Wikipedia lists 47 active national LGBTQ+ organizations, that does not include religious (29 Christian, 11 Jewish, 9 Muslim), or 12 Medical. Student organizations are local to a specific campus. That seems too fractured when trying to present a unified front on anything. It also does not include state or local organizations. How can we get or reject legislation at any level or counter the extreme media coverage by the Republican Party that casts us as evil.
Before I retired 30 years ago, I was a member of the National Lesbian Gay Journalists Association. We got a small group of the national leaders at that time together for the first time at a gathering at the National Press Club. Since I’m out of the loop, such efforts still may be happening. I hope so.
Not all national organizations are in Washington, DC. New York City has several, and the rest are scattered across the country. CenterLink: the Community of LGBTQ Centers sponsors an annual week-long training workshop for leaders of various organizations, primarily officers and board member of local LGBTQ+ Centers. The National LGBTQ Task Force hosts an annual Creating Change Conference that brings 3500+ activists from all over the world to learn from each other in the same place.
Of course, one organization could not provide services on all issues without becoming an enormous bureaucracy. I’m not proposing any “mergers or acquisitions” like the corporate world. I’m just raising the issue of “navel gazing” where we can become too narrowly focused to have real impact at a national level. I’m not talking just about politics or media messaging. We’ve been at this for more than 70 years. Yes, the media organizations and the theater and film producers are not as biased as they used to be, but we have not “taken over the arts.”
We had a blizzard of anti-transgender legislation last year at the state level that was too powerful for us to counter. The Equality Federation provides training and support for the state level Equality Groups (not every state has one.) They did their best, and in some cases were able to stem the tide. We can’t count on the Democrats to do our work for us. They have other constituents. We can count on the Republicans to use us as their “bogeyman” to appeal to their right-wing base. “Many hands make light work, but not when they’ve all got their hands on the same money switch.”
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