Dot Gay

From Paula Ettelbrick, Philanthropic advisor to Dot Gay Alliance

My dear friends -

As my way of giving thanks this week, I wanted to share the most powerful speech I have ever read. (many of you know what a sucker I am for a well crafted and delivered speech!). http://www.aids-freeworld.org/content/view/335/153/

It was delivered this morning in Trinidad at one of those generally officious and often useless of forums – intergovernmental meetings. This one is the CHOGM, or Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting – you know, the heads of state of Britain and all of its former (and current) colonies. The speaker is Stephen Lewis – a longtime government official if there ever was one – former Canadian legislator and Ambassador to the United Nations, former UN Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa, and lots and lots of other credentials. But unlike most current and former politicos, Stephen is genuinely passionate about injustice. (A note on why the CHOGM is an important forum for this speech – of the 80 countries of the world that still criminalize same-sex conduct, 40 of them are among the 53 CHOGM countries!)

His entire speech is devoted to railing against Uganda for the introduction of the Anti-Homosexual Bill – truly the most horrendous piece of legislation I have ever seen – anywhere, anytime. (As some of you know, I was hired two months ago to motivate and coordinate international opposition to the bill among international governments, international funders, NGOs, and with the groups in Uganda fighting the bill. A vote is possible in January.)

In any event, please, please take time to read his speech. It is the most passionate and intelligent condemnation of homophobia that I have ever seen given – must less by a straight guy, at a straight-laced international meeting. It is a most passionate indictment of homophobia and of a government that is blindly willing to allow homophobia to derail the many real issues the country faces. And, it is the embodiment of the impact of all of the people, work and lives lost, spanning decades and borders, devoted to turning the tide of homophobia and the truly horrendous treatment of LGBT people – here and everywhere. Stephen Lewis stands above most of his peers, it is true. But he’d be the first to tell you he could not have stood there this morning if truly brave LGBT people around the world did not fight back when it wasn’t popular, and teach the world a thing or two about resilience, about humanity and about love. We are a better world for the fact that LGBT people are a part of it. And I am thankful that that message is getting across to the highest levels of government.

I started this project thinking there was nothing we could do but raise hell, build consciousness and put our faith in the courts to strike it down. But, with the global response we have been able to motivate, and the incredible coming together of all kinds of groups in Uganda who have NEVER before supported LGBT rights, dare I say, we could possibly win this battle?!?! I feel it in my bones. And, if we do, it will be truly, truly because we have turned the global tide.

Happy Thanksgiving, and thank you for once again indulging me!

Paula

There’s been much discussion about how the LGBT community would use a .GAY web address that dedicates a majority of its profits to LGBT civil rights causes in the US and abroad. We who are behind this effort see the benefits clearly, and this report, which comes from Marketing VOX: The Voice of Online Marketing, adds more power to the argument. Most enlightening. Check it out:

The successful addition of a “.gay” domain will likely influence how marketers target the LGBT community online, especially if LGBT users begin to widely adopt its use as a means of raising funds for various gay causes, or expect that it will be used to specifically target GLBT users, who have proven to be loyal to products, organizations and causes that support gay issues.

According to one Harris Interactive poll, nearly one in four (24%) LGBT adults said they had switched products or service providers in the previous 12 months because they found a competing company that supported causes that benefited the LGBT community.
The “.gay” movement also may be a natural fit for the online-friendly LGBT users, who are much more engaged online, and with social media in particular, than their heterosexual peers, a recent survey found.
Approximately 55% of gays and lesbians report reading some type of blog, compared with just 38% of heterosexuals, according to a separate Harris Interactive survey.

Other statistics about the online GLBT population:

* 34% of online gay and lesbian adults say they read news and current-issue blogs, compared with 22% of heterosexuals.
* 25% of gay and lesbian adults read entertainment and pop culture blogs, compared with 15% of heterosexuals.
* 28% of gay and lesbian adults read political blogs, compared with 14% of heterosexual adults. This represents an increase over March 2008, when 23% of GLBT read political blogs.
* 14% of gay and lesbian respondents say they read travel blogs, compared with 8% of heterosexuals.

Read the full report http://www.marketingvox.com/competing-groups-vie-for-gay-web-suffix-045328/?utm_campaign=rssfeed&utm_source=mv&utm_medium=textlink

Paula Ettelbrick is the Philanthropy advisor to Dot Gay Alliance and had been away for a few days. When she got back in town and saw this video of President Obama addressing the Human Rights Campaign Fund, she was so inspired she sat down and sent this to all her friends. Her note was so moving I had to post it.

