With the planned resignation of its president this summer, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has launched a national search to find a replacement for Neil Giuliano, the former Republican mayor of Tempe, Arizona who joined the gay media watchdog group in September 2005.
The agency's board of directors will meet in San Francisco in early June, and Giuliano expects his successor to be announced at that time. Executive search firm Isaacson Miller, whose vice president Tim McFeeley is a former executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, has been hired to conduct the search.
"Neil has done a great job. At the same time change can be a very healthy thing. We are excited about using this time to find a new leader and have a new strategic plan coming into effect now," said San Francisco resident John Stewart, chair of the management committee on GLAAD's board and a member of its executive committee. "GLAAD will continue the culture-changing work that we do. We saw with Proposition 8 how not only do politics matter, but really, the culture's view about our community, that is the most important thing."
As GLAAD looks for new leadership, the agency's critics are voicing their concerns about what role it should play in a rapidly changing media landscape, where major newspapers are folding and online sites and blogs are rushing in to fill the vacuum.
Is GLAAD obsolete?
"Is GLAAD obsolete? I don’t know if that is the question. The mission is certainly relevant. But the goals of the organization have not been accomplished by a long shot, as far as I am concerned," said Cathy Renna, GLAAD’s former communications director. "The challenge with the current incarnation of the organization is they have lost their teeth. It has lost its fight or activist edge it had in prior years."
GLAAD was born out of a battle in 1985 over anti-gay and AIDS-phobic coverage in what is now viewed as a relic of the old media world, the New York Post. At times, it can seem like the agency is still stuck in its feud with the Manhattan tabloid.
In February GLAAD used a brouhaha over a Post editorial cartoon derided for using racist stereotypes to once again thrash the paper for its homophobic cartoons and news coverage. But some see such ritualistic beating up on the paper’s editorial staff as a waste of time.
In a blog post that month on Bilerico, Renna took GLAAD to task for what she perceives as "the same fruitless strategy implemented after every homophobic cartoon ... And it happens often."
"And the blame for this sits squarely in the lap of our community’s media advocacy group, GLAAD," added Renna.
Rather than issue another action alert, GLAAD should instead target advertisers of the paper, Renna suggested. Convincing Macy’s to pull its ad campaign from the Post would have an immediate impact, she argued.
"Too many people in the community tell me they feel like GLAAD has lost its bite and only see the celebrity-filled events and entertainment-focused work," wrote Renna.
In an interview, Renna questioned the point of GLAAD posting on its Web site a slideshow of past Post cartoons deemed anti-gay. She said she was even more irked when the agency tied it to a fundraising appeal.
"What disheartened me the most was they had the gall to send out another version of the alert to ask for money," said Renna, who now owns her own public relations firm. "I know the economy is tough. It really made me sit up and take notice."
Both Giuliano and Stewart said they had not read Renna’s blog post. Stewart said GLAAD has successfully used boycott threats against advertisers in the past and would do so again.
"We will continue to react to defamatory examples of media we see and make people accountable to that," he said.
Photo: an example of the New York Post’s anti-gay editorial cartoons.
No longer seen as media outsider
In some ways, the problem GLAAD faces is that it has replaced its grassroots identity with being seen as a media insider, said Katherine Sender, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
"I think that has good things and bad things attached to it. The good things are often they know a lot of people in various media industries. They are often involved in discussions on making gay representations better before they come to light. Being on the inside they can head off work that kind of stereotypes, or are real hostile representations, before they can happen," said Pender, who used a GLAAD-funded research study for her dissertation and book on the formation of a gay market. "On the bad side, a great deal of their funding comes from national corporations. They do take quite a safe and conservative view on the kinds of representations that are out there. As a result, they are not pushing the envelope in any way."
Giuliano, whose total compensation package is more than $271,000 a year (although according to the Washington Blade, he agreed to a $20,000 salary cut this year), defended the role GLAAD plays in ensuring fair and accurate coverage of the LGBT community in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter during a visit to San Francisco in late February.
"I am very happy with my record at GLAAD. My career was teaching and being mayor. This was my time to serve," said Giuliano, who taught at Arizona State University and is stepping down to focus on writing an autobiography.
Under his watch, GLAAD’s budget increased from $7 million to $10 million over the last three years. The extra funding allowed it to extend its attention into religious and faith based coverage, sports media, and young adult news outlets.
It has been building up relations with sports writers and is creating a National Commission on Homophobia in Sports. GLAAD brought on Roxanne Jones, the founding editor of ESPN The Magazine, to its board to oversee the effort.
In late May GLAAD plans to launch a new advertising media program and will present a new event in the fall called the GLAAD Media Awards in Advertising. The moves build upon its recent merger with the Commercial Closet, a project that tracked LGBT images, both positive and negative, in advertising.
Behind the scenes, Giuliano steered resources and staffers toward state and local LGBT groups to help with media training and press relations. GLAAD staffers have worked closely with Equality Alabama, a statewide LGBT group, and last year’s No on 8 campaign in California.
