2017 World AIDS Day

Today is World AIDS Day. It is the 29th annual recognition of the impact on HIV and AIDS organized by the United Nations.  This year's theme is "Increasing Impact through Transparency, Accountability, and Partnerships."

TENNIS TUESDAY: Murray Is British Again; Serena Sabbatical; Federer in Africa, Venus Loses

Andy Murray Wins Three Matches In Davis Cup Tie With France
Andy Murray continues his excellent 2015 season by almost single-handedly lifting Great Britain to the semifinals of the annual Davis Cup team tennis competition by defeating two former Top 10 players from France: Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gilles Simon in singles and then teaming up with brother Jamie to win the doubles match in order to advance past France for the right to face Australia the weekend of September 20th (with home court advantage).

Serena Pulls Out of Bastad and World Team Tennis To Rest Before US Open
Despite going to Sweden immediately after winning her 6th Wimbledon title, World #1 Serena Williams withdrew after winning her first match and then promptly pulled out of World Team Tennis as well. She is still scheduled to play Stanford, Cincinnati and Toronto but if I was the tournament director at any of those tournaments I would start to sweat: I doubt she'll play all three.

Roger Federer Goes To Africa (To Open A School)
The President of the Roger Federer Foundation, i.e. the World #2 player, went to Malawi to open a school.

Venus Should Have Stayed Home; Loses 1st Round In Istanbul
Meanwhile Venus Williams maybe should have taken a page out of her sister's book and taken a sabbatical after Wimbledon. Instead she went to Istanbul as the top seed and lost in the first round to Kateryna Bondarenko!

New Report On Progress In LGBTQ Immigration

A new report from Funders for LGBTQ Issues, titled Pathways Forward, has been released.
From the introduction:

For most of the twentieth century, anyone who openly identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) was banned from immigrating to the United States. HIV-positive people were also barred from entry. Until 2013, the immigration system denied recognition of LGBT families: the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prevented gay, lesbian, and bisexual U.S. citizens from sponsoring their same-sex partners for permanent residence. 

Slowly, over the past three decades, all of that has changed. The ban on LGBT people was repealed in 1990, and the ban on people living with HIV was lifted in 2008. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Windsor decision overturned part of DOMA, recognizing the legitimacy of binational same-sex couples, ending years of separation and uncertainty for tens of thousands of couples.  

But the pathways to equality and basic quality of life is still hard for the vast majority of LGBT immigrants in the U.S., who now number an estimated 904,000. By comparison, New York State is home to 575,000 "out" LGBT adults. In fact, nearly a tenth of the nearly 9 million "out" LGBT adults are immigrants.

The full report is 24-pages long but is chock-full of important information like:

Funding for LGBTQ immigration issues has risen 20-fold from $146,000 in 2002 to over four million dollars in 2012.

As a former board member of Immigration Equality and an immigrant myself, this is good news!

REPORT: LGBT Philanthropy Has Increased 400% Between 2003-2012

A new report from Funders for LGBTQ Issues indicates that the funding for organizations that advocate for LGBT equality has increased dramatically in the last decade. From 2003 the total granted by philanthropic sources was about $30 million while in 2012 it had increased to over $120 million.

From the overview:

In 2012, U.S. foundations awarded 4,068 grants totaling $121.4 million to support organizations and programs addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lGBTQ) issues. This is roughly a one percent decrease from 2011, when we identified $123 million in grants for lGBTQ issues. 

Foundations also granted an additional $12.7 million to public foundations and other intermediaries for the purposes of re-granting to lGBTQ communities — more than double the $5.5 million awarded for re-granting in 2011. with re-granting dollars included, lGBTQ grantmaking totaled $134 million, a record high. we generally exclude these dollars from our analysis to avoid double-counting. However, dollars awarded through intermediaries are not necessarily re-granted in the same calendar year. Given the high dollar amount awarded for re-granting in 2012, some of the modest decrease in total lGBTQ grants may be more due to the cyclical nature of re-granting initiatives than to any substantive decline. 

In addition, the Arcus Foundation, one of the top lGBTQ funders, conducted a strategic review in 2012 that led to the launch of a new lGBTQ strategy in early 2013. Although Arcus’s lGBTQ grantmaking has since returned to its previous run rate, transition to the new strategy resulted in an $8-million decrease in that foundation’s lGBT grantmaking in 2012, significantly reducing the overall total in comparison to 2011. Arcus’s 2013 lGBTQ grantmaking is currently on track to achieve its previous level of about $16 million. This further indicates that this year’s slight decrease in total dollars is an aberration. However, it also demonstrates the vulnerable position of lGBTQ funding, which remains highly sensitive to any fluctuations in the handful of top funders that provide the lion’s share of foundation support for LGBTQ communities. 

