Cause Commandos to the rescue in Haiti

Each week I get a fair amount of promotional e-mails and press releases from people promoting something or other they think I might write about on this blog. Most times you wonder if the promoters sending those press releases have even seen the blog since the stuff they are promoting clearly doesn't fit within the topics I address (no, I will not write about your latest neon red Valentine's Day dildo). At other times, they are clearly product placement pitches which makes you wonder why the company simply doesn't take an ad on the blog (no, I'm certainly not going to write about the latest hair product being used by Eva Longoria). And then, there's those few promotional e-mails that actually do fit in with the blog, some of which also go by the side particularly if I haven't been blogging consistently during a period of time.

And then, well, your mouth just drops when you get something like this.

Meet Cause Commandos! From the press release:

When disaster struck the impoverished island nation of Haiti, it also struck close to the hearts of boyfriends Luke Montgomery and Nate Gudias. Having lived in Haiti and founded an AIDS orphanage in the coastal town of Jacmel, Montgomery feared the worst when no word was received from the orphanage. Within 48 hours the couple raised over $10,000 from family and friends in the gay community and were on a plane bound for the Dominican Republic which borders Haiti. When news reached them that children in the AIDS orphanage were unhurt but that the local hospital had collapsed on its patients the couple says they were transformed into "cause commandos" with a mission to get medicine and medical supplies to survivors.

Now, a month after the catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the island nation, Montgomery and Guidas have decided to expand their personal mission and go public with their efforts through the launch of causecommandos.com and a series of YouTube clips showing their work. Their goal? To rally support from the LGBT community for Haitian relief causes and to allow site visitors to "directly buy medicine, food & tents".

"We're on a mission to help as many people as we can with medicine, food and tents for shelter. We're buying the supplies across the border in the Dominican Republic and running them by boat into the parts of Haiti that aid is still slow to get to. When a country is as poor as Haiti was before the quake, even the biggest relief effort is not enough. So we're stepping up to the plate and hoping that the gay community can join us," says Montgomery.

Their efforts are not the first time that gays in the United States have stepped up for Haiti. The Red Cross launched an LGBT Haiti Relief Fund that has raised more than $150,000; a small LGBT foundation based in San Francisco with previous work in Haiti called the Rainbow World Fund also launched one of the most immediate LGBT-specific responses to the earthquake; and the good men of Onyx, a "brotherhood of Men of Color in the Leather lifestyle" raised $1,200 for Haiti at a fundraising party. Olivia, Atlantis and RSVP, the leading travel cruise ship companies in the LGBT community, also called for the LGBT community to donate money in collaboration with the Red Cross. But I was first taken aback and then actually amused by the "Amazing Race" feel of Cause Commandos site and video.

I mean, my first reaction was actually that it trivialized the suffering going on in Haiti by adopting some of the 'reality show' elements in promoting assistance for Haiti and featuring yourself as the lead super-heros in the midst of all of it. But then those feelings actually subsided - I do tend to criticize everything - and began to see it for what it was. Two guys with a personal past commitment to Haiti who actually lived there before the earthquake using the internet to call others to do good. The "give now" button on their site takes you to their Paypal account so I can't voucher for how donations might be accounted for. But I also don't see any reason to think that the guys are anything but genuine in their intention. They do say that 100% of proceeds will go towards helping people in Haiti. And, looking again at the video, I actually have come around to think it's a pretty smart idea to engage certain segment of the LGBT community.

An aside: Something else caught my attention. At the bottom of the release there is also a little blurb that reads "Luke Montgomery is a former AIDS and gay rights activist best known for his highly-publicised interruption of President Clinton's 1993 World AIDS Day speech and legal name change to 'Luke Sissyfag' in the 1990's."

Yup. Luke Montgomery is Luke Sissyfag reborn. In 1995, Montgomery told The Advocate "I wish people would forget about the person named Luke Sissyfag and move on, I have. It's not part of me anymore".

It would be tough to outrun that past so I guess Montgomery has learned to live with it. He probably knows that putting that blurb there will probably get Cause Commandos more attention. For those of you who have no idea who Sissyfag is, I won't bore you with details. Let's say he was incredibly polarizing and, in some ways, Montgomery might still be. But last year I was purging my files, news clippings, and old magazines, and ran into a couple of articles I had saved about him. I'd actually nearly forgotten about him but I was shocked by the charge I felt in looking at clippings from that time. Whether he likes it or not today, he was a shock to the system, and I might have disagreed with a few of the things he did and said. I was equally shocked when blogger and friend Michael Petrelis ran this post in May of last year.

It's fascinating to me to see a man who was such a public figure go into media hibernation and emerge years later as a different person. In that sense, good bye Luke Sissyfag, welcome back Luke Montgomery.

For more information:

• Cause Commandos official web page here
• Cause Commandos YouTube page here
• Cause Commandos Twitter feed here

Related:

• Luke Sissyfag's Haitian Relief Effort For Quake Survivors Needs Funds (Michael Petrelis)
• Boyfriends Luke Montgomery & Nate Gudias are on a 2-man mission to rescue Haiti (Queerty)
• Gay Commandos lend aid in Haiti (The Advocate)
• 'Cause Commando' couple comes to rescue in rural Haiti (The Huffington Post)
• Gays to the rescue: Same-sex couple run emergency supplies to survivors in Haiti (Steve Rothhaus / Miami Herald)
  

NN09: President Bill Clinton on 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' and the 'Defense of Marriage Act'

Photo by Andrés Duque. Additional photos here.

