Petrelis Files

Gay Town Halls
Omitted from HUD Site?

[UPDATE: HUD has amended the states' pages.]

The Housing and Urban Development agency is soon holding three gay town halls in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. The HUD release about the SF town hit my in-box this morning, and when I went looking for it on the HUD site, I couldn't find it.

I spoke with Brian Sullivan at HUD's press office to explain it's nice to hold the meetings, and send out a release, but it was necessary to also post the release on their own site. After some arguing from him, he agreed to my request to have the state pages of their site updated with the gay town hall info.

Michael, look for our advisory to our forthcoming LGBT town hall meetings to be posted on our California, Illinois, and New York pages. In addition, we plan to promote through Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for pushing us in the right direction!

As I write this at 1 pm PST, HUD's page for California does not have the announcement. Same goes for the Illinois page. Only the New York page had the released, in PDF format, available for public inspection.

Why does it take a blogger to point the Obama administration in the right direction, about basic promotion on the HUD site for gay-related events? How could they even think of excluding the info -- gays, really -- on the town halls?

Seeing the omissions at HUD and over at the State Department blog regarding Obama's global HIV plans today, I detect a pattern. We're going to be casually made invisible in programs and media promotions.

If the Obama administration wants to send a message of keeping the gays invisible unless they get pushy and act up, they're succeeding very well.

All this aside for a moment, I still want to point out that at least HUD is staging three gay town halls. That is three more than the Human Rights Campaign will hold for the community.