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This article was originally published on my Cohost page on June 6, 2024.

Content note: The following contains extensive discussion of Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people.

Since October 2023, the Human Rights Campaign has faced mounting pressure from LGBTQIA+ activists to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank. Queer activist groups like ACT UP have also demanded that HRC condemn Israeli pinkwashing propaganda, which falsely pits queer and trans rights against those of Palestinians. Over time, the organization has expressed a generalized empathy for what it has deemed a “humanitarian crisis.” But for much of the past eight months, the organization has kept its collective mouth shut – and according to HRC workers, that pervasive silence has been enforced from the very top.

In a series of phone and email interviews conducted since January, multiple current and former employees of the U.S.’s largest LGBTQIA+ nonprofit told me that leaders have repeatedly refused to call for a ceasefire or overtly criticize Israel. HRC President Kelley Robinson, while addressing a staff retreat last year, allegedly suggested that if pro-Palestine workers thought HRC was betraying its values, "maybe it's time to go." Some told me the organization’s refusal to take a stand for Palestinian human rights stretches back more than a decade, enforced for at least that long by senior leadership including Chief of Staff Jay Brown, now the highest-ranking transgender person at HRC.

HRC’s reticence to act is not unique in the queer nonprofit sector, and the sources I spoke to – most of whom wished to remain anonymous in whole or part, for fear of retaliation – expressed strong support for many of their colleagues and the liberatory work they originally set out to accomplish. Their experiences, however, paint a picture of an organization that refuses to learn from its long history of mistakes, seemingly due to fear of criticism and the financial risks that come with real, radical change.

~ ~ ~

Shortly after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and Israel’s immediate escalation into wholesale genocide, HRC President Kelley Robinson wasted little time in issuing a statement on October 13 to express her “outrage” at the estimated 1,200 casualties of Hamas’ “brutal terrorist attack.” Robinson’s statement, however, was missing any context of Israeli violence against Palestinians prior to October, conspicuously generalized the “toll on […] Palestinian civilian lives” rather than providing an available estimate, and equivocated in its condemnation of hate-motivated violence within the U.S.: “Antisemitism is wrong. Islamophobia is wrong. Full stop.”

Leadership followed that statement with “radio silence” for nearly a month, as current and former employees told me for this report. In some staffers’ eyes, Robinson’s language was “dehumanizing,” racist, and anti-Arab, lacking critical background from decades of Israeli violence ever since the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleansing that killed or displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians to create the Israeli state. Some hoped that leaders were preparing to issue a more complete statement condemning Israel’s bombing of Gaza, but no such statement came – nor has one been released in the eight months since. Instead, sources say HRC’s weekly newsletters continued to generalize the violence and used similar language to Robinson’s first statement, while other senior staff would only repeat that the organization was “neutral in this moment.” Even when pro-Palestine organizers from outside HRC staged protests at HRC events, including President Joe Biden’s speech at the annual National Dinner gala on October 16, leadership seemed to pretend that nothing had happened at all. One person I spoke to compared the mood at that time to the Earth Kingdom’s pacifying mantra in the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender: “There is no war in Ba Sing Se.”

Multiple members of staff privately emailed leadership during this time, I’m told, asking HRC to call for a full ceasefire and improve its messaging. If HRC took decisive action, they knew, other LGBTQIA+ groups would follow its lead in a domino effect; they had already heard the inverse, people from other organizations using HRC's silence as cover for their own. But public critique was known to be unwelcome in the HRC offices. “It was heavily implied, if not demanded, that [critique should] not be done in full staff meetings, or any sort of public internal-facing meetings,” one anonymous former staffer explained – not only on Palestine, but regarding any source of disagreement. “There’s a heavy preference in HRC to individualize problems and have someone go talk to leadership behind closed doors. […] If you have a random one-off meeting with someone, they can say anything they want, and say it went however they think it did later on," they said. "And that’s what happened in this case.”

