FOF #1314 – Call Me Anytime
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HRC came under fire last month with activists when they set up an HRC branded gift shop in Harvey Milk’s Camera Shop. Now, they want to join the youth bandwagon by partnering with The Trevor Project to run a youth call center from the shop.
Is this HRC trying to play nice or is it looking to tap the cash cow of teen suicide? And a call center in one the most expensive neighborhoods in the country- couldn’t they do it someplace cheaper like in India?
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The Cowardice of Gay Inc.
Comments
“Is this HRC trying to play nice or is it looking to tap the cash cow of teen suicide?”
Trying to use gay teen suicide as a cash-cow. If they _really_ gave a damn, they would’ve been doing something about gay teen suicide already. Instead, it took a gay sex columnist getting fed-up with all of the gay kids killing themselves to do something. HRC, meanwhile had been expending their energies fundraising for themselves.
The day that the HRC put their support behind a Republican NY senator’s reelection campaign, it became very apparent that the HRC is completely and entirely self-serving. (That senator, BTW, was known for being very, _very_ corrupt back when he was a local Nassau-County official. So not only was HRC backing a Republican, but a corrupt one.) The HRC is nothing but a pack of DC lobbyists who pay lip-service to Gay Rights, but as soon as those who are really fighting for Gay Rights do something that threatens their revenue stream, then throw the rest of us under the bus.
DO NOT fund or support the HRC. Support The Trevor Project directly. Support the Hetrick-Martin Institute. Fund them. (Heck, donate to Feast of Fun; they do more for us than the HRC.)
I find blanket criticism of and wholesale accusations of misconduct on the part of HRC to be one of the laziest current trends in LGBT activism/thought.
HRC is a lobbying organization. Always has been, always will be. As such they must operate inside the beltway, in that arena, with the rules of that game. Those rules require making decisions that from a pure, orthodox, put-your-foot-down grass roots level LGBT activism point of view may not be the choices or alliances we want them to make. Politics and passage of law as practical matter is filled with nuance, ass kissing, alliance building and yes very often getting together with some strange bedfellows. I think categorizing them as mere playing lip service to Gay rights is absurd beyond measure. Their accomplishments are real and measurable and have improved life for all LGBT Americans.
I do not know the situation with regard to the NY Senate campaign you refer too (without a candidate name making it very difficult to research by the way – I found no references to a Nassau county republican endorsed by HRC – do you mean the 1998 endorsement of D’Amato? 1998?) but my guess is that endorsement of any candidate is based on a thoughtful process of determining what potential legislative benefit having a particular candidate on our side does for us.
Yeah they backed the ENDA compromise. It wasn’t the end of the world and partially because of the uproar we still have no ENDA and no prospects for it in the immediate future.
Incremental change shouldn’t be seen as a deal breaker, in a practical real world way it is how most social change happens.
The HRC is necessary. Just as loud in your face grass roots demands are necessary. There is an important place for the continuum of political activity in our community and they all deserve our support. I am all for challenging HRC to be better but these broad calls of DO NOT SUPPORT HRC are not constructive and are pointing the finger at false enemies when we should be spending our activists energies fighting real enemies.
We should be glad that HRC took the space and has preserved some level of LGBT presence int he space, and preserved the mural. It easily could have become an Apple outlet or a Body Shop or a mortgage company with no real connection to our community. The rents in the Castro are outrageous, the buildings are owned by private people who have them as investments not as museum peices to our communities glorious past.
I loved the irony of you making fun of them for daring to sell HRC branded merchandise (how cynical of them to want to maintain their own funding!) RIGHT AFTER you had called for donations to Feast of Fun. You guys crack me up.
I’m glad the irony was not lost on you. Somebody has to watch the watchdog.
If you like Sherlock Holmes, try watching the new 3 episode BBC series “Sherlock” that recently aired. It was really well-done and interesting contemporary re-envisioning of the character (with a lot of good jokes about his ambiguous sexuality). The first episode in particular is really awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_Eagle
Personally, I’m waiting for scientists to clone the giant moa, the tallest bird that ever lived. Moa only went extinct like five centuries ago, when humans settled New Zealand and hunted them all down, and there’s still soft tissue samples from them in museums. If we brought moa back we could ride them, have them pull carriages like horses, or make the world’s most epic turducken!
But we should probably let the moa’s main predator, the Haast’s eagle, stay dead. That would definitely pose a risk to human life and limb. Although it’d be one more thing Weta Workshop wouldn’t have to CGI for The Hobbit, so really we’re at the mercy of Peter Jackson and his choice to fund it.
You should start selling “Bring Back the Moa” T shirts in your Etsy store. I bet the moa taste delicious, but I would hate to run into that eagle in a back alley, they say it would be like getting hit with a cinder block from eight stories up.
I sell t-shirts through my Zazzle store, since I don’t have screen-printing facilities myself (and the places around town that do it are painfully expensive). I only earn a small royalty through Zazzle though, so maybe I’ll consider going in-home.