Tuesday, March 23, 2010

It's the 30th Anniversary of HRC's Founding

(Democratic Party hack and homo clothes-horse, Joe Solmonese, from a 2009 fashion spread in Washington Life magazine.)

My, my, how times flies when you're holding endless rubber-chicken galas, parading an endless line of attention-starved B-list entertainers in front of your logo, paying an executive director a solid $300,000-plus salary and showering healthy six-figures on other top leaders, telling the gay community you have a road map to federal equality but can't reveal any directions, and having pretty much nil to show for advancement of gay protections at the national level.

From the HRC site:

The Human Rights Campaign was founded in 1980, with a goal of raising money for congressional candidates who supported fairness. In the years that followed, the organization established itself as a resilient force in the overall movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights as it strived to achieve fundamental fairness and equality for all.

In 1980, Steve Endean, an advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, founded the Human Rights Campaign Fund to raise money for pro-fairness congressional candidates. [...]


Happy birthday, HRC! You're thirty-years-old and your list of genuine accomplishments is remarkably slim, for an org that has probably raised and wasted close to a billion dollars. Buckets of gay dollars have flowed your way over three long decades, and the biggest achievement you've got on your resume is the purchase of an office building in Washington, DC.

Oh, and today Joe Solmonese, the nincompoop fashion maven at the helm of HRC was chosen by Washington Life magazine the most Elegant Activist of the Year:


If the past thirty-years of HRC's incompetence and non-delivery of real change for gays is any indication of what the next three months hold in store from the org, we'll see more galas and minor performers yammering in front of cameras, promoting HRC's equal logo.

3 comments:

Thomas Kraemer said...

I shared my notes from reading the autobiography Steve Endean wrote shortly before his death from AIDS in 1993 in my blog post Thomas Kraemer, "Steve Endean, Terry Bean, Obama HRC speech," thomaskraemer.blogspot.com posted Oct. 18, 2009. Steve Endean was literally the hat and coat check boy at the first gay bar I ever went to in Minneapolis in the 1970s. He ran with the conservative gays even back then.

Greg Milward said...

I just want them to stop sending me their = bumper stickers. HRC is largely responsible for DADT---they pushed Clinton into the gays in the military fiasco that blew up in our face...

Will Kohl said...

Michael

When I think of all our LGBT brothers and sisters who have passed away over the past 30 years not as equals but as second class citizens of this country over the past 30 years while the HRC has been holding cocktail parties and failed strategies it makes me IRRATE.

I am usually noit one for "eating our own" but my opinion as of now is the only way that we will get anywhere in the future is to take over the HRC or have it disbanded. It does so much more harm than good at this point.

i think its time that we band togther and do something. And the first step is calling for the resignation of Joe Solmonese.

We will not be able to move further until we fix the machinery at the core of our movement.

Wolf
back2stonewall.com