Human Rights Campaign: Largest LGBT Donors Are Drone Manufacturers

Human Rights Campaign Largest LGBT Donors Are Drone Manufacturers

In the 1960s and 1970s, queer liberation (what we now call “LGBT equality”) was seen by its advocates as an all-inclusive movement intrinsically bound to other social justice movements: there could be no justice for queer people without justice for people of color, women, workers, those in other nations, etc. Accordingly, queer activists worked hard to build coalitions with all those determined to fight for justice. 

Nowadays, the LGBT movement does more branding than coalition building. 

Steven W. Thrasher, who has been nationally recognized for his LGBT journalism, called out national LGBT nonprofits and advocates, colloquially referred to by some as the glitter industrial complex, in a Gawker article, contending that the LGBT activists and nonprofits “have been bought, paid-for and sold to the highest bidder.”

It’s true: corporate America runs the LGBT movement, or at least the part of the LGBT movement that gets press time and donors. Their sponsorship keeps the LGBT movement from addressing the issues that matter most for the LGBT community and beyond.

Thrasher highlights that many of the biggest donors to the Human Rights Campaign, the multi-million dollar nonprofit that receives the bulk of donations for LGBT issues, are drone manufacturers. These donors profit off of the United States’ use of drones to kill civilians,including children, with little oversight or accountability. Drone manufacturers are far from the only ethically dark gray to black donors to LGBT advocacy organizations: a brief perusal of any major LGBT organization’s list of donors reveals that corporate black hats like Bank of America,BP, Coke, and Nike all provide major cash to LGBT nonprofits.

Read more at Policy Mic.