First published on February 11, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.
Back in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, you could scarcely go out to bars on weekend nights without paying a door charge "for AIDS" or being asked by some fresh-face young man to contribute to AIDS education. Bars held raffles, sales, fundraisers garnering anywhere from a few hundred to several hundred dollars.
Then the head of some AIDS group would step forward, accept the money and thank the crowd for "helping support the fight against this dread disease," telling us how wonderful we all were. And we would smile and applaud because we knew we were helping the fight against AIDS and we were wonderful.
For years, I cheerfully contributed a few dollars each time I was asked. After all, it was a worthy cause, I knew people with AIDS, some dying, and I was glad to help as much as I could.
Then sometime in the late 1980s I read that the head of the largest local gay health organization doing AIDS work was paid a salary of something like four or five times my admittedly rather unimpressive annual income at the time.
That made me stop and think. And I stopped contributing. The amounts this woman was gushing over and thanking people for contributing would barely pay her salary for a day or two, much less go to help anyone with AIDS. If she were so concerned about AIDS, I wondered, how much of her own salary she was contributing?
And this was while I was doing a considerable amount of volunteer AIDS-advocacy work of my own within the all-volunteer state gay advocacy organization.
So I resolved to make no more contributions to AIDS groups unless there were full disclosure. That is, unless I knew how much the executives made, how much money actually went to useful projects, and what specific things the money went for. And that information was seldom if ever available.
I thought back to all this when I recently read an article in the Washington Blade detailing the salaries of executive directors of more than a dozen gay advocacy groups.
Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, headed the list with salary and benefits of about $210,000. Next was Elizabeth Birch, until recently head of the Human Rights Campaign, paid a total of $200,000. Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's Kevin Cathcart was third at not quite $200,000. Kevin Jennings, founder and head of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network earns about $165,000. And so forth.
These salaries are higher than most of us earn, at least more than I earn. I suppose they are not out of line with salaries in other social advocacy groups. If they seem high, maybe we are too used to thinking of gay advocacy as something you do as some sort of personal sacrifice.
And, after all, executive directors do have responsibility for the survival and growth of their organizations: setting policy, hiring staff, being a spokesperson, keeping the money flowing in, and doing what we hope is effective advocacy.
Still, since that moment of revelation years ago, my standards for contributing have risen. Fundraising letters waving the bloody shirt of religious right have no impact on me. Don't tell me about the menace, tell me what you are going to do about it. I want specifics. I figure if they are soliciting our money, we have the right, the obligation, to know what they are going to do with it. And how do we do that? Do they issue annual reports of what they achieved with the money we gave last year? Don't even ask.
In my book Kevin Jennings gets a free pass. He founded GLSEN, working courageously in the minefield of homosexuality and young people. He has written books, given innumerable speeches to educators and sparked those high school Gay/Straight Alliances. If anyone deserves his salary Jennings does. And Cathcart's Lambda Legal files high profile suits against unjust laws and policies and often wins. Perhaps no other gay organizations achieve such obvious results with so comparatively little money.
But the others? Especially GLAAD, best known for holding glittery fundraisers and award ceremonies "honoring" pop culture personalities, piggybacking on other people's achievements. And when we learn that Garry's $210,000 salary is a stunning 5 percent of her organization's total annual revenue of $4 million, something seems awry. Do they need my $25? I'm sure Garry can afford groceries without it.
I don't in principle begrudge executives making more money than I do, even a lot more. Maybe they deserve it. Some certainly do. But if they still want me to contribute, they had better give me a really good reason to contribute to them rather than any one of several other groups.
Just for starters, keep in mind that most statewide gay organizations are desperately poor - yet the state level is where most gay political issues are being decided - gay adoption and foster care, hate crime and civil rights laws, gay marriage and partnership issues, and state ratification or rejection of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.