When asked for comment regarding key allegations in this report, HRC at first directed me to a webpage assembling several statements Robinson has made since October, a page I’m told was created in February. Although some of these statements do reference Palestinian casualty estimates and express grief at “innocent lives lost,” they are also consistent with many of the criticisms levied at HRC leadership last year and conveyed to me by my sources. The statements euphemistically refer to Israeli occupation as a “humanitarian crisis,”¹ Palestinian resistance as “terrorism,” and murdered civilians as having mysteriously “died.” Staffers acknowledged that Robinson’s statements in November began to include Palestinian casualty estimates, but said even that change only occurred as a result of internal pressure via email, and barely addressed the first of many concerns. To date, the closest HRC has come to calling for a ceasefire was on April 5, when Robinson referred to Biden’s own verbal support for a ceasefire – but she did not call for one herself, only going far enough to specifically condemn the bombing of World Central Kitchen aid workers, who she wrote were "killed in an Israeli air attack."²

After individual efforts to push HRC leadership into action stalled, sources tell me, collective organizing began. “A group of folks came together feeling helpless and asking ourselves ‘what can we do?’” explained Alex Costello (she/her), former Associate Director of Video, who resigned from HRC earlier this year. Organized under the banner of HRC Staff Calling for Action, “we created an open letter calling for a ceasefire and educating HRC [leadership] on the problems with the previous weekly statements, and giving them factual evidence of how it was wrong and the statements were biased,” Costello told me. “That’s why the letter was written: to educate, to give historical context, to say that we can’t have queer liberation under colonization.” The letter-writing process was steady but “arduous” throughout the month of November, one staffer recalled.

Staff members’ frustrations with their leaders’ “neutrality” reached a boiling point in December, leading up to HRC’s two-day staff retreat in Washington, D.C. – the organization’s first such retreat since the start of the COVID pandemic. The day before the retreat was set to begin, leadership finally called an impromptu meeting 30 minutes before the close of business to discuss HRC’s organizational position on Palestine, during which Robinson allegedly instructed staff the meeting was “not a conversation.” HRC would not call for a ceasefire for several reasons, she said, like “we don’t get involved in global issues.” To many, this seemed an obvious falsehood, given the nonprofit’s then-robust Global Programs division. Making matters worse, an overview document for “HRC x D.C. 2023” explained the retreat’s theme: “North Star work,” a set of principles to guide HRC’s future goals. Many balked at one of the framework’s three main bullet points, “Disrupt Political Systems” – a stark contrast, they said, to HRC’s lack of leadership on Palestinian justice.

“It struck people like, what the fuck?” one former staffer told me. Many were already bringing long-festering labor and discrimination grievances with them into the retreat, but this seemed on another level. How could statements like these coexist with HRC’s publicly posted values, like equity and intersectionality? “That made people even more pissed coming into the retreat the following day.”

Photo of the HRC "Community Mural" in December 2023. Sources told me it was never displayed after the retreat. Image credit: anonymous HRC staffer

Organizers arrived at the D.C. retreat on December 6 with hundreds of homemade Palestinian flag pins, ready to pump the volume. Costello recalls making matching bracelets during one retreat session, and adorned her own denim jacket with a paraphrased quote from Robinson herself: “Let’s get free, y’all, without exception, without anyone left behind.” On the second day, Costello said, she donned a T-shirt reading “NORTH STAR WORK: DISRUPT POLITICAL SYSTEMS.” Leadership arranged a “community mural” made of white paper for staff to draw and write messages on (above); by the end of the retreat, the mural included numerous Palestinian flags, watermelons, and slogans like “Silence is Violence.” Still, headway was slow. “The first day didn’t go quite how people wanted it to go, and the second day people were kind of like ‘fuck it, we need to say something,’” one organizer summarized.

December 7 indeed brought with it a long-awaited eruption. After addressing staff about “North Star work” for roughly forty minutes that day, Robinson opened the floor to questions, facilitated by microphone “runners” who delivered mics to audience members who raised their hands. Costello raised hers – but during the time it took for the runner to jog to her seat, she told me, two members of HRC leadership made it visibly clear that she was not to be handed a mic: Susanne Salkind, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, and Margot Rosen, the organization’s newly-minted Deputy Chief of Staff.