I am currently attending the 2009 Netroots Nation conference and the highlight might have happened tonight, on opening night, at the opening day plenary. The key note speaker was former US President Bill Clinton who I had never personally seen speaking publicly and gave an impassioned speech about politics,the Obama administration, the health care debate and the opportunity for bloggers and online activists to create a progressive future that may well last for the next forty years, should Obama win the health care debate. U-Stream has the whole speech online here (it begins at the 1:37:46 mark).

Skip forward to the 1:59:00 mark, though, and you will hear what happened when DC-based gay blogger Lane Hudson stood up and interrupted the President's speech. Here is my transcript of the question he posed and the President's answer, to the best of my listening skills, at this late hour. I've based it on the U-Stream video feed as well as a video captured at the same event by Jeremy Hooper and posted on his blog tonight at his blog, Good as You.

Lane Hudson: Mr. President, will you call for a repeal of DOMA and “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” right now? Please...

President Clinton: Hey, you know, you ought to go to one of those congressional health care meetings. You did really well there. I’ll be glad to talk about that. If you will… If you will sit down and let me talk, I’ll be glad to discuss it. But if you stand up and scream I won’t be able to talk. But the other guys would love to have ya. I wanna talk a little about that too.

But anyway, so, here we are in a different world. Now, it’s not like the 1990’s. You wanna talk about ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. You couldn’t deliver me any support in the Congress and they voted by a veto-proof majority in both houses against my attempt to let gays serve in the military and the media supported them. They raised all kinds of devilment. And all most of you did was to attack me instead of getting some support in the congress. Now, that’s the truth.

Secondly – it’s true! – You know, you may have noticed that presidents aren’t dictators. They voted - they were about to vote for the old policy – by margins exceeding 80% in the House and exceeding 70% in the Senate. The gave test votes out there to send me a message that they were going to reverse any attempt I made by executive order to force them to accept gays into the military. And let me remind you that the public opinion is now more strongly in our favor than it was sixteen years ago and I have continued supporting it. That John Shalikashvili, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under me, was against “Don’t A..” – was against letting gays serve – is now in favor of it. This is a different world. That’s the point I’m trying to make.

Let me also say something that never got sufficient publicity at the time. When General Colin Powell came up with this ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ it was defined while he was Chairman much differently than it was implemented. He said that, if you will accept this, here is what we’ll do. We will not pursue anyone, any military members out of uniform will be free to march in gay rights parades, go to gay bars, go to political meetings, whatever mailings they get, whatever they do in their private lives, none of this will be a basis for dismissal. It all turned out to be a fraud because of the enormous reaction against it among the middle level officers and down after it was promulgated and Colin was gone. So nobody regrets how this was implemented even more… anymore than I do. But the congress also put that into law by a veto-proof majority and many of your friends voted for that, believing the explanation about how it would be eliminated. So, I hated what happened. I regret it. But I didn’t have, I didn’t think at the time, any choice if I wanted any progress to be made at all. Look, I think it’s ridiculous. Can you believe they spent – what did they spend? - 150,000 dollars to get rid of a valuable Arabic speaker recently?

And, you know, the thing that changed me forever on ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ was when I learned that 130 gay service people were allowed to serve and risk their lives in the 1st Gulf War and all their commanders knew they were gay, they let them go and risk their lives ‘cause they needed them, and then as soon as the 1st Gulf War was over, they kicked them out. That’s all I needed to know, that’s all anybody needs to know, to know that this policy should be changed.

Now, while we’re at it, let me say one thing about DOMA, since you… The reason I signed DOMA was, and I said when I signed it, that I thought the question of whether gays should marry should be left out to states and the religious organizations, and if any church or other religious body wanted to recognize gay marriage they ought to. We were attempting at the time, in a very reactionary congress, to head off an attempt to send a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the states. And if you look at the eleven referendum much later in 2004, in the election, which the Republicans put on the ballot, to try to get the base vote for President Bush up, I think it’s obvious that something had to be done to try to keep the Republican congress presenting that. The President doesn’t even get to veto that. It’s the Congress can refer constitutional amendments to the states. I didn’t like signing DOMA, and I certainly didn’t like the constraints it would put on benefits, and I’ve done everything I’ve could, and I am proud to say that the State Department was the first federal department to restore benefits to gay partners in the Obama administration, and I think we are going forward in the right direction now for federal employees, and I don’t like that eith… I don’t like the DOMA.

But actually all these things illustrate the point I was trying to make. America has rapidly moved to a different place to a lot of these issues and so what we have to decide is what we are going to do about it.

Update: Over at FireDogLake, Lane Hudson has written a post titled "Why I interrupted Bill Clinton's speech at Netroots Nation". FireDogLake also provides the following video...

Noticed: Missing at Bill Clinton blogger reception in Harlem

A secret: Say whatever you say but I rarely if ever check The Huffington Post, Daily Koss, InstaPundit or any of those top political blogs (ok, I confess, I do check on Andrew Sullivan's blog from time to time). But when The Republic of T. writes about this and I get a call from California from a certain Miss Wild Thing to urge me to read this Pam Spaulding blog post, then there's some sort of weird synergy at play. Go to New York's own Daily Gotham and you also get this in which Liza Sabater writes:

These are the 20 liberal bloggers that met with Bill Clinton in Harlem [on Tuesday]. As you can see, not one of them is black or latino.

There is an argument to be made that bloggers might have been chosen based on popularity and alliegance to the Clintons and, as gay blogger John Aravosis says in his AmericaBlog site, (the source of the photo above), "these kind of get togethers are far more interesting on a personal than a substantive level" but for a meeting held in Harlem, the over-sight is a pretty glaring one.

Further thoughts by Pam Spaulding here, Terrance here (which provides additional information on people of color bloggers that were invited but were either not available of did not accept the invitation).