From our Founder & CEO, Todd Sears.
For me, Pride is not just a time to celebrate, but it’s a time a reflect—I’ve often said it’s like New Year’s for the LGBTQ+ community. What’s happened in the last year, and what do we need to do in the year to come. And this Pride I’ve been reflecting a lot on one of my mentors, the incomparable Larry Kramer, and what he’d say to me about the world today. I only knew Larry for the last ten years of his life, but in that short time, I learned so much from him. You’d think that given how different our styles of activism are (he favored “die-ins” in the #nyc streets and covering Jesse Helm’s entire house with an inflatable condom, and I try to get CEOs and companies to use economic power to drive change), that we wouldn’t see eye to eye on much. But instead, he helped me understand that creating social change requires activists of all stripes and approaches, from loud protestors on the outside to strategic advocates on the inside. And to prove it, he agreed to speak at my @outleadership #OutNEXT emerging leader conference (the LAST place you’d assume to find Larry Kramer was on an investment bank’s stage surrounded by 220 young corporate leaders). And I’ll be forever grateful that he agreed, because those next gen #LGBTQ leaders got to hear from a Legend. I asked my buddy Kate Kendall to interview him, and the one question I asked her to ask him was, “Does it bother you that the vast majority of these young leaders may not know who you are and what you did for them?” And Larry had the most poignant (and Larry-like) answer. He said, “Todd, we fought for our health and our community so that they could just live their lives. The greatest gift that our generation can give to them is to not pass along our trauma, and to absorb it for them.” Larry died just ten months later. Our community owes leaders like Larry (and Urvashi Vaid, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and countless others who are no longer with us) an enormous debt of gratitude for the world we now inhabit. And what would Larry say to me today? “Stop wasting time writing social media posts, you’ve got work to do!” I can literally hear him. And as usual, he’s right. #Pride #moreworktodo Out Leadership