NATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN TASK FORCE (NGLTF)

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, originally called the National Gay Task Force, was formed in October 1973 by a group of New York City activists— Bruce Voeller, Nathalie Rockhill, and Ron Gold—who had met in the Gay Activists Alliance. At the time, virtually all gay and lesbian movement organizations were local in nature. Voeller, Rockhill, and Gold were interested in creating a national organization with full-time paid staff. With the support of Howard Brown, a former New York City health commissioner whose coming out was a front-page story in the New York Times in 1973, they raised money and constructed a board of directors drawn mostly from the Northeast.

Based in New York, NGLTF turned its attention to national campaigns beyond the scope of local groups. It quickly amassed a number of significant victories. In 1974 it played a key role in the referendum within the American Psychiatric Association that removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. It elicited from the National Council of Churches a resolution condemning antigay discrimination. It prodded the American Bar Association into going on record in favor of sodomy law repeal. In Washington, D.C., it successfully lobbied in 1975 the federal Civil Service Commission to lift its blanket ban on the employment of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. That same year, it persuaded U.S. Representative Bella Abzug, Democrat from New York, to introduce a bill in Congress to amend federal civil rights statutes to include sexual orientation. It also won reversal of an Internal Revenue Service ruling that denied tax-exempt status to groups that argued for the acceptability of homosexuality. Concerned about negative portrayals of homosexuality in the mainstream media, NGLTF initiated the first coordinated nationwide action against network television to protest the airing of a homophobic episode of the ABC series Marcus Welby, M.D. It established a "Gay Media Alert!" to keep local activists appraised of homophobic programming.

From the beginning, women on the staff and board of NGLTF lobbied for gender parity in the organization. Board membership was divided equally between men and women, and in 1975, NGLTF hired Jean O'Leary to serve as coexecutive director with Bruce Voeller. With the support of board members such as Frances Doughty and Charlotte Bunch, O'Leary pressed successfully to add new priorities to the work of the Task Force. NGLTF worked within the mainstream women's movement to win support for lesbian rights. In 1975, the convention of the National Organization for Women passed a lesbian rights

resolution. Two years later, O'Leary and the other women of NGLTF spearheaded a successful national campaign for adoption of a lesbian rights plank at the International Women's Year Conference U.S. called by President Jimmy Carter and held in Houston. O'Leary also pushed NGLTF to be involved in mainstream party politics, which, in the 1970s, essentially meant the Democratic Party. In 1976, she organized a national convention project that pressed candidates for the presidential nomination to take a stand on gay issues and attempted to get openly gay or lesbian delegates elected in the states. O'Leary was one of only four such delegates at the Democratic Convention in New York City.

The rise of the New Right, the spread of antigay ballot referenda, and the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 posed a new set of challenges for the organization. Voeller and O'Leary both left NGLTF in 1979. Their replacements, Charles Brydon and Lucia Valeska, worked poorly together and could not adapt to the more hostile political climate. In 1982, Ginny Apuzzo became executive director. An inspirational speaker, she traveled around the country trying to restore NGLTF's credibility among local activists. She hired Kevin Berrill to direct an antiviolence project and Jeff Levi as a Washington-based lobbyist.

Most of all, Apuzzo turned the resources of the Task Force toward the emerging AIDS epidemic. Though the national caseload in 1982 was still below a thousand, Apuzzo sensed that a crisis of massive proportions was in the making, and, with Levi, she tried to craft a national response. NGLTF worked closely with friendly members of Congress, such as Representatives Henry Waxman (a California Democrat) and Ted Weiss (a Democrat from New York State), to organize congressional hearings. She strove to bring local organizations together into a national effort, helping to create what later became the AIDS Action Council and a much larger coalition, National Organizations Responding to AIDS. The emphasis on AIDS made a strong presence in Washington, D.C. ever more important and, in 1986, when Jeff Levi became the executive director, he moved the organization to Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, the configuration of the lesbian and gay movement was changing. The Human Rights Campaign, concerned with electing to Congress supporters of gay rights, was becoming a stronger presence in Washington while the AIDS epidemic was provoking a whole new wave of local militant activism. The Christian right was targeting the gains of the gay movement all over the country. By the late 1980s, NGLTF decided to shift its focus to building support for grassroots activism in communities across the country. Organizing itself into a series of issue-oriented projects—privacy, antiviolence, family, campus organizing, fight-the-right, lesbian health— NGLTF began to provide training and technical assistance to local groups in every region. Under the leadership of Urvashi Vaid, who became executive director in 1989, NGLTF's annual Creating Change conference was quickly recognized as the premier gathering of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals and, eventually, transgender activists in the United States.

In the wake of the devastating "gays in the military" debate of 1993, NGLTF decided that a more explicitly progressive voice needed to be heard within the LGBT movement. It began to refer to itself as the "progressive voice of the queer movement" and "the queer voice of the progressive movement." Intent on pursuing coalition politics, it started to speak out on issues such as welfare reform, immigration restriction, affirmative action, and the death penalty. It rewrote its mission statement to make explicit the inclusion of bisexual and transgender concerns. It established a policy institute in 1995, a think tank designed to produce research and progressive analysis that could be used by activists around the country. In the late 1990s, it began to add to its work with local activists an emphasis on statewide organizing. NGLTF has provided support and helped to seed statewide coalitions around the country and was a founding sponsor of a national federation of statewide LGBT organizations.

For all its important work, NGLTF has been plagued by difficulties throughout its history. Trying to be too many things to too many people, it has often overreached itself and repeatedly faced serious budget crises that have forced staff cutbacks and failure to follow through on its work. It has picked up issues for a time, such as antiviolence work and campus organizing, and then dropped them as it has moved on to newer issues. It has also been plagued by rapid turnover of its leadership. Between 1993 and 2003 it had seven different executive directors. The change in leadership has made it difficult to maintain continuity and establish a strong continuing public presence. As a result, NGLTF has seen itself eclipsed in size by other national organizations, like the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and has watched as newer national organizations, such as GLSEN and GLAAD, have grown and carved out important missions for themselves. Nevertheless, NGLTF remains an active and distinctive advocate for LGBT liberation.

John D'Emilio

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