Dear Friends:

OK, another full-blown weepy moment for me as I could only think about what it would have been like in 1974 when I struggled to come out and find a place in my Roman Catholic family, my suburban community and among my friends  to have a President — scratch that — ANY public or community leader (or just any adult!)  stand up and just lend a kind word to a lesbian like me.

Whenever we begin to lose faith, when we become cynical about whether our system of government will ever work again in the face of the relentless and nauseating barrage of attack on civil discussion waged by the right wing in this country to confuse and divide people, remember this speech and think of two things:

1. This is what leadership looks like, and
2. Once we elect the leader whom we believe and know is leading in the right direction, it is our continuing responsibility to fight like hell to get the rest of our elected representatives (535 members of the United States Congress) to follow our leader — that is OUR job after election day.

So, please, watch this inspiring clip.  Revel what our passion and work has done to elect him to lead us. And then, do something tangible — today — to finish the work we all started oh so long ago.  Suggestion:  Take one minute to call your member of Congress AND your Senator, or better yet, write a personal letter (yeah, the kind with a stamp!) telling her/him how important it is to YOU that they do everything possible to support the President’s LGBT agenda (ENDA, Hate Crimes, HIV ban, HIV/AIDS policy, repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, which he lays out beautifully in this speech.  (You might mention health care, etc. as well — the single most important issue facing America today)

And THEN — one more thing:  ask ONE other person to do the same, and ask them to ask ONE other person.  Perhaps someone in a district in which our elected representatives don’t hear from us on a regular basis.  It’s easy to google to find your elected representatives.

http://www.hrcactioncenter.org/site/Ecard?ecard_id=1061

BTW, you do NOT need to sign up with HRC to watch this clip.

We have an incredible moment here, guys. In three years we will either be voting for a President who has turned the history of hate and discrimination against LGBT people around, or we will be trudging to the polls cynically wondering why he did not do all we asked and needed. We have elected the leader who is more willing than anyone in history to go to the mat for us.  The difference in our attitude in three years will not depend on him — he’s put the agenda out there. It will depend on us.

Love,
Paula

PS.  If you no longer use stamps, or you have forgotten what they are, email your letters to me and I will send them for you.  How’s that for a deal?  Please, just do something.

you should watch his speech to HRC on Saturday night. I know there’s a lot he didn’t say, but I can’t imagine hearing George Bush utter the phrase LGBT (without mangling the letters).

“When you look back on these years, you’ll see a time in which we put a stop to discrimination against gays and lesbians whether in the office or on the battlefield.”
http://www.hrcactioncenter.org/site/Ecard?ecard_id=1061

Edmund White, the great novelist, biographer, nonfiction writer and long-time community stalwart endorsed Dot Gay Alliance today. This is fantastic! Not only is support coming from the political and non-profit spheres, but now it’s coming from the arts as well.

White’s new memoir, City Boy, is a great and courageous read, btw. Amazing detail on Stonewall (he was there) and moving material on being a self-hating gay in therapy with a shrink to ‘get cured,’ not to mention some good dish on Susan Sontag, Jasper Johns, Gore Vidal and other boldfacers of the day.

If you missed this wild time of gay awakening in NYC, then it’s a must read. If you were there, it’s a rocky, rich trip down memory lane. Either way it’s a reminder of how much things have changed in 40 years. http://www.amazon.com/City-Boy-Life-During-1960s/dp/1596914025

One of the most important aspects to Dot Gay Alliance – and the primary reason I am working so hard to ensure ICANN approves the .GAY top level domain – is that 51% of all profits would earn will go to fund LGBT civil rights fights in the US and around the world. This includes a range of issues from marriage equality in the US, to preventing workplace discrimination, to providing emergency funds for people in danger. (Seven countries still administer the death penalty for homosexual acts).

Locating the organizations that do the most effective work is a big job. In the last few months I’ve been working to devise an intelligent scheme of giving that doesn’t create more bureaucracy and that hones in on the organizations and causes doing the best work. It is important to know that the monies are being distributed efficiently and being used to maximum effectiveness.

Today, I am pleased to announce that Paula Ettelbrick, one of the leading advocates of LGBT rights, is joining the Dot Gay Alliance as Philanthropic Advisor. Paula is a lawyer, teacher and relentless advocate of LGBT causes who has spent most of her working life leading LGBT organizations. She is as impressive as she is compassionate, and she is a great addition to the Dot Gay Alliance team.

