Pride Guide 2

Missing Millennium funds inquiry reveals a house of cards

by Michelangelo Signorile

GAY.COM EDITOR AT LARGE

REPRINTED FROM THE GAY.COM NETWORK

Like a flash of lightning during a thunderstorm, the investigation into missing funds from the for-profit Millennium Festival has shown a white-hot light onto the entire Millennium March on Washington, which took place April 28-30.

What's coming into sharper view is not very pretty: MMOW's financial premise— that the festival would pay all the costs. MMOW incurred, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans from individuals and corporations, as MMOW overextended itself—was a foolish scenario from the start. That the FBI is now investigating the alleged theft of possibly a million dollars only underscores this fact.

MMOW organizers, rather than doing substantial grass-roots fund raising, became like credit card junkies, living on tomorrow, waiting for that mythical payload to come in. And the Human Rights Campaign, with a foot in the MMOW door, was simply exploiting this crass, millennial-era American impulse among the organizers just long enough so that it could shine brightly and benefit greatly.

Impressively, HRC organized a fund-raising rock concert, aligned itself with popular. celebrities, signed up thousands of new members, sold its "Equality Wear" merchandise and seized the gay political agenda in a campaign year. The only thing HRC didn't count on was that the MMOW house of cards

Milk

would come crashing down while its foot was still in the door.

The planning of the march, as critics had droned into our brains for almost two years, was a topdown corporate strategy, far different from the grass-roots marches of the past. But actually, it was even more top-down than the march critics-most notably the Ad Hoc Committee for an Open Process-imagined in their wildest dreams.

It wasn't a board of directors running this show. It was a much smaller executive committee of six, a secretive group that ran the march their way and their way only: Minneapolis activist Ann De-

JANET MACOSKA

Milennit for Gay, Les

ich

thon Wa l, and Transge

Groot; Donna Red Wing of the Denver-based Gill Foundation; Duane Kramer of the Names Project Memorial AIDS Quilt; Nicole Ramirez-Murray of the National Latino/a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender

ted to the

val to be produced

hell:

Calling

alized and the total revenue generated by the lear, Debis outstanding from the festival and the

march combined exceed $1,023,000. A breakdown follows.

$400.000

8500 000 $42.000

$323 000 Unknown

Follow the money trail Millennium Productions

Money loaned to Millennium Productions

Malcolm Lazin.....

Money paid back by Millennium Productions

Malcolm Lazin.....

Strawberry Fields, Inc (juice vender) eers

Outstanding debts of Millennium Productions

Food vendors....

Other creditors

Total debts of Millennium Festival......

$323,000+

Follow the money trail the Millennium March

Money loaned to the MMOW

Human Rights Campaign (bridge loan)

$110.000

Human Rights Campaign (standard loan)

$230.000

Greg Williams, former MMOW development director

$100,000

Michael Gallagher...

$30,000

Online Partners (Cory.com's parent company)

$100.000

Anonymous corporate sponsor

$150,000

Anonymous donor,

$70,000

Lines of credit guaranteed by G & L Bank

al,

Organization; HRC's managing director Margaret Conway and Michael Armentrout, a North Carolina financial advisor and HRC board member.

"They asked for more money three days before the event," Deborah Oakley Melvin, an MMOW board member had told me on May 7, one day before I filed the story that first broke the news about the FBI investigation of the Millennium Festival. The "they" she was talking about was the executive board.

"I would like to know that things are being taken care of," Oakley Melvin had said, professing that she knew nothing about two MMOW executive committee members hav-.

main reasons she left the board last fall was that she could never get information from the executive committee. "It was like pulling teeth," she said. "Communication was nonexistent."

Ginny Foat, who was an associate producer of the march until September 1999, left MMOW because of what she felt were ethical lapses and their spendthrift ways. She says the line-item budget she created in May, based on her experience working with nonprofits, was still not passed when she left four months later. "By looking at the press now," she says, "they clearly went over that budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars."

ing met with the FBI. "These are all things Tyler saw financial disaster coming

that board members should know."

But according to several current and former board members and staffers of MMOW, throughout its life, unlike most other boards, the full MMOW board was not included in pertinent, high-level discussions.

"The executive board made decisions and did things they wanted to do without explaining it and without being upfront," says an individual associated with MMOW. "I don't think it was underhanded all of the time. I think they thought it was intelligent. But they were making some pretty bad decisions."

Someone else associated with MMOW puts it this way: "Most executive committees on boards are empowered to make day-today decisions, but not to make decisions about getting loans and other major decisions outside their power and scope. But this executive committee did... It's in the [MMOW] bylaws that all loans or lines of credit must be gotten with full board approval, and yet they didn't get it."

Geni Cowan, a professor at California. State University in Sacramento, was on the MMOW board briefly. She said one of the

The executive committee may be even more secretive now, as bunker mentality has set in (they have now designated DeGroot as their official spokesperson), but clearly a lot of other people are starting to open their mouths.

Los Angeles activist and events organizer Robin Tyler, who was the stage producer for the previous three marches on Washington, was executive producer of MMOW until last year, when she left amid raucous disagreements with the board. She says she didn't speak to the press because she didn't want to hurt the march. "However," she says, "I can't sit back now that it's over and allow them to spin out the lies and the bullshit."

Tyler says the attempts by both HRC and MMOW to distance themselves from one another and from the festival since the alleged robbery have enraged her, particularly since she says that she warned the MMOW board and HRC executive director Elizabeth Birch about the festival's possible downfall. (Birch could not be reached for comment on this point.)

Continued on page C-4

MMOW projected be

$150.000

$150,000

$110000

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