Petrelis Files

Gay Agenda for 2 White House 
Briefings in May?

(Brian Bond. Credit: Pam Spaulding.)

If you cruise over the White House page for the visitor logs, scroll down to the records and search function, click on the little magnifying glass, key in LGBT, hit return, eventually 139 listings will pop up.

Scrolling to the right, you'll see that the White House liaison to the gay community, Brian Bond, held two meetings in May with lots of gay leaders, among them well-known Human Rights Campaign folks such as Phil Attey, Vic Basile and Terry Bean.

The May 5 meeting lasted about 90-minutes, and 46 gay leaders were there. The May 10 briefing was attended by 44 leaders and went on for almost 2-hours. No info was provided about what was on the agenda for the meetings, so I sent an email to Bond and Shin Inouye, a White House press officer who happens to be gay.

I asked Bond and Inouye for details about the meetings, and also explained that I couldn't locate any details on the web about the briefings. Quite odd that the White House would invite more than 80 gay leaders in for meetings, and neither the administration officials nor the attendees would have said a word about it.

Unfortunately, Bond and Inouye opted to not respond to my query for details about what happened at the talks.

It must be asking too much of Bond especially, since he is supposed to be the gay community rep at the White House in charge of public engagement, for to actually engage on a regular basis with gay bloggers like me and provide answers to some very easy questions.

At the same time, I find it unacceptable that the 80-plus gay leaders who went to the May meetings haven't bothered to inform the community of what was discussed, and how their participation benefited ordinary gays who don't get invited to the White House for briefings or cocktail receptions.

Also back in May, in a somewhat unrelated column for her LGBT POV blog, Karen Ocamb wrote:

The problem for Obama is – no one knows Brian Bond, except Beltway insiders and selected A-gay “leaders” with whom he apparently holds private meetings to presumably discuss the LGBT “agenda.” It is impossible to know what is being discussed because the A-gays do not report back to the community either.

Thank you, Karen, for holding Bond and the A-gays accountable. BTW, this was the title for her post: Will White House LGBT ‘Liaison’ Brian Bond’s Failure Lead to Repercussions in November?

Judging the results of Tuesday's election and the generally accepted thinking that the enthusiasm gap between gay voters and the Democrats contributed to Obama's allies and other Dems losing dozens of races, I say Bond played a key role in the disastrous results. Of course, he was greatly abetted by his buddies at HRC and other Gay Inc orgs.

If this sort of public engagement from Bond and the White House, along with the silent and subservient behavior of Gay Inc leaders, continues as we head into the 2012 Obama reelection campaign, I expect gays will stay home in November 2012 and Obama will be a one-term president.