In the next few weeks we will work to highlight the areas we are looking to fund and develop a framework for our philanthropic distribution. Here’s a brief bio on Paula — we are lucky to have her onboard!

Paula L. Ettelbrick is a lawyer, law professor, writer, speaker, and long-time LGBT rights advocate from New York. Until March 2009, she was the Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), a US-based non-profit headquartered in New York with regional offices in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Cape Town, South Africa. IGLHRC partners with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender groups around the world to challenge human rights abuse and discrimination and advocate for global policies and laws that respect the rights of LGBT people everywhere.

A lawyer by profession, Paula has a 25-year history in leadership positions within LGBT advocacy non-profits in the United States. She has served as the legal director at Lambda Legal Defense, policy director at National Center for Lesbian Rights, legislative counsel for the Empire State Pride Agenda, and family policy director at the Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Paula has written and spoken extensively about civil, constitutional and human rights issues related to sexuality, gender and sexual orientation. She is an adjunct professor of law at New York University Law School where she teaches Sexuality and the Law, and a lecturer in the Women’s Studies Department at Barnard College. She has also taught in the law schools of the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Wayne State University, Whittier Law School’s Amsterdam Summer Program, as well as New York Law School.

I met Sunil this past July at an International LGBT Human Rights conference in Copenhagen. His intelligence, dignity, and accomplishments are all deeply impressive leader and it means a lot that he is throwing his support behind our initiative. Sunil, 36, trained as an engineer, and became an activist in 2000 because he felt so isolated from other LGBT people in his beautiful and deeply conservative country. Today, besides working in his country’s government, he also runs the Blue Diamond Society, the most successful LGBT movement in South Asia, one that represents 150,000 LGBTI Nepalese people. In 2008 Sunil received the Monette-Horwitz Trust Award, a prize given to people who combat homophobia. Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco, and Anastassios Aliferis, the mayor of the Greek Island of Tilos who performed the country”s first same-sex marriages, were also recipients of last year’s prize. I am thrilled to have Sunil as an ally. Here’s a copy of his endorsement of the Dot Gay Alliance’s initiative to launch .GAY http://www.dotgayalliance.com/endorse-dotgay/sunil-babu-pant/

Here’s what the Los Angeles Times wrote about this fascinating and accomplished man. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/02/world/fg-nepalgay2

Some very clued in, clever bloggers are starting pick up on the Dot Gay Alliance’s initiative.

“Dolce’s group sees the ascent of .gay as an organic step in the battle for GLBT rights that began with the Stonewall Riots 40 years ago, continued with the fight for AIDS funding/survival via ACT-UP and is now anchored around civil rights and mainstream visibility. “The .GAY top-level domain,” Dolce’s group says, “will provide concentrated Internet real estate for companies to showcase their gay efforts.”  Read on: Competition for top level domain from .gay ‘alliance’

Welcome to the Dot Gay Alliance. This is a gay-led initiative to get ICANN, the international body that runs the Internet, to allow the creation of the new top-level domain of .GAY. Instead of .COM, .NET, .ORG and other such top-level domains, ICANN is going to allow hundreds of new web addresses.

If there is one community that can benefit from its own domain space, it’s .GAY for the LGBT community. We are international but up until now, have only been organized locally. Now we can achieve global visibility, united by a short, 3-letter word — GAY.

The Dot Gay Alliance is launching this bid for one major reason, to raise money to fight for LGBT rights in the U.S. and around the world. We believe that .GAY will be a major success, we will deliver, by charter, over half of our profits back to the community to help civil rights groups in this fight. That is major.

We have come this far because of relentless activism and streams of money to fund it. That needs to continue until we are fully equal.

For example, we are fighting to make same-sex marriage our right in the U.S., though to many LGTB people around the world it’s a distant luxury they dare not even imagine. That fight has just begun, and needs our support.

Last Monday, the Obama administration finally – FINALLY – took a baby step of filing court papers against the terrible Defense of Marriage Act that has been soiling the law books of the United States since the Clinton administration. It’s progress, however slight. The following day however, the mayor of Anchorage, Alaska, vetoed a ban against discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Republican mayor, Dan Sullivan, said he wasn’t clear if such discrimination existed! Clearly, he should get out a bit more.

The point is: there’s still a long way to go for full and equal rights. It’s clear that the combination of activism plus funding is what it is takes to fight these sorts of battles in the courts as well as in the courts of public opinion..

Won’t you please endorse this important initiative now? It’s simple — just click the button on the right. Let’s not be invisible on the Internet any longer.