Urvashi Vaid, who directs the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, rightly notes that "the movement has focused too much on elites with money and access, but that has brought us little change and no national civil rights laws: The situation with the DC-based organizations has deteriorated as our movement has gotten too cozy with power by trying to be insiders. There is no movement at the national level that is challenging Bill Clinton strongly enough." And, adds Vaid, the HRC endorsement of D'Amato--a right-to-lifer--confirms HRC's willful drift to the center-right (its political director is a former Bush Administration official), even though "there can never be a separation between reproductive freedom and sexual freedom."

The increasingly conservative style and agendas of Washington "gaycrats" are only part of the problem in our top-heavy movement. As Diane Hardy-Garcia, executive director of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, argues, "Our national organizations' budgets together spend some $40 million, while all the statewide lobbying groups put together have only $3.5 million--and over half of that is in New York," where the Empire State Pride Agenda's budget this year reached $2 million (half of which goes for fundraising--a troublingly large percentage).

NGLTF is by far the national political organization that tries hardest to support grassroots organizing. Its annual Creating Change Conference is one of the few national venues where local organizers can meet and network, drawing 2,500 activists last November from around the country to its Pittsburgh conclave. And NGLTF--together with the Federation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Statewide Organizations--organized this year's Equality Begins at Home Campaign, which staged rallies, lobby days, prayer breakfasts and other activities in all fifty state capitals, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, March 21-27. Thanks to a $300,000 grant from the Gill Foundation, the creation of computer mogul Tim Gill, founder of Quark, the Task Force was able to donate $5,000 for the campaign to every state group. But the NGLTF's annual budget of $3.6 million is dwarfed by the HRC's $15 million, and in any case is only a drop in the bucket compared with the money spent by the religious right on its anti-homosexual organizing beyond the Beltway. Even the Task Force is not exempt from elitism: As Washington's only gay state legislator, Seattle Representative Ed Murray--a progressive Democrat--recounts: "When the HRC or NGLTF come to town, they never call me--an NGLTF staffer actually explained to me that 'it's because you're not the gay leader with the Microsoft stock'--and they're supposed to be grassroots?"

Unfortunately, none of the issues raised here got any serious attention at the annual Aspen retreat of the Gill Foundation's Outgiving Project, a closed-door conference for gay fatcats who give at least $10,000 each year to gay groups. Although the foundation divides its funding roughly 50-50 between local and national activities, a study it prepared for the retreat of organizations and their needs focused only on the latter.

That gay funders should be determining the gay agenda with their checkbooks is itself problematic. As Joo-Hyun Kang, director of the Audre Lord Project--a Brooklyn-based community organizing center for nonwhite same-sexers--puts it, "Only funded organizations get surveyed, and nonfunded groups get passed over; it becomes a vicious cycle. There are over thirty lesbian and gay people of color groups in New York City, for example, and only a couple of them get any funding at all. A concomitant of the corporatization of our movement is that we're becoming a social service industry, and that's where the money is increasingly going."

Ultimately, though, the direction the gay movement takes will depend not on checkbook activism but on the kind of energy and commitment that people bring to work in their own communities. This may involve some nasty battles with more conservative gay elements and force the debate into the open--but the ultimate goal is victories that last, and that's worth the fight.

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