inverse relationship to the actual legal and social hardships faced by LGBTQ people, ballooning in the years since all of the most difficult battles were won.
The corruption of GLAAD and other LGBTQ groups should force a reckoning for the gay community, which has no shortage of underfunded grassroots organizations working to address real problems. Among them are Outright International, which supports gay-rights movements abroad, and SAGE, which helps LGBTQ seniors. The community has genuine needs—which do not include helping nonprofit executives enrich themselves and hobnob with celebrities. If there’s a silver lining to the ethical collapse of GLAAD, it’s to shine a bright light on the massive waste of resources spent on organizations that have no reason for being and, in some cases, cause more harm than good.
