The nonprofit world runs on the fumes of exhaustion, desperate hope, and a general sense of futility exuded by its denizens.
I published “Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Why Gay Nonprofits Struggle and Yet Survive,” a review of Myrl Beam’s Gay Inc. The review appeared in Current Affairs.
Excerpt:
The gay Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) is like a bloated shark that must keep swimming in order to stay alive: if it stops feeding itself with more causes that funnel more money into it, it will die, and it exists in order to keep existing and also to ensure that mainstream and wealthy gays and lesbians have an arena, a social register of sorts, of their own where capital and social class can be invested and gained and circulated. The task of the gay NPIC is not to fund causes but to coin social currency for a community that hankers, desperately, for legitimacy and validation, to belong.
You can read the rest here. Contact me for a pdf if you can’t access it.