From our archives:
Date: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:58 pm
Subject: Anonymous Donor to Early LGBT Movement
A wonderful article on the life, contributions, and recent passing of an anonymous donor who helped fund a great deal of some of the movement's earliest endeavors. Choosing to remain anonymous to inspire others to give in the same way, the donor funded the co-founder of the National Gay Task Force, Bruce Voeller, allowing him to successfully lobby key American Psychiatric Association members in removing homosexuality from its index of mental disorders in 1973. The donor was also involved in funding the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth (the precursor to the Hetrick-Martin Institute) in the 80s, as well as SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment), and the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project-sponsored ads in the New York Times after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. Strongly concerned about homeless LGBT youth, this donor gave huge sums to MCC (Manhattan Community Church) to fund shelters like Sylvia's Place and Marsha P. Johnson Drop-In Center.
I think this donor's life and work is an inspiration to young people of gays helping our own. To be able to step out of one's own financially comfortable experience to understand that for others less fortunate things could be a lot more difficult is certainly a trait more of us could stand to display.
http://gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18055247&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=6
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Anonymous Generosity, In Life and In Death
03/08/2007
A New York gay man who donated millions of dollars to LGBT causes going back to the early 1970s died February 22 at age 85.
He insisted on remaining anonymous in life and in death not out of a desire to be closeted, but rather to inspire others to give in the same way. This reporter knew him for 20 years and served as an intermediary between him and several organizations he supported over the last decade.
The donor, whose fortune was made as a Manhattan art dealer, was also an expert on sexually transmitted infections, for years running a foundation that disseminated prevention pamphlets he authored. An intimate of Margaret Sanger, he was also active in the defense of reproductive rights.
In the early 1970s, the donor funded Bruce Voeller - who co-founded the National Gay Task Force in 1973 - to lobby members of the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality from its index of mental disorders. Washington's Franklin Kameny and the recently deceased Barbara Gittings of Philadelphia played the central public roles in that campaign, but the funding Voeller received allowed him to privately lobby key association members. The APA voted to make the change in 1973.
Voeller's initial salary at the Task Force was $250 a week, not enough to support his children from a previous marriage. The donor stepped in and more than doubled his compensation. A biologist, Voeller went on to establish the Mariposa Foundation for research on sexuality and STDs. The group pioneered the use of the spermicide nonoxynol-9 as an HIV-preventative during sex. Voeller died of AIDS in 1994.
Perhaps the most famous story about the anonymous donor is how he provided the seed money for the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth - now the Hetrick-Martin Institute- to offer social services beginning in 1983. Founded in 1979 by the late Drs. Emery Hetrick and Damien Martin, it had been a volunteer advocacy and research group.
As a board member of Dignity, the gay Catholic group, in the early 1980s, I remember Hetrick and Martin making a lengthy presentation just to secure a $100 donation for the Institute (an indelible memory about the state of gay philanthropy in those days). The donor heard about the Institute's work, met Hetrick and Martin in their Murray Hill apartment, pulled $25,000 in cash out of his boot, and told them that he had another $25,000 for them but that it did not fit in the boot.
"Without this donor, it never would have gotten started," said Dr. Joyce Hunter, a founding member, who was vice president of the Institute's board at the time and went on become its first director of social work. She said the city matched the donor's contribution soon afterward.
Over the next decade, the donor pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars more into the Institute.
One of his primary causes over the last decade was SAGE, the New York agency providing services and advocacy for LGBT elders, to which he contributed nearly a million dollars. He sponsored full-page ads for SAGE in the New York Times promoting the slogan, "Who loves you when you're old and gay? SAGE does!" featuring a big photo of exuberant SAGE members singing around a piano.
The donor also paid for ads sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project on the op-ed page of the Times after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, saying that the killers "acted in an atmosphere poisoned by the anti-gay rhetoric of religious and political extremists" and calling for education of young people in schools and at home on "tolerance, understanding, kindness, and concern for all."
One of the anonymous donor's lifelong concerns was homeless people, especially LGBT youth on the streets. Though he was not a religious man, he became a major donor to the Metropolitan Community Church of New York and its many programs for these young people. At his death, he was providing major funding for MCC's Sylvia's Place shelter for homeless LGBT youth - named for the late transgender leader Sylvia Rivera - on church premises at 446 West 36th Street and the new Marsha P. Johnson Drop-In Center, named for another noted transgender activist who is deceased, set to open in Harlem soon.
On the Sunday following his death, Reverend Pat Bumgardner, senior pastor of MCC, told her congregation that the donor was "as an imitator of God's generosity and kindness and that he strove by his example to make God's will for housing the homeless and feeding the hungry a reality."
While gay philanthropists have stepped forward since with more money and more varied causes, this donor will be remembered - though not by name - as providing critical sums when no one else would to populations in the community that almost no other big contributors cared about.
©GayCityNews 2007
