(LifeSiteNews) — Eric Hoffer once wrote that “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This is not just true for “great causes” – it also applies to the LGBT industry, which has been at war with the West’s founding values for over a half-century.
The first wave of homosexual activists were street fighters (lionized for their brawls outside a mafia-run bar called the Stonewall Inn); the second wave were professionals and marketing strategists; now, the industry is run by fat cats who wield unprecedented cultural power pulling in massive salaries by claiming that things are worse for LGBT-identifying people than ever.
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Exhibit A is Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), one of the two most influential LGBT advocacy groups in America (the other is the Human Rights Campaign). GLAAD is a charity. The New York Times reviewed expense reports, receipts, tax filings, and other financial documents from January 2022 to June 2023 and discovered that the 52-year-old Ellis has been milking the movement for all that she’s worth – which turns out to be quite a lot. For starters, she flies first class, uses exorbitantly expensive car rental services, and likes to stay at luxury hotels like the Waldorf Astoria.
According to the Daily Mail, “Ellis reportedly expensed a summer rental on Cape Cod and stayed at the Tivoli Lodge, a seven-bedroom chalet in the Swiss Alps with employees.” The chalet, which she rented to attend the World Economic Forum, cost just shy of $500,000 a week – but she still managed to squeeze in a ski day, which she also expensed. The car services cost another $15,000.
Ellis turns out to be talented at expensing her preference for luxury, reimbursing more than thirty first-class flights in only 18 months. During one trip, where she spoke at a conference, GLAAD paid $13,000 for her flight, car, and room at the Waldorf. Her actual speaking fee wasn’t reported.
GLAAD has an annual budget of $30 million and pays Ellis a salary somewhere in the “high six or low seven figures.” These expenses – such as more than $60,000 on flights and hotels for Ellis and one other GLAAD employee to attend the Cannes film festival – are on top of that. According to the Mail:
According to a company policy, GLAAD pushes employees to be ‘cost conscious,’ saying hotel costs should not exceed $350 a night. In 2022, her contract was up for renegotiation, with board members reportedly seeing her as indispensable and feared she might leave for a corporate job. The board agreed to a base salary of $441,000 with a five percent increase each year through the end of her contract in 2027, according to documents seen by the Times. This change in contract granted her a $150,000 signing bonus, with payments of up to $300,000 tied to GLAAD’s fund-raising. There was also an annual bonus of up to 40 percent of her salary agreed, as well as a $225,000 farewell bonus that she will collect in 2027. Alongside her salary, Ellis’s contract includes a variety of items including airline tickets for her wife and two children to accompany her on trips four times a year. Among those perks is a $25,000 annual allowance for Ellis to rent a home in Provincetown, the Cape Cod community she has vacationed at with her family. The new contract has put Ellis on track to receive anywhere from about $700,000 to $1.3 million a year… Her contract also provided her with up to $20,000 to renovate her home office, and she spent $18,000 to overhaul the top floor of her $1.9m Long Island home.
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The laundry list goes on and on – so long, in fact, that even the New York Times thought it merited investigation. The press generally ignores the grifting of groups claiming to combat a “trans genocide” and the rise of fascism, but legal experts told the Grey Lady that the astronomical financial perks Ellis is raking in were likely inappropriate for a non-profit with only 60 employees and “are more commonplace at a for-profit company, with non-profits being exempt from federal and state taxes.”
In fact, there may be legal issues with GLAAD’s spending – they didn’t declare the cash spent on Ellis’s home renovation, and Ellis likely didn’t pay taxes on it. As one charity lawyer delicately told the Times: “It appears she may have fallen into the trap of excess.”
Other experts concurred in scathing terms, with David Samuels of Perlman & Perlman noting that first-class flights, high-priced car rentals, and luxury hotels are considered taboo at non-profits. But GLAAD isn’t just any non-profit – the groups that make up the activist engine of the sexual revolution have become cultural powerbrokers, with progressive politicians, entertainers, and other elites desperately seeking their endorsement and their approval.
The LGBT industry is an activist industry – but they are pushing a top-down revolution, and that means red carpet events, not street marches. That is all in in the past now, which is why GLAAD’s board noted that they are standing behind their loaded lesbian leader 100 percent.
Successful revolutionaries always end up rich. Sarah Kate Ellis is no exception.
