Petrelis Files

Hildebrand Org, GetEQUALNow!'s
Stock Photo of Models: Real Gay Youth?

Maybe it's just me and the fact of where I live, but I see honest-to-goodness genuine gay youths every day in the Mission, or on the web. It's not difficult at all to locate gay young people, if you really want to find them, right?

Two Astroturf gay orgs currently use the same stock photo of perfect slender, multi-racial young models in a most seductive pose on their web sites, telling me these orgs need to exercise some muscle and shoe-leather, and pound the pavement to find actual gay youth. Not a single chub, nerd, baby dyke, gawky kid among the models. How reflective of authentic gay lives is the image?

Over at DC's Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance blog, Rick Rosendalls informs us that openly Democratic and gay political guru to Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign, Steve Hildebrand, is a top leader at the niche gay org known as Faith in America (FIA) and they've redesigned their site. FIA is a 501c3 tax exempt org, founded by gay furniture mogul Mitchell Gold in 2005, and Gold's business is a longtime corporate sponsor of the Human Rights Campaign. He also likes to throw a lotta money at the Democratic Party and its candidates.

Further, the HRC Foundation's 2010 IRS 990 filing, on page 29, reveals that they donated $25,000 to FIA, making this all quite a comforting circle jerk, politically speaking.

But I digress. My point is that FIA's newly-upgraded site uses a stock photo to call attention to issues of importance to gay youth:

OTOH, the GetEQUALNow! org based down in Texas, which is a splinter group off of Robin McGehee's GetEQUAL org, is using the same darn stock photo, in a much larger placement on their site, as they have done since GetEQUALNow! was founded back in the spring:

Why can't these orgs show us their gay youth members or any everyday gays? Actually, I shouldn't presume that the models are gay, but I do presume that gay orgs such as FIA and GetEQUALNow! have a responsibility to showcase not only authentic young same-sexers in their imagery, but also in the ranks.

But if that is too much to ask of them, can the orgs at least use different stock photos?