A Conversation with

Activist, author and athlete Rodger McFarlane was among the first to join the fight against HIV/AIDS, as a founding member of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (of which he was later executive director) and ACT UP. He also ran Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, helped build Bailey House and received a special Tony award for mobilizing the national theater community.

Author of three books (most notably The Complete Bedside Companion: No-Nonsense Advice on Caring for the Seriously Ill), McFarlane also is a gifted athlete. He characterizes the Eco Challenge and triathlons as "recreation" compared with some of his other pursuits, such as seven over-ice expeditions to the North Pole. Having also served as a nuclear reactor operator on a fast-attack submarine, he was certainly well prepared to meet the myriad challenges of being a full-time grantmaker.

McFarlane became the third executive director of the Denver-based Gill Foundation in March. Here's what he shared with FN&C regarding diversity, his experiences as a grantmaker and grantseeker, the tough transition from New York City to the mountains of Colorado and the road ahead for the foundation.

You became a grantmaker after you had worked with nonprofits for a long time. How are you finding it on the other side of the table?

It's a fundraiser's revenge, but it's actually not entirely new to me. I led the Broadway Cares grants review committee, so I had several years experience giving away a lot of money nationally. Many major events I worked on in New York also were distributed pots. I also had done a lot of National Institutes of Health peer reviews—really treacherous, highly competitive, academic grantmaking. Also, when Governor Cuomo made his first appropriations for AIDS back in about 1983, I chaired the group that divvied up that pie and nearly got murdered by my own colleagues.

So I imagined I was coming to a very, very cushy job at the Gill Foundation, but I'm working my butt off. It's a huge responsibility. First of all, it's Solomonesque. I can't make anybody happy. No matter what I do, I'm offending somebody who's a friend of mine and whose work I appreciate. And the second thing is the very delicate diplomatic aspect of it. I am a leader in this social movement, and I take that leadership very seriously and have earned it with a track record as opposed to merely my strong opinions. But you have to tread very delicately as a funder, because people can feel like you're telling them what to do.

So I have the street cred that few of my grantees have. But when you're holding the checkbook, you just become a big bully in the grantees' eyes. All of a sudden, instead of being their colleague for the last 25 years, I'm lumped into that category of just another rich white man.

It's probably not a position you ever imagined yourself being in.

I never imagined myself being on the receiving end of that big, wide paintbrush. It's a very serious responsibility. We're rationing resources, and I feel like it's wartime, particularly on lesbian and gay civil rights issues. We're really being used by the far right—manipulated politically—so cynically this year. Gill is at the forefront of that battle, and we can't afford to misstep.

This has been a big year in terms of the marriage issue coming to the forefront.

That's right. And we were one of the principals of all of that, the largest funder. It's historic. I walked into the job and then, [San Francisco Mayor] Gavin Newsom shows up at the courthouse. I thought, "That's not in my strategic plan. We didn't cover that in the interview."

I think all thoughtful Americans feel like this is a critical era, the next few years. Democracy faces some very serious challenges. In many ways, the foundation world is the only realm, the only force, that could stand immune to much of that. Funders can draw a line in the sand and push back and fight, because we're somewhat insulated from that cynical manipulation. But I also don't know that we have enough money or that we spend what we do have wisely enough.

All those things that have tormented foundation officers long before I arrived suddenly take on very serious implications with me. I used to say, "Oh, stupid foundation officers—if they would just pick up the newspaper, it would be obvious what they needed to do."

Is the role of grantee or grantmaker more difficult?

Well, I'm a little new here. In the field, only results matter. But here, process really matters, because it requires the cooperation of other people who don't have to play with you. Other people with plenty of money. At the street level, you don't have any choice about whether you're going to fight together or not. But here, we have a choice, so it requires a great deal more sophistication and finesse than I ever imagined.

Are foundations doing enough to support equality?

This has been a most stunning year in the history of our movement. It was the progressive family foundations who stepped forward on marriage, side-byside with gay people, who made those lawsuits and that legislative defense possible. Most significantly, Columbia, Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr., Tides, Wellspring, Overbrook, OSI—George Soros's people—those people were magnificent in the face of this onslaught.

On the other hand, when I look at foundations across the board, I think it's less than one-tenth of one percent of the funding from foundations going to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identified things, even in 2004. It is miniscule even among our progressive friends, even for uncontroversial things. I realize marriage is controversial, but we're not funding safe schools, even. There's lots of room for improvement and growth. Progressive foundations aren't poor; we're just not really efficient, historically. We're results-oriented, but you know what we measure? Some spend 40 percent measuring program outcomes instead of movement outcomes.

The myth is