“The head of HR looks at this other woman Margot [Rosen] and puts her hand by her neck and shakes it, like ‘not Alex,’” Costello recalled during our interview. “And I don’t lose eye contact with Susanne Salkind, because I want her to look at me. So the mic runner looks at Margot, Margot looks at [Salkind] because she’s shaking her head ‘no,’ and Margot shakes her head ‘no’ at the mic runner, who is right next to me and says ‘I’m sorry.’ Susanne starts pointing, trying to find me in the crowd, but my eyes are on her because I want her to know I just watched [her] do that. By the time she finds me, she looks at me like shit. I [mouthed] to her I saw that. Very slowly. And then I put two fingers by my eyes, and pointed them at her.”

Costello would not receive a microphone, but other members of the coalition took her place. Sources told me that Robinson went on to field repeated questions about HRC’s stance on the bombing of Palestinians, but evaded and equivocated, asserting that HRC was “a recruitment organization” that didn’t have the capacity to “fight every fight.” When one staffer asked what to do about their concerns that HRC was not aligned with its values, Robinson allegedly began a lengthy anecdote referencing racism and tensions she said prompted her to leave her former position as Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund – implying that pro-Palestine HRC staff should consider resigning if they were disappointed with leadership.

“I used to work at Planned Parenthood,” sources describe Robinson as saying. “I did not trust the organization at the end of my time there because a bunch of racist stuff was happening, and you know what I did? I said ‘you know what, we have different political views,’ and I decided to leave. […] And if you’re having a hard time right now, it’s a hard decision to make, but maybe it’s time to go then. We would be with you mentally, but that’s okay – sometimes you just have to leave when you don’t agree with something.’”

“It really pissed people off,” one attendee told me. “I was pissed, I was cussing, I was yelling […] to have the president sit there with a smile on her face [and] say, ‘if you think that there’s something wrong with us not standing up to say “genocide is bad,” then you should just leave.’ I felt sick.”

It was around this point that Costello stood up and yelled “ENOUGH” in Robinson’s direction, interrupting her from the floor without a microphone. “When is HRC going to say something? Calling for a ceasefire is not a stance for Palestine or Israel, it’s a stance against genocide. I am done,” she recalls saying, before being interrupted by Robinson in turn:

[Kelley Robinson] goes ‘Alex, I respected your time, it would be great if you respected mine.’ So then I interrupted her again and said ‘When did you respect our time? Because I don’t know a time you respected our time. You weren’t respecting our time in the all-staff [meeting], you gave no spaces to talk about Palestine. We are ignoring a genocide. When? I am done. When are you going to say something?’ And then she walked off stage, and [Chief of Staff] Jay Brown came on […] he says ‘Alex, Alex, calm down. You’re such a good employee, and we hear you. We do. And it’s so hard this is happening right now, you gotta understand.’ I’m like, ‘no Jay, I don’t. Can you explain? What is our stance?’ He goes ‘I think we’re going to have to take a break right now, but let’s go into the trust function a little early.’

“I just broke down in tears. Why was I seen as the villain? For saying what we should be saying?” Costello told me. “In that moment when he said ‘you’re such a good employee,” it was very much like ‘oh, look what you’re doing to your reputation.’ [...] At HRC, the only way you can make it up [the ladder] is you don’t do your job. To do your job, to fight for queer liberation, is not to be a ‘good employee.’” After the argument, Costello said she joined several others to hold one another and cry. “I know this sounds sad to say, but that was the most I felt connected to anyone at that organization,” she remembered.

Robinson’s message seemed clear to those I spoke to: get with the program or get out. Several staffers left the retreat early. One told me that Robinson’s “galling” and “nasty” comments marked the moment they decided to look for other work.

HRC Staff Calling for Action delivered their letter to leadership the following week. In the wake of Robinson’s statement to staff, a wave of new signatures had joined the open letter, though some were removed due to concerns of retaliation (I’m told that some staff received emails from leadership they considered threatening). The letter was eventually signed by more than 60 staffers across the HRC, the HRC Foundation, and multiple regional and state offices.

The letter – which organizers requested not be reprinted in full, due to privacy and retaliation concerns – demanded that HRC call for an immediate ceasefire, condemn Israeli attempts to pinkwash their alleged war crimes, and remove anti-Palestinian bias from its official communications. It also provided information about the history of Israeli military aggression in Gaza, defended Palestinians’ right to self-defense against an occupying army, and asked for more spaces during work hours for HRC staff to learn about Palestinian rights in relation to LGBTQIA+ issues. “Our main questions were ‘what is our stance, and if we have no stance why are we not calling for a ceasefire?’” Costello explained. “And they did not even answer the question at all, and […] kept saying ‘we’re so proud’” – perhaps, she speculated, because Brown and other leaders suspected the emails would later be leaked to journalists.