Generally, the level of lGBTQ funding was stable in 2012, a likely temporary pause in its broader trajectory of growth.

The report goes on to note that just 0.24% of all philanthropic dollars, i.e. twenty-four cents out of 100 dollars, goes to support LGBT issues nationwide.

The top ten private funders for LGBT advocacy are:

Read the entire report, there is very interesting information there.

First Openly Transgender Billionaire Identified

James Pritzker has announced a name change to Jennifer Natalya Pritzker

Forbes magazine is the primary source for information about the world's billionaires and recently they have identified a milestone: the existence of the first openly transgender billionaire, Jennifer Natalya Pritzker.

Jennifer Natalya Pritzker, formally known as James, is one of 11 billionaire members of the extended Pritzker family on the FORBES list. They sold a majority stake in industrial conglomerate Marmon Holdings to Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway  for $4.5 billion in 2007 and continue to control publicly-listed Hyatt Hotels. The heiress has an estimated net worth of $1.7 billion. 

[...] 

Pritzker is a retired Army lieutenant colonel with 11 years active duty, followed by 16 years in the U.S. National Guard. Earlier this year, she gave $1.35 million to the Palm Center to create the Transgender Military Service Initiative. The goal of the project is “to sponsor state-of-the-art scholarship on transgender military service, and to enhance the quality of public dialogue.”

As far as I can tell, there are only three known openly gay billionaires: David Geffen ($5.5b), Peter Thiel ($3b) and Jon Stryker ($1.2b). Regardless, this is an interesting milestone representative of the diversity of the LGBT community. "We are everywhere, indeed!"

Openly Gay Black Man Named CEO of Ford Foundation

Darren Walker was recently named chief executive officer of the Ford Foundation. Walker is an openly gay, Black man who will run one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. According to Wikipedia, the Ford Foundation is currently ranked 5th in the world and has assets of nearly 11 billion dollars and hundreds of employees.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports:

Mr. Walker, a gay black man who grew up in a small town in Texas, worked for nearly a decade as a lawyer and bond salesman on Wall Street before giving up corporate life in 1995 to volunteer for a year at a school in Harlem.

He went on to become chief operating officer at Abyssinian Development Corporation, a community-development group in Harlem. Mr. Walker then worked for many years at the Rockefeller Foundation, before moving to Ford in 2010 as vice president for education, creativity, and free expression.

“The opportunity to lead the Ford Foundation is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for someone of my background, with the interest in social justice and the passion for social-change work that I have,” Mr. Walker said in an interview on Thursday.

Mr. Walker’s selection—he will officially take over in September—was widely praised by philanthropy peers, who described him as a well-connected and energetic manager with an unusual ability to build consensus among different groups of people.

Congratulations to Mr. Walker! I hope he is able to have an impact on focussing the Foundation's word on addressing inequality in the United States, especially inequalities based around race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

Bill & Melinda Gates Give $500K To Approve R-74

http://washingtonunitedformarriage.org/washington-united-for-marriage-salutes-signature-gifts-from-mayor-bloomberg-and-bill-melinda-gates-in-closing-days/! Although he had previously given $100,000 as part of a pair of six-figure donations by the current and former CEOs of Microsoft corporation to support marriage equality in Washington, it was announced on Tuesday that Bill and Melinda Gates wrote another check, this time for $500,000, to approve Referendum 74.

Bill and Melinda Gates have donated $500,000 to the campaign to uphold the state's gay marriage law. 

The donation was announced Tuesday by Washington United for Marriage, which is working to approve Referendum 74. The donation was made on Oct. 15, but didn't publicly post online with the Public Disclosure Commission until Tuesday. Referendum 74 asks voters to either approve or reject the law allowing same-sex marriage that was passed by the Legislature earlier this year.
Bill Gates had made a $100,000 contribution to the campaign earlier this year. 

About $11 million has been spent on the campaign so far, with a bulk of it spent by gay marriage supporters. Washington United for Marriage has far outraised its opponents, bringing in nearly $11 million compared to the more than $2 million raised so far by Preserve Marriage Washington, which opposes the law.

The Gates' are not the only billionaires to show their support for marriage equality. Mike Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, has announced that he will match dollar-for-dollar all donations up to $250,000, which could end up raising another $500,000 for Approve Referendum 74.

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God

MAP Report on LGBT Right Progress 2000-2009

There's an interesting report out this week called "A Decade of Progress on LGBT Rights" written by one of the smartest (and least well-known) LGBT organizations, the Movement Advancement Project, (with funding from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr Fund) which puts where the LGBT community is now in a useful historical context.

* Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation: The number of states outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation increased 83 percent, from 12 to 22, between 2000 and 2009. The percentage of the U.S. population living in states banning discrimination based on sexual orientation soared from 24.5 percent to 44.1 percent, an 80 percent increase. In other words, today 134 million Americans are now living in states where discrimination based on sexual orientation has been outlawed, an increase of 65 million over the decade. (When local nondiscrimination laws passed by cities without statewide protections are included, the figure is over 50 percent of the U.S. population.) Fortune 500 companies that protect workers based on sexual orientation grew from 51 percent to 88 percent.

* Discrimination Based on Gender Identity: There was an even more remarkable increase in states outlawing discrimination based on gender identity and expression, which rose from just 1 state in the year 2000 to 14 states representing nearly 30 percent of the population in 2009. The percentage of Fortune 500 companies that protect workers based on gender identity jumped even more, from just 0.6 percent to 35 percent.

* Relationship Recognition: Similarly exceptional gains were made in the area of family recognition. In 2000, no state extended the freedom to marry to same-sex couples; one state gave broad recognition to same-sex relationships and one offered limited recognition. Now in 2009, five states extend marriage to same-sex couples (with New Jersey and the District of Columbia pending at press time), six offer broad recognition, and seven offer more limited recognition. Overall, the number of Americans living in a state that offers some protections to same-sex couples nearly tripled, from 12.7 percent to 37.2 percent.

* Protection from Violence: The 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act is the first federal law to specifically protect LGBT people.

* LGBT Elected Officials: The number of openly LGBT elected officials in America rose 73 percent between 2000 and 2009, from 257 to 445.

* Public Opinion: The percentage of the public supporting the right of openly gay and lesbian people to serve in the military grew from 62 percent to 75 percent. Support for marriage equality has grown from 35 percent in 2000 to 39 percent today; there has been an even larger increase in support for relationship recognition that involves many of the rights of marriage, from 45 to 57 percent.

* Safer Schools: In 2000, only one state had a safe school law that specifically cited sexual orientation *and* gender identity/expression for protection; by 2009 that rose to 13 states. The number of Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs in high schools grew from 700 to 4,700, a nearly six-fold increase.

The report also includes data on areas with mixed or negative results.

· Marriage Opposition: In 2000, 5 states had blocked marriage equality through a statewide vote; today, 31 have done so, including 29 states amending their constitutions to prohibit the recognition of same-sex marriages.

· Homophobia in schools: The percentage of LGBT students reporting hearing homophobic remarks in school has remained above 99 percent and LGBT students who report experiencing harassment in school edged up (up from 83.2 percent to 86.2 percent.)

· HIV/AIDS: New HIV infections among adolescent and adult men who have sex with men grew 10 percent, from 28,000 to 30,800, as did the percentage of new HIV infections overall that occurred among men who have sex with men, which rose from 51 percent to 53 percent.

· Military Service Ban: In spite of overwhelming public support for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the U.S. military continued to discharge hundreds of gay and lesbian service members, with the cumulative number of discharges under the 1993 policy nearly doubling during the past decade. The only "positive" note was that the number of annual discharges decreased from 1,241 in 2000 to 619 in 2008 (the most recent year for which data are available), apparently because of the urgent need for soldiers to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002.

I hope that some of the people who have been screaming obscenities at our friends in power take a sobering look at how far we have come, and think about where we want to be in 2019.

$100M Donation To Help Harvard & MIT AIDS Research

Finally some good news about HIV/AIDS!

A Massachusetts businessman [named Phillip T. Ragon] has donated $100 million to fund research into the development of an AIDS vaccine[.]

The gift, which will flow through [Massachusetts general Hospital] will be shared with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

"By providing flexible funding and by connecting science and engineering at MIT and Harvard with the research and clinical resources of MGH, we intend to empower many of the world's best researchers to focus on what they view as the most promising research," Ragon said in a statement.

The institute will bring scientists and clinicians together to better understand how the body fights infections and ultimately to apply that understanding to a broad range of infectious diseases and cancers.

It will be lead by Dr. Bruce Walker, an MGH researcher and physician and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The initial work of the institute will focus on identifying the effective immune responses in a small group of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, who are able to keep their virus in check without medications. It will work to design strategies to reproduce those responses.

Gay MSFT Millionaire Leaves $65M to LGBT Groups

365gay.com and Pam's House Blend have the scoop on the will of Microsoft millionaire Ric Weiland which resulted in a windfall of $65 million dollars to numerous LGBT groups. Weiland was Employee Number 5 at Microsoft and went to high school with Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Interestingly, the largest single chunk ($19m) of the money goes to the Pride Foundation, with the rest to be distributed to the following groups over an 8-10 year period:

* The Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR)
* Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)
* Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
* In The Life
* International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC)
* Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund
* National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF)
* Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)
* Project Inform
* Servicemembers Legal Defense Network

Notice the Human Rights Campaign is not on this list!