When we first saw the New York Times news alert for its August 1 story about lavish spending by lesbian GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis, we immediately thought of the bad old days at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation when then-executive director Pat Christen racked up raise after raise after raise. While we understood the need for nonprofit leaders to be fairly compensated — and still do — we believed it was a reach for SFAF's board to keep rewarding Christen with raises as people living with AIDS continued to die or needed access to services. Our reporting from 1997 found Christen's salary doubled in five years, from $74,753 to $148,794. And that didn't even include benefits. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be $146,327 and $291,260, respectively for Christen's salary amounts.) Back then, 27 years ago, a nonprofit director salary of over $100,000 was unusual, except for the largest organizations. Today, that is not the case.
And though there is a difference in missions between the two organizations — one deals with life and death; the other hypes its glitzy Hollywood-style award shows as major fundraisers — we see GLAAD's board allowing Ellis' excessive spending as a huge distraction from its goal of holding the mainstream media to account. (We must add, however, that we aren't convinced that GLAAD's strategy has been very effective, especially when social media allows anyone to type out a few words and hit "send." And yes, GLAAD has been critical of the Times, which has published problematic articles on transgender issues in recent years. The paper has a terrible opinion writer, Pamela Paul, who traffics in tropes about trans people. Its coverage would improve by better framing its articles and having reporters actually talk to more trans people, rather than rely on doctors, researchers, and transphobes.) But as the Times wryly noted, "today GLAAD acts as a watchdog and a cheerleader for the media." Obviously, that can be problematic.
Still, the Times' details of Ellis' first-class flights, swanky Davos accommodations, Cape Cod rental, and most famously, expensing a chandelier in the nearly $20,000 remodel of her home office to make it more attractive on Zoom calls are a stretch for any nonprofit. All of that is on top of her base salary of $441,000 — with a signing bonus of $150,000 and other payments of up to $300,000 tied to fundraising. GLAAD is not a large organization; it had revenue of about $19 million in 2022, according to the Times report. "If Ms. Ellis were to receive the more than $1 million that she is potentially eligible for some years, it would be comparable to what giant nonprofits like Feeding America, the American Red Cross, Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union pay their leaders," the Times reported. "Those organizations are many times the size of GLAAD."
It's interesting that GLAAD's board has not issued any statement since the Times article appeared, and one doesn't appear forthcoming. In fact, chair Liz Jenkins told the Times that the board stood firmly behind Ms. Ellis, "with respect and appreciation for how she and her team are leading the movement at a time when our community is under attack. We have full confidence that they're doing so with integrity and that they share the board's commitment to irrefutably strong governance and business practices."
It seems that GLAAD's governance and business practices aren't strong enough and could use an extensive update. Apparently, Ellis did not adhere to travel guidelines set up by GLAAD and she should have. We can't think of any reason a nonprofit leader needs to fly first-class anywhere, much less the 30 flights for which Ellis sought reimbursement, as the Times reported. Also eye-opening in the report was that a lower level GLAAD employee was chastised for expensing a cup of coffee and being told that it was "taking money away from the LGBTQ cause," the Times reported. The worker had to reimburse GLAAD. Under those policies, Ellis would need to do a lot of reimbursing of her own. Let's be clear: anyway you look at it, it's Ellis who is taking a lot of money away from the LGBTQ cause.
The board seems scared to see Ellis leave and it shouldn't be. There are capable leaders who could step up and run GLAAD without all the baggage of these exorbitant expenses. GLAAD's board has blinders on — it's time that they remove them and get a clear view of the bad example Ellis is setting, not only for her organization, but also for the entire LGBTQ community.
This is an issue of GLAAD's own making. When it started out with the aim of refuting homophobic and transphobic mainstream media coverage, there wasn't another similar organization that was doing this work. Now, there are lots of sites — think Media Matters for America, which is a true journalism watchdog organization. In the days before the internet, GLAAD would run a regular column in the B.A.R. to alert readers to what was happening. But as it grew, the organization shifted its focus to celebrities and corporate CEOs — and their money. It would appear that Ellis fancies herself in that category, hence her need to spend like the stars do. The problem is that GLAAD is not a celebrity, and it could be using the tens of thousands of dollars Ellis spent on car services, rental homes, and world class hotels to help rural LGBTQ organizations be more effective in their own messaging, for example, or assist statewide LGBTQ groups in less populous parts of the country. Or really, anything else to help the community.
Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal, a gay man who was at the Stonewall riots in 1969 and later crashed the set of Walter Cronkite's "CBS Evening News" program, recently wrote a scathing column about all of this. "While she has built a formidable organization, raking in millions of your donations, she seems to have become excessively comfortable with spending those donations on her own lifestyle," he wrote of Ellis. "There used to be a term for those overpaid within our community: 'Gay Inc.' Her spending is nothing less than, and I'm being polite here, gay greed."
He's not wrong about that.
The bottom line is that now that we all have this information, LGBTQ and other donors can choose to continue supporting GLAAD or take their money elsewhere to help other queer nonprofits. Most all of them would be grateful for donations, even a fraction of the ones that GLAAD gets. We're not sure why philanthropist MacKenzie Scott decided to grant $10 million to GLAAD, as the Times reported, but perhaps the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will channel her fortune more to underrepresented groups, like she has already done on numerous occasions. (Openhouse, the LGBTQ senior agency in San Francisco, received $2 million from Scott's Yield Giving program earlier this year, for instance.)
It seems that the cost of an Ellis photo with Oprah Winfrey, which was taken at GLAAD's awards gala in Los Angeles in March, comes at the expense of, well, living it up.
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