During my totally unpleasant 5-year association with the San Francisco Pride Celebration Committee, reportedly a non-profit membership organization responsible for the city’s annual LGBT Pride festival and parade, I listened to moronic debate about acceptance of corporate donations, “sponsorship,” and inclusion of corporate groups carrying their corporation’s identifying brand name with pride colors, and slogans.
Socialist, anti-corporate and anarchists on the SF Pride Board, a supposed leadership entity charged with making decisions for the city’s LGBT community, wasted hours upon hours ranting about corporations ruining the spirit of the Pride celebration.
At great personal risk of being shouted out of SF Pride meetings, I spoke in favor of corporate inclusion and explained the corporations were involved in Pride to support their LGBT employee groups and in response to the requests of LGBT and allied corporate stockholders. I am speaking of corporations based in San Francisco like Pacific Gas and Electric (NYSE: PCG), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) and others.
Corporate stockholder activists have since the 1960s brought national and global change on business, social and political issues. While in university in the 1970s, I worked with activists to stop Nestle from promoting their infant formula to young African mothers in place of breast milk. Early in my Washington career, I worked with stockholder activists in Washington and New York to fight corporate business practices, especially better wages, for African workers.
Simultaneously, I worked to end apartheid through corporate activities. It was during this time, I began a business relationship with corporate activist and Holocaust survivor Evelyn Y. “Queen of the Corporate Jungle” Davis. Initially Mrs. Davis, or “EYD,” she liked to be called, worked from her residence at The Mayflower Hotel. She later moved to the Watergate despite resistance to her controversial activism. Mrs. Davis and I worked on and off over the year and married in 2005.
Evelyn, nearly 30 years my senior, was verbally abrasive, to put it mildly, to CEOs and politicians, but she played a role in democratizing and, to a degree, sexualizing corporate meetings. Mrs. Davis, unknown to me at marriage, had a prostitution arrest in her background and often engaged in a form of sexual performance art at corporate annual meetings. The old gal, now incapacitated, did enjoy sex. A LOT!
In recent days, GOP governors in Dixieland have moved to alter onerous provisions in “religious freedom” legislation deemed anti-LGBT by many corporate leaders. Georgia GOP Gov. Nathan Deal, it is widely believed, responded to corporate pressures in vetoing an anti-LGBT “religious freedom” bill. Though he said his veto decision was not pressured by corporate interests, the “dismal science” of economics surely played a role.
Economics, if not social progress, also marched toward equality in North Carolina and Louisiana where GOP governors “saw the light” of economics if not full LGBT equality. In a sense it might be that corporate activism put the economic fear of God into Dixie governors.
Economics is speaking as loudly today as my ex-wife Evelyn Y. “Queen of the Corporate Jungle” Davis during her over 60 years of “prowling,” to borrow a word from The Financial Times, corporate annual meetings.
The SF Pride Board and the San Francisco LGBT community should see the results of corporate involvement in the move toward LGBT rights and employment equality in the rights resistant South, long a Confederate States of Anti-LGBT America (CSALA). Corporate action is greater than street action. Though I agree both are important.
The LGBT community, whether in corporate resistant San Francisco or in other cities, should borrow a lyric from Sir Paul McCartney, whom I saw perform at the closing of San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, “open the door and let them in.”
It is past time for Pride organizations to honor corporate chiefs and stockholder activists in Pride parades and celebrations. The stockholder activists are the real and unsung heroes who worked namelessly and tirelessly for decades to embolden resistant corporate chiefs, boards and other stockholders to change the minds of those resistant to LGBT rights.
Southern governors will demonstrate political leadership when economics, especially jobs in traditionally high jobless regions, are at stake. Mrs. Davis was fond of telling male CEOs and male board members that her questions and corporate resolutions had them all by the balls. This raised gasps when she first started using it at annual meetings in the 1970s.
Corporate chiefs and activists of today have resistant politicians by the balls by “bargaining” economics for equality. Unlike corporate meetings of the 1970s, no one is gasping at the suggestion of corporate economic testicular strangulation. Most people, like Mrs. Davis and I, rather enjoy it.
Longtime Washington diplomat Jim Patterson writes from California and Washington, DC. JEPCapitolHill@gmail.com Disclosure: The author owns stock in some of the companies mentioned.