Staff meetings became increasingly heated as December wore on. A growing number of workers now openly asked when the organization would call for a ceasefire during Zoom meetings, only to be forcibly muted by leadership, who allegedly also disabled chat messages and forbade “negative” reaction emojis. In one meeting, an anonymous staffer told me, Robinson asserted HRC “will not call for a ceasefire just as we wouldn't call for increased defense funding for Israel.” Instead, the organization would call for general peace across the region without “picking sides.”

“It is evident senior leadership is unwilling to engage in a good-faith dialogue with their staff about the ongoing crisis in Palestine,” Staff Calling for Action wrote in an email to leadership on December 18, repeating their previous demands and calling for Robinson to apologize to all staff. “The response during the retreat, where Kelley suggested that staff should leave if they did not believe HRC was living into its values, was devastating and disrespectful [… and] demonstrates a lack of empathy for the majority of HRC staff, who do not have the financial security or social capital to leave a job impulsively.”

After weeks of continued stonewalling from above, some workers reached their personal breaking points. Costello’s came in early January, when she was asked to create a highlight reel of Robinson’s livestreamed speech to the Kettering Foundation. As HRC’s press release hyping the speech attests, Robinson spoke at length about the need to “protect democracy” by “using our political power and influence… to speak out boldly and in public and to use our relationships together to transform the institution.” Hearing that rhetoric on the stream, Costello told me, was too much to bear after everything she’d seen at HRC since October.

“She’s like, ‘now more than ever, we need to stand up when it’s hard, we need to speak louder and speak up,’ and I was weeping. I’ve never cried so much in my whole life. I was weeping that these words are empty,” Costello told me. She emailed her boss to quit the next day.

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Although the situation has devolved rapidly since October, the Human Rights Campaign’s internal malaise on Palestinian justice has remained an open, self-inflicted wound in the organization’s belly for at least a decade. In addition to current and recently-departed staffers, I also interviewed several former employees who worked at HRC in various roles throughout the 2010s. All said they were unsurprised, but disappointed, that HRC had continued its silence amid years of Israeli bombings. Several told me that the nonprofit’s lack of action was, even then, enforced by Jay Brown in his former roles as Director of Foundation Strategy and Director of Communications.

In summer 2014, Beth Sherouse (she/her) began a two-year fellowship at HRC through the American Council of Learned Societies, during which time she worked directly under Brown as Senior Content Manager for the HRC Foundation. Sherouse – who accused HRC of cultivating “the most pervasive biphobia I have ever experienced” in a 2017 article for HuffPo – told me her first month on the job coincided with the start of a roughly six-week Israeli military assault in Gaza, which eventually killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and wounded 10,000 more.

“It prompted me to ask Jay, ‘where is HRC on this issue? Is this something we would consider at some point making a statement on?’” Sherouse recalled. “And he was like ‘no, we won’t touch it.’ Like, ‘that’s not something that we will touch at all.’” Brown’s unstated implication, she understood, “was that it would be a liability with donors, political allies, supporters on any level. […] He didn’t really have to say it, but he did say ‘we won’t touch it.’” HRC, and her department in particular, “was not a safe space to advocate for Palestinian freedom,” Sherouse said.

An anonymous former staffer, who worked for the organization for roughly six years beginning in the 2010s, told me “not safe” was putting it mildly. “I left because they [leadership] were very psychologically damaging to me,” they said when we spoke on the phone earlier this year. Their team leaders, they recalled, “were pretty not secret about the fact that they were Zionists. Any criticism of Israel whatsoever was very quickly shut down. So there’s a long history of silencing criticism of Israel’s actions as it relates to Palestine within HRC.”

