The Gay Mafia That's Redefining Liberal Politics

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The Cabinet first came together three or four years ago, according to Van Ameringen, as a "meeting place" for donors who wanted to use their money with greater strategic acumen. Gill got the idea for the group after he and Lewis attended a Democracy Alliance meeting. The donors felt they could accomplish more for gays if they shared information rather than operate as "silo" givers. Some members were frustrated that the established gay movement in Washington hadn't made greater progress in a society rapidly coming to see homosexuality as a mere variation rather than a moral degeneration.

Today it's difficult to find a gay organization that has not enjoyed the Cabinet's largesse. In 2007, for example, Stryker's Arcus Foundation gave away $11.8 million as part of its Gay and Lesbian Program. The money reached both big-name groups like the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (which got half a million dollars) and little organizations like the Actors Theatre Co. of Grand Rapids, Mich., which got $25,000 to produce a play called Seven Passages: The Story of Gay Christians.

The web of connections among the Cabinet members is complex. All the other members have donated the maximum amount allowed to Ketner's congressional campaign. Gill, Lewis and Stryker employ political advisers — respectively, Denver attorney Ted Trimpa; Paul Yandura, who worked in the Clinton White House's political-affairs office; and Lisa Turner, a former political director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee — who regularly speak with one another and with others who work for Cabinet members.

There's nothing illegal about the Cabinet's coordination of its members' giving, according to Lawrence Noble, campaign-finance expert with the Washington-based firm Skadden, Arps. The contributions would be illegal only if the members agreed to give up control of their donations entirely or coordinated them directly with a campaign. There's no evidence of either; several people associated with the Cabinet made clear that its members make their donations without anyone's review. And yet as the National Review's Byron York has pointed out, Americans were horrified to learn during Watergate that Richard Nixon's friend Clement Stone had donated an outrageous $2 million in cash to the President's campaign. Cabinet members have spent at least five times that amount in various races in the past four years; the Soros-backed Democracy Alliance has spent probably 50 times that amount.

Still, it's hard to argue that the left in general and gays in particular should sit on their hands while foes outspend them. Strategically, the Cabinet makes sense; most people who defend its secrecy offer a Machiavellian understanding of ends and means. "I could lose a lot of sleep about it, and I do wonder why they have abandoned [gay] organizations that have a 35-year track record in order to have their own operations," says a seasoned Washington gay activist. "But if that's the way the rules of the game are being played, I need to maneuver within what the realities are."

The larger question is what role wealthy groups like the Cabinet will have in reshaping the politics of the left. There's been a great deal of (largely self-congratulatory) talk among liberals about the progressive movement's success in using new technologies to harness the netroots, to use the fashionable liberal argot. But there has been less reflection about what impact the great gobs of Sorosian money will have on the movement. Michael Fleming, a Los Angeles political macher who advises Cabinet member Bohnett, worries that rank-and-file gay people — the ones who might have picked up a rock at Stonewall — are increasingly relying on billionaires to cut checks. "Where is the outrage?" he asks.

The answer is that outrage has given way to smugness, the kind of self-satisfaction conservatives displayed after electoral successes in 1980 and 1994. Groups like the Cabinet and the Democracy Alliance suggest a new kind of moneyed progressivism, one that shows little of the class discontent that animated earlier strains of leftist thought. Is this a sign of maturation — throwing off radical excesses — or capitulation, a surrendering to the idea that efforts to reduce the power of money in our democracy have failed? Probably a little of both.

For its part, the Cabinet seems poised to prod the gay movement into being sleeker, faster, more tactical. When the remaining veterans of Stonewall march down Fifth Avenue next summer, those shimmeringly romantic, slightly foolish days of 1969 will have never seemed so distant.

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