The Faces We see with the Gay Civil Rights Movement

 I am Gay but when people think about gays they don’t think about me. As a gay movement on our way to get our individual human, civil rights what faces do we people see when we are mentioned?  Luisita Lopez Torrebgrossa writes on the NYTimes about her ideas of what people see in this movement. She doesn’t just mentions faces she mentions money and the heads of the biggest organization. I thought you would like to see her view point. Please never go away with a point on your head. Wether is criticism or something to ad. That helps others to see a view point expand or a news story comment on it by the reader. You can always leave it here at the site or may be in one of the sites that will carry this blog. 

Scoring consecutive victories in state legislatures, at the ballot box and in the polls, gay people have gained national prominence and momentum in the United States even as high-profile men have tightened their hold on the leadership as strategists, promoters, spokesmen and financiers.

 With money flowing from Hollywood and the high-tech world, members of the gay elite have contributed cash to political campaigns, created foundations and pumped in millions of dollars to transform gay rights into a mainstream movement hoping for another victory at the Supreme Court in June.

It is a male dominance; Out Magazine’s annual list of the 50 most powerful and influential gays and lesbians, issued this month, included only 11 women.

That’s no surprise: As a rule, women have not made it up the gay ranks or grabbed the media spotlight except perhaps when Ellen DeGeneres or Martina Navratilova came out of the closet (the basketball player Jason Collins upstaged them this week).

Today attention centers on people like Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, who is a strategist involved in the California lawsuit to overturn the ban on same-sex marriage that now awaits a U.S. Supreme Court decision. Or on Evan Wolfson, a Harvard-trained lawyer who has built Freedom to Marry into a bipartisan engine driving the marriage equality campaign.

Troubled by this trend, Urvashi Vaid, who headed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force 20 years ago, created a political action committee last year to raise money to elect pro-lesbian, pro-woman and progressive candidates. In six months they raised over $750,000; they have set $1 million as this year’s goal.

“Before we launched this super PAC, there was no national political vehicle for lesbians,” she said over lunch. While she endorses marriage equality, she said, “the lesbian political agenda is bigger than this issue alone.”

Along those lines, Rea Carey, the current head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, agreed that her agenda was larger, and claimed that the movement had plenty of strong women who did not get media attention.

“We live in a society where men are favored over women,” she said in an interview in her office here. “We see certain issues that come to the fore,” she said, like marriage equality and the right to serve in the military. “Whoever runs those organizations gets the attention.”

Allyson Robinson, a transgendered woman who is the executive director of the 6,000-member OutServe-S.D.L.N., which fights for equality in the military, agreed.

“We often say that the gay community is the same as the larger society,” Ms. Robinson, a West Point graduate and U.S. Army veteran with a degree in theology, told me. “We share the faults and failings of society in a broader way: fewer opportunities for women, lesser pay, less respect. But this community is well positioned to play a leading role in our society. The strongest leaders are women.”

That seems clear at a new group, Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry, a fledgling faction of Republicans with high-profile leaders who happen to be straight women. One is Megan McCain, who disagrees with her father, Senator John McCain of Arizona, on same-sex marriage; another is Margaret Hoover, a political commentator who is a great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover; the third is S.E. Cupp, a New York Daily News columnist and co-host of “The Cycle” on MSNBC.

Ms. Hoover, who worked on Capitol Hill and in the George W. Bush White House, has seized her role with the Young Conservatives, where she said she was made to feel comfortable in a leading role as a woman among mostly men: “I’ve felt totally welcomed.”

For Mr. Wolfson, the head of Freedom to Marry, there is no question about women’s roles. “The women are at the forefront,” he said. “They have a central role shaping strategy and leading the work.”

He mentioned Thelma Zepatos, an activist of 25 years who led the project to reshape the Freedom to Marry message. Ms. Zepatos, who is straight, is considered a big wheel in the movement, though living in Oregon, away from the media glare, she is hardly known outside the gay network.

“I was one of the people who thought of rebranding the same-sex-marriage campaign,” she said over the phone. “We started talking about love and commitment, and not so much about equal rights and health and other benefits of marriage,” which didn’t project an appealing and warm image. She and others rebranded the campaign, calling it “marriage equality,” a soft sell that has proved a big success.

As for leaders in this area globally who are women, one stands out. She is Mariela Castro, the daughter of President Raúl Castro of Cuba and director of the National Center for Sex Education there. Her work has turned around a government and society that not so long ago ostracized, arrested, jailed and deported gay people. Today, she is recognized as a leading advocate for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people in Cuba
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