But just as workers at 2023’s all-staff retreat brought years of grievances with them, the former staffers I spoke to said HRC’s problems always ran far deeper than weakness on one issue alone. Its most obvious problem, according to some, is wage inequality (a common complaint across LGBTQIA+ nonprofits, as I’ve found during previous research). Some entry-level staff were allegedly not offered a living wage despite working in cities like Washington, D.C. or New York City; meanwhile, according to HRC’s most recent 990 filings, Jay Brown took home more than $330,000 last year, with other senior staffers posting similar numbers. Some former staff described rampant financial inefficiency in their time at HRC, recalling that leadership would habitually hire contractors to perform work that staff could already accomplish, at exorbitant rates higher even than those staffers’ annual salaries. Dismay at such brazen, predatory capitalism at work was a theme across almost all my interviews.

Former staffers also asserted that many of HRC’s problems circle back to the nonprofit’s most famous “product”: the Corporate Equality Index. Marketed as a ranking of the most LGBTQIA+-friendly businesses in the U.S., the CEI is largely regarded by those I spoke to as a consent-manufacturing scheme to boost the public image of certain large corporations – whether they currently donate to HRC, or merely have the potential to do so in the future. Former staff told me they were reprimanded by leadership for criticizing CEI-rated companies on their personal social media pages, and were especially disallowed from voicing criticism of companies who’d received a perfect “Equality 100 Award.” Companies with a perfect 100 CEI currently include Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers who have profited from Israel’s bombing of Palestinians for decades (a third, Raytheon, received a 100 CEI in 2021). Northrop Grumman is also listed as a “Platinum Partner” on HRC’s website for its financial support and “high level of commitment to equality.” As Sherouse put it, “the reduction of ‘human rights,’ of ‘LGBT rights,’ to ‘did this company institute a training or a policy’ – it’s just total bullshit.”

But even the CEI is, arguably, another symptom of HRC’s biggest problem – its decades-long subservience to the Democratic party, and the neoliberal politics such an allegiance demands. Nathan Barrera-Bunch (he/him), former Senior Manager for Community Inclusion and Education, stressed to me that some of his former coworkers at HRC were “the best people I’ve ever met,” and that he had “incredible positive experiences” working with most of the organization. But even so, he said, the fissures between staff and leadership were obvious as soon as he arrived in 2017, and only deepened over time.

“It’s always been that there’s not enough people willing to challenge the donor class or more senior volunteer class when it comes to trying to move things forward,” Barrera-Bunch told me. “It is very unsurprising that they [leadership] haven’t been able to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza of the Palestinians […] but at the same time, I am disappointed.” Despite “the good work we were doing on all levels,” Barrera-Bunch recalled, HRC leadership’s “glacial” response time and resistance to change on any level prevented the organization from improving. “Beyond transphobia, racism or colorism, xenophobia, or even class, at the heart of it, it’s the inability to manage power and relinquish it so you can lift other local trans and queer organizations,” he opined, a mission HRC should have prioritized long ago.

In a sense, Barrera-Bunch went on, HRC faces the same problem as the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment, a stagnancy analysts have termed the blob. “It’s this set-in, para-human, parasocial, para-democratic bloc that doesn’t allow things to evolve the way they need to,” he explained – making HRC “ultimately a reflection of the Democratic left-of-center establishment in every way.” After all, devotion to the Dem party line infamously led HRC brass to endorse Andrew Cuomo for governor of New York in 2018 (and to appoint Cuomo ally Alphonso David as the organization’s first Black president), which would again rupture the organization only three years later when Cuomo’s serial sexual harassment came to light.

That critique is further borne out by HRC’s vocal enthusiasm for Joe Biden, having re-endorsed the president a full 13 months before the general election. HRC is pushing hard to reelect Biden, lauding the president and VP Kamala Harris as “pro-equality champions” and dedicating $15 million to pro-Biden ads and canvass support in swing states. But under Biden, Democratic priorities include arming Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and barring asylum seekers from the southern border – just two possible reasons the president’s approval rating plummeted to 36% last month, the second time Biden's approval has reached that nadir.

Those two policies alone would give most "human rights" organizations pause. Nevertheless, HRC remains steadfast and unyielding, even as their lack of action in deference to Biden sparks public protest from LGBTQIA+ figures like Indya Moore, Sara Ramirez, the late Cecilia Gentili, and Angelica Ross (appropriately, the former recipient of an HRC Visibility Award).³

“What you’re doing now is what you would have been doing during slavery [and] the Nazi period in Germany,” one staffer said, “and what they’re doing is standing behind the man who is facilitating the ethnic cleansing of an entire population. Unflinchingly.”

