Petrelis Files

Boston Globe: GLAAD 'Shilling for AT&T
... More Than a Whiff of Hackery'

Attention, GLAAD: This beautiful story about your decades of corruption, star-gazing sleaze and pimping of the community to corporations has a fabulous pair of legs. This editorial in Saturday's Boston Globe, in gay Democratic Party pimp Jarrett Barrios's backyard, is just the punch to the gut to this rancid organization that must be dismantled needs.

The GLAAD crisis must be used to open up the slime under the rock to gay sunshine. They must immediately disclose all their corporate sponsorship agreements, begin regular town hall meetings and make the board members available to the press and bloggers.

Much gratitude to the Boston Globe editorial page writers for this fine piece of a call for accountability:

Wireless phone service has about as much to do with gay rights as zebras have to do with waterskiing. So gay bloggers were justified in hounding Jarrett Barrios, who until this past weekend was president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, after he wrote the federal government on behalf of AT&T, a corporation that had donated $50,000 to Barrios’s watchdog group.

Barrios’s fall tarnishes the reputation of the former Massachusetts state senator, a charismatic politician once thought to be destined to hold higher statewide office. But the episode raises deeper questions about GLAAD and its peer organizations. Two other organizations with no official business related to telecommunication ... Clearly, some activist groups have grown a little too fond of their corporate backers, at a cost to their credibility. ... 

Shilling for AT&T makes them seem more like paid lobbyists than clarions of justice; it carries more than a whiff of hackery. ...

Barrios’s decision to step aside was a step in the right direction. But [GLAAD] must do much more to regain the public’s trust, and all nonprofits should take the opportunity to clarify their relationships with corporate sponsors. ...

What a great idea. GLAAD clarifying their relationship with its business world backer. Let's start with immediate release of every contract GLAAD has with any corporate sponsor and the disclosures must be posted on their site.