When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”
She should have done the latter.
Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.
Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on. Recently, the Times published a devastating exposé revealing how GLAAD succumbed to this temptation, enabling Ellis to live luxuriously at the expense of the group’s donors.
The trouble at GLAAD, however, is more than just a story of individual or organizational corruption. It’s also a story about how—in the years since LGBTQ people earned the right to serve openly in the U.S. military, get married, and not be discriminated against in housing and employment—an entire movement has gone tragically adrift.
According to documents obtained by the Times reporter Emily Steel, Ellis signed a contract two years ago enabling her to earn up to $1.3 million a year, far higher than the salaries of CEOs at charitable organizations of comparable size. She racked up nights at a Waldorf Astoria and other posh hotels and took 30 first-class flights in 18 months. A trip with a colleague to the Cannes Lions advertising festival, the purpose of which, according to GLAAD’s spokesman, was to “speak directly to companies about not turning their backs on the LGBTQ community,” cost $60,000. GLAAD also gave Ellis an annual $25,000 allowance to rent a summer house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and $20,000 to remodel her home office.
Hellbound and Down 