Hi, my name is David courtesy and I am presenting my research on LGBT organizing and the impact of organizational goals and priorities on strategy. My research consisted of a literature review to explore how LGBT organizations strategies were shaped by their goals and priorities. And these organizations include gay shame, the LA LGBT center, the marriage equality movement, the gay liberation front, as well as others. I then applied the knowledge I gained from that research to meeting minutes and other materials of the main lesbian and gay political alliance that had been archived in special collections at the Glickman library. The ML GPA was founded in response to the murder of Charlie Howard, a gay man from Bangor, Maine. This murder, as well as the recent fight to remove same-sex sexual relations from the criminal code. In main, really highlighted for the founding members the exclusion and marginalization of the lesbian, gay, bisexual community. And at that time, as well as centered legislative work as an important way to achieve their goals. And that organization known as E1_l GPA at that time is now known as equality mean the MLL GPAs, goals and priorities can be seen in their original mission statement. Here, D is include a focus on educating the general public, which is also could be called the cisgender heterosexual population of main legislative work, building a strong lesbian, gay, bisexual community, as well as working with other organizations within main and the United States as a whole. So how do you these goals and priorities translate into strategy as well? One of the most obvious strategies is to appeal to the general public. Since their focus on legislative work and raising acceptance for the lesbian, gay, bisexual community. And so this led them to avoid appearing to radical or queer and to try and maintain more mainstreamed. Save Picture of algae b n gay bisexual identity. Other tactics that were taken with education. And this is done in multiple formats through events, newsletters, action and alerts, all sorts of publications that describe the legislation and other actions the ammo GPA was supporting. These tended to focus specifically on legislation or other policy issues, but did not highlight the specific challenges that lesbian, gay, bisexual people were facing. And Maine, they did advocate for acceptance inequality But they didn't bring in the specific experiences or kind of the queer experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual people. And this may also been a strategy to try and curtail some of the opposition they were receiving from the organized anti-gay forces in me. And at this time that we're working very hard to prevent any gains in equality through legislation. Here on the left of this slide, you can see a pink invitation to the ammo GPAs fifth annual meeting and 990s on these meetings occurred every year. They were a key way for the organization to provide connection and community for lesbian, gay, bisexual, while also connecting straight allies with the community and fundraising for the organization through the event. Fi is on the left or right. I'm sorry. You can see action alert on this one focuses on Bill LD 1116, which they described as an act to prevent discrimination, as I mentioned previously. And it holds true for this action layer, is while they keep too vague language about equality, just preventing discrimination. However, they do not describe the discrimination that occurs or any of the specific challenges that queer people may face. Because of that discrimination. They encouraged their members to lobby by attending a hearing, as well as calling or writing to their legislators. And this is a really good example of how they worked really hard on legislative reform and getting them, remembers them fault in that, but did not work to include more marginalized members of the LGBT community. And on that note, we'll now move to a discussion of inclusion and exclusion and how the history and founding of the Amal GPA, as well as their goals and priorities impact that. So here we can see that in 19, 9160% of the MLL GPAs members were women. And 32% of their members on that same year where men. And this is a very interesting statistic that reveals a lot about other things that were happening at the time, as well as the unique context of this organization. So e, of course, shows with lesbian community was very influential in lesbian, gay, bisexual organizing and Maine. And part of the reason for that at this time in particular, is that in 1984, for the aids crisis causing many gained by men to die from complications of aids or were very ill and unable to be as active in activism. And they also, it meant that a lot of women who were very involved in LGBT organizing and activism at the time. This is in contrast to other organizations such as the earlier Gay Liberation Front, which was formed to be inclusive, inclusive of both men and women. However, in practice, I'm women often found that their voices were shut down in the organization and many of them left to form woman centered lesbian and bisexual organizations instead. And finally, we will move on to the exclusion of the transgender community. You may have notice I haven't talked about that community or part of the broader LGBT community much at all. And that's partially because transgender membership was not mentioned in any of the materials that I examined during this research. And in fact, the animal GPA or by that point, equality Maine had had no transgender employees until Jia, Andrew and out trans woman was hired in 2014. And there are a few reasons why this might have been on. One is early on in the organization's history in the 19 eighties and 990s, the transgender community was facing very strong opposition, even more so than Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual on people and receding and as very threatening to society. And so it would have been really difficult for an organization that was trying to appeal to a broad public to include them done being the trans community in their activism and organizing at that time. And this is really important because I can lead that dynamic, can lead to exclusion and, and lack of protections for people that are otherwise part of the same community. And so my general conclusions from this Reacher is the historical context in which organizations are founded help shape their goals and priorities. And that those goals and priorities determine the strategies that the organization employees and who they include in their work and who they exclude from their work. And understanding this dynamic as can clarify why organizations choose some strategies over out berries. Thank you for listening to my presentation.