“They’re here to get their seat at the oppressor’s table, but they don’t want to change the system that oppresses,” Sherouse told me, in sum. “Because once they get that seat at the table, they can just forget about all the rest of the people who are struggling worse than them […] I think that’s the case with Jay, [and] that’s probably the case with a lot of folks in politics across HRC and a number of other organizations.”

When reached for comment, HRC told me that my sources’ allegations, including those naming specific members of leadership over the past decade, were inaccurate and lacked context. They did not elaborate on which allegations were inaccurate, or how. An HRC spokesperson provided the following official statement:

"The devastating grief and unthinkable violence in Palestine and Israel has shaken so many of us to our core – and it continues. These tragic events and this humanitarian crisis have deeply impacted families and communities, and HRC staff are no exception.

"Over these past eight months, HRC has called for an end to the violence and connected our members to humanitarian organizations to share resources and support. Internally, we created space for staff members to grieve, engage in dialogue, and created regular opportunities to share questions or concerns directly with senior leaders. Leadership conversations have always acknowledged and valued the range of diverse perspectives our team brings to this work, but also clearly outlined how we will dedicate organization capacity and resources."

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Every source I spoke to for this report said that although they had significant doubts about HRC before working there, each of them accepted the job to make a difference in LGBTQIA+ communities. All were aware of HRC’s past controversies over issues like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (unsuccessful HRC-backed legislation that abandoned trans communities not once, but twice), and most considered themselves more left-wing than the organization’s moderate liberal tone, mentally preparing themselves for civil office disagreements even before their employment began.

“I knew what I was getting into,” Sherouse assured me. Still, she had been excited to work alongside Brown, who she believed was aligned with her on at least some values. Barrera-Bunch even told me that in his opinion, some of the accusations lobbed at HRC over the years were unfair and made in bad faith, because the organization was an easy punching bag for more radical groups. But its institutional unwillingness – even inability – to change course made it difficult for even staunch defenders to fully support leadership.

I asked each of the people I interviewed for their opinion on HRC’s future. Considering its checkered past and bitterly divided present, I wondered, could the organization still find a way to correct its course? Some, like Barrera-Bunch, still hold out hope, but even he seemed skeptical. “I think the organization’s going to continue to have a turbulent sort of experience so long as they don’t address the root issue,” i.e. its inability to lift others up and distribute power, Barrera-Bunch mused. Others were far more blunt. “I am unfortunately not very optimistic about my abusers’ capacity to change,” Sherouse told me. One former staffer described such a scenario as “possible, but not plausible,” because “if there’s no room for critique […] just like anything else in life, you’re not going to learn.” Another said they believed HRC’s silence in times of controversy had in fact become a requirement for continued donations, “and that’s a bad business model when it comes to people’s lives.”

A potential route for improvement, sources suggested, would be for leadership to stop taking criticism as a personal attack. But in order to do that, leaders like Brown and Robinson would need to also end their own “identity reductionism,” as one Black staffer termed it in our conversation. Robinson often deployed her identity and experiences with discrimination as a Black queer woman to claim she naturally understood Palestinian oppression, ignoring the perspectives of lower-ranked (and lower-paid) Black and brown staff members, they said.

“[T]hat is irrelevant to what we’re saying,” the staffer told me. “This is what really pissed me off – the people who were coming to [Robinson] with this from jump were Black and brown staff […] to sit up there and act like because our identities link up, that we are the same? […] It’s very galling.”

Staffers gave a similar critique aimed at Jay Brown, who they alleged would regularly reference his own trans identity and that of his children for similar ends – and to encourage staff to support the Biden administration. “Right now, [other] people’s kids are being blown up. Right now! With this president, currently!” a nonbinary former staffer vented to me. “So what are we gonna do right now?”

~ ~ ~

Contrary to what some might infer, I took little joy in writing this report. In the past, I’ve gone on the record as something of an HRC hater; apart from my general skepticism of the nonprofit sector, HRC’s historical stances and deceptions on ENDA repelled me from the start. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with the way it now lionizes icons like Sylvia Rivera, who openly despised HRC for ENDA and much more.

