ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the largest LGBTQ lobbying organization in the United States, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The Human Rights Campaign is one of various hegemonic organizations within the LGBTQ advocacy community. Hegemons often function to manage advocacy coalitions. This includes encouraging actors that support their strategies and punishing those that oppose them. This chapter argues that the Human Rights Campaign as a non-profit institution has facilitated progress in the gay mainstream movement, which advances a neoliberal heteronormative model of organizing and fundraising. This includes the expansion of respectability politics as a norm-setting function within the community, and the perpetuation of certain sexual hierarchies that appeal to cis, white, gay, male constituencies. Ultimately, I argue that the Human Rights Campaign furthers hegemonic heterosexuality by gaining access to power by advancing heterosexual models and issues. For instance, this model reproduces systems of oppression including racism, sexism, ableism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia. As a result, this stifles progress in the radical queer movement. Importantly, HRC’s actions are consistent with other hegemons in various movements. In this case, a review of the LGBTQ advocacy community highlights the tensions around DADT, the starting of Q Street (the LGBTQ lobbyist association), and the ways the Human Rights Campaign’s fundraising model can promote a commercial identity of gayness as a consumable product that often privileges white, cis men and cis women from the middle and upper classes.