San Francisco Pride officials last year turned to GLAAD for help prepping its board president for an appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s cable show. And last March Giuliano hired Juan Barajas, the former executive director of the LGBT center in Berkeley, to revive the agency’s presence in the Bay Area and northern California after a years-long absence.
It is all part of Giuliano’s push to revamp GLAAD’s regional media strategy into a more focused field strategy. When a local story breaks, whether it has regional or national attention, GLAAD is now equipped to parachute in and work with local groups to manage press coverage, he said.
"We now can have people on the ground within hours to help behind the scenes," Giuliano. "We help local organizations do media. GLAAD is not front and center."
He also decided to send staff to Mexico to work with local activists in Mexico City on addressing concerns with the content found on Spanish-language TV shows. Roughly 80 percent of all programming is filmed south of the border.
"It’s been great. It’s been successful," said Giuliano.
The agency did lay off a handful of people last November due to a downturn in donations, and Giuliano is hoping the country’s economic crisis will not impact the money GLAAD pulls in from its media awards shows this spring.
"When we laid off people in the fall, we did not cut programs. We may do a little less but we didn’t want to eliminate any programs," he said. "My hope is we will not have to do more layoffs and we will have a strong media awards season."
Photo: Neil Giuliano.
Awards focus criticized
While the awards shows are moneymakers for GLAAD, they also supply ammunition to its critics who charge that the agency is too focused on throwing its star-studded fundraising events than on working with editors and reporters at news outlets.
New York-based writer Eric Marcus, a former media circle donor to GLAAD, said he is concerned that out of 47 staff members, 18 have jobs focused either on fundraising or special events like the media awards. As for the media work it does, Marcus questioned whether some of its approach merely duplicates efforts by groups like HRC, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund.
"My hope is going forward the organization’s focus will be more on monitoring the media and education than producing its three annual awards events. It seems like there aren’t nearly enough worthy honorees to merit three annual awards dinners," said Marcus, who wrote a biography on gay Olympic diver Greg Louganis. "In these lean times perhaps it’s an opportunity to rethink the GLAAD Media Awards and make it a single national event and rotate it through the three cities."
Stewart said the board realizes the agency needs to do a better job of articulating just what GLAAD’s staff is doing on a regular basis so that the general public’s perception is not that its only function is to offer A-list gays a chance to hobnob with Hollywood stars at high-priced galas.
"Part of our strategic plan is for us to spend more time articulating what we do. We call it the results work," said Stewart. "It is so people do understand what we do other than the media awards. The awards shows are an important part of what we do but are not everything we do."
Nonetheless, the awards shows are what GLAAD is best known for in the community. The three that take place annually in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco focus on English-language media, while a fourth in Miami caters to Spanish-language press. The San Francisco event will take place May 9 and feature cable talk show host Chelsea Handler as host.
The shows in recent years had been televised, most recently on Bravo. But to save money, the agency dropped plans to produce this year’s shows for broadcast.
"We couldn’t afford producing them for television this year. And we are not in a position to entice someone to cover the cost for us," said Giuliano.
Photo: Anthony Rapp and Cheyenne Jackson backstage at the 19th Annual GLAAD Media Awards at the Marriott Marquis - New York City - March 17, 2008.
New media landscape poses hurdles
In today’s media world, where information flows in a nanosecond, LGBT bloggers often beat GLAAD - which recently launched its own blog - to the punch in pointing out problematic news coverage.
"The blogosphere has really threatened their role," said Pender, an out lesbian. "There are a lot of people who are very well read online whose comments and commentary keep GLAAD on its feet and have made it look a bit behind the times in terms of what is going on and in terms of responding to things."
Unlike bloggers, who can express their own opinions instantly, GLAAD must answer to a constituency of donors, board members, and corporate funders, said Giuliano.
"We have different roles to play. We take a much broader view on things," he said. "Our work remains focused on media advocacy and fighting defamation."
Whoever takes over for Giuliano will increasingly have to address the nexus of online sites and news reporting, predicted Renna.
"Media has changed so much in the last decade. GLAAD must find someone with intricate knowledge of how news and entertainment media work in this new online world we live in so GLAAD doesn’t get tripped up and have blogs break the news all the time," she said.
That isn’t to say GLAAD doesn’t serve a purpose. To Renna, the value of GLAAD is not in its alerts to the community about anti-gay articles but its professional connections inside newsrooms.
"You need an organization that acts as a check on an institution that can do more than even 100 bloggers online. The organization has a constituency. It can go to these media outlets, sit down and talk to them," said Renna. "What is missing is the kind of multi-pronged, nuanced, sophisticated media work I know happened when I was there."
Pender agreed that there is still a need for regular institutional and funded monitoring of the media.
"Whether it should be GLAAD, I don’t know," she said. "Whether it is still relevant the new executive director, whoever comes in, needs to do a serious rethink in its direction. A lot of which I think has to do with GLAAD being so out of touch with the grassroots that originally supported the organization."
Giuliano repeated a line he uses often when talking about the importance of what GLAAD does.
"How we are portrayed in the media doesn’t make a world of difference. It’s all the difference," he said.
Photo: ANeil Giuliano at the 18th annual GLAAD media awards in 2007.