Originally
presented at the community meeting November 13, 2016 at the Joyce Beers
Community Center to discuss the future of San Diego’s Pride events and the
apparently arbitrary and cause-less firing of Pride’s executive director by the
current board.
I’ve been part
of San Diego’s Queer (a term I use inclusively because I can’t stand the
initials “LGBTQ” or whatever they are this week) community for an awfully long
time, ever since I came out definitively as a cisgender Gay man in 1982. I have
been part of every Pride event since 1983 and briefly served on one of the
Pride boards in the 1980’s.
During that time
I’ve seen repeated meltdowns in the administration of Pride. There were at
least two in the 1980’s and there have been others since. Pride will always be a source of contention because it is the biggest
public event our community puts on, the event that most strongly and vividly
defines us to the broader community.
And the various
Pride organizations that have come and gone in San Diego have not helped their
cause by running themselves more like private for-profit corporations than
community organizations. Over and over again we’ve seen Pride secretly — and
legally — taken over by people unknown to the bulk of the Queer community and
its activists, people most of us in the community have never even heard of
until they screw up and their screw-ups hit the media.
The current
administrative model for Pride — a nonprofit corporation with a self-perpetuating
board of directors — makes it all too easy for disastrous administrative
mistakes to happen and to get covered up. It is that model, not any specific
board or staff members, that needs to change. To that end, I propose:
Make Pride a
membership organization. Pride should be
reorganized so that individuals can become members by paying dues and/or
contributing volunteer time to the events, and it will be the members — not the
board — that elects the board annually. This creates a constituency to which
the board members would have to answer instead of secretly and unaccountably
doing whatever they want with the organization.
Hold Pride’s
annual meeting after the events. The
annual meeting of Pride’s members would take place in August (or, if the Pride
events are rescheduled, about one month after they take place). At that meeting
all parties involved — Pride board, staff, members and the community at large —
would have a chance to discuss that year’s events, both what went well and what
didn’t, and then the membership would elect the Pride board for next year.
The Pride
board. All Pride board members would serve
a one-year term; they could run for re-election, though the Pride bylaws could
include a limit on how many consecutive terms one individual could serve. The
bylaws should be crafted to ensure that all segments of our community —
Lesbians, Gay men, Bisexuals, Transgender people and non-Queer allies — are
represented fairly.
Pride should
be run openly and transparently. Though
California law no longer requires private nonprofit corporations to run under
the same openness rules as governmental bodies, it should still be a good idea.
All Pride board meetings should be open to the public except when
they discuss personnel issues or pending litigation, and the agendas should
begin with public-commentary periods in which any individual can address the
board.
Afterthoughts: Some issues were raised at the November 13
meeting which need to be considered seriously if this proposal is implemented,
among them ensuring representation for communities of color on future Pride
boards, making membership affordable for people with limited income (either by
allowing them to join at a lower rate or having their volunteer hours counted
in lieu of a dues payment), and cultivating a culture of mutual respect among
the individuals working on and for Pride.
A membership
organization structure for Pride will not solve all its problems. The new
bylaws that make the change will have to be very carefully crafted to avoid the
possibility of a certain group “packing” the membership and staging a hostile
takeover. But many of the people involved in Pride have had experience in
membership organizations, from the San Diego Democrats for Equality to the
American Civil Liberties Union, and can use that experience to craft bylaws
that can ensure organizational democracy and control the potential to abuse a
membership structure.
The point isn’t that converting the Pride
corporation from a self-perpetuating board to a membership structure will solve
all its problems overnight. What it will do is end this abominable Catch-22 the
community members who are concerned about Pride’s current direction find
themselves in, in which they have absolutely no recourse against the existing
board except to boycott the events altogether, which would threaten their very
existence. The first thing we need to go forward with a positive future for
Pride is a way to hold the board accountable. A membership structure is a
well-established, well-proven way of doing just that.
