Gay Superfriends!

Time magazine has an article called "The Gay Mafia That's Redefining Liberal Politics."

Among gay activists, the Cabinet [a loosely-connected group of politically active like-minded rich gay people] is revered as a kind of secret gay Super Friends, a homosexual justice league that can quietly swoop in wherever anti-gay candidates are threatening and finance victories for the good guys.

What at first sounds like a tongue-in-cheek view of the changes in the gay political landscape begins an attempt to hint at something not-quite-sinister, although the article's author, John Cloud, the most ridiculed reporter in the blogosphere, says, "There's nothing illegal about the Cabinet's coordination of its members' giving, according to Lawrence Noble, campaign-finance expert with the Washington-based firm Skadden, Arps."

Rather than focus on the undertones of the article, I think the article can be used to draw a little bit of attention to how the fight for gay civil rights is changing. We need to know where we're headed as much as where we've been. And we also need to know how the opposition is framing the fight against us. Cloud, despite his creepiness (well-suited to Halloween, and Halloween only) and out-of-touchness (he reads rather quaintly), does manage to ask a few questions that gay people ought to also ask themselves (just to take one's temperature).

And yet the Cabinet is noteworthy not only because its treasure begets political influence but also because its very existence shows how dramatically the culture wars — and liberal politics as a whole — have changed in the past decade . . . the street movement is basically defunct. And increasingly, the center of gay power is moving out from Washington toward the interior — toward powerful foundations like those run by Stryker in Kalamazoo and Gill in Denver.

That raises questions: What does a civil rights movement look like in an era of massive wealth? Can you still inspire a grass-roots movement when all the street troops know that the billionaires can just write bigger checks? And is it possible that the left has become a movement as coldly obsessed with money as it always assumed the right was?

The rest of the article? Probably worth checking out, but only because it's appearing in Time Magazine and lots of people (both for and against civil rights) will come across it. And I think it's really great to know that there is a concerted effort among wealthy gays to fight the good fight. But the article does leave a bad taste in the mouth.