But somehow, I found myself among those who held out hope for a brighter future. When I interviewed Kelley Robinson last year, she said all the right things to make me feel like there was a chance HRC could become a trustworthy LGBTQIA+ advocacy group under her stewardship. “I'm serious when I say we're going to get freedom and liberation for every LGBTQ+ person without exceptions,” Robinson told me at the time. She even name-dropped Kimberlé Crenshaw in the next sentence, and rhapsodized about intersectionality as “a lived reality of how we fight, how we build power, and also how we try to access joy together.”

When I read those words back today, they are hollow. Part of me can’t believe I saw, or inferred, substance there in the first place. Whatever Robinson’s intentions, and those of Brown and other senior leadership, their refusal to take a principled stand on the ongoing genocide in Palestine reveals them to me as lip-service peddlers and passive agents of imperialism. Though it claims to act in defense of all LGBTQIA+ people everywhere, HRC does not truly speak for me, or any other queer who supports Palestinian justice. Far too often, it does not speak at all.

What I have documented above is only a fraction of the stories HRC staffers told me. My own bitterness is a small thing compared to what many of those I spoke to over the past six months are still feeling: condescended to, misrepresented, betrayed. The values so many of them came to HRC to work towards – values they were even graded on during performance reviews, a pure strain of gay idealism seen and sold on a billion blue-and-yellow stickers worldwide – seemed to be mere slogans to the elite who made “freedom and liberation” their industry.

“If this is not the time for [leadership] to stand up and say ‘fuck it, we need to be on the right side of history here,’ I do not know what would change them. And it’s honestly really heartbreaking,” one former staffer said. They told me they came to HRC because no other job would respect them as a trans person, offer them necessary healthcare, or even use their pronouns. For all its missteps, HRC represented to them some amount of respite, and a chance to fight for what was right. “And their actions have taken that away from me and a lot of other people, morally,” they said, “because I’m not going to taint my soul just so that I as an individual queer person can feel more comfortable.

“That’s what they’re saying, in no uncertain terms,” the staffer added. “That the relative safety of queer people in the United States is more important than the lives of an entire people. More important than stopping a genocide. It’s nauseating.”

Even after all this, HRC could still call for a ceasefire and denounce pinkwashing. If it did so, as many people I spoke to noted, other groups would still follow the falling dominoes. The National LGBTQ+ Task Force, for one, called for a ceasefire back in January; that HRC could muster up the courage to do the same is still possible, however remotely. But, Costello told me, any such announcement would have to accompany a sincere acknowledgment and apology for “the trauma they gave not only their staff, but more importantly, to queer Palestinians, their followers, supporters, and members, and queer people as a whole.” For starters, anyway.

The real work of getting free, without exception is still ongoing, and it can’t be accomplished alone. “We will never have queer liberation if we are not together,” Costello reflected, near the end of our interview. “This isn’t hate for HRC as much as it is to ask them to be better for us and for our movement, because we want you to be with us, we want you to be in coalition with all of us, and we just want to fight for queer liberation. And that won’t be possible under colonization.”

Some statements have been edited or condensed for clarity.

If you are able, please consider directly supporting Palestinian families via Operation Olive Branch.

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¹ For transparency, an article I authored for Them.us in October 2023 also used the phrase "humanitarian crisis" to describe the genocide in Gaza. I explained my frustration with that situation here. Since that time, Them has continued to push the boundaries of its parent company's agenda, for which I am thankful.

² I found it interesting that there appears to be no way to find this page, or the main HRC "Campaigns" page, through normal website navigation; if you find your way to it via another path, please let me know. On the "Campaigns" page, it is notably situated in the same row as a link to HRC's Biden/Harris support campaign.

³ By this time, in February 2024, I'm told HRC leadership did begin internally acknowledging protesters at their events. I'm also told Robinson and other leaders supported the protesters' right to assemble, but accused them of antisemitism and homophobia as well, claims that staffers who watched the proceedings deny. Robinson's weekly message mourning Gentili's death later that month did not mention that Gentili had been arrested protesting HRC just a few months before, though she did wish for Gentili to "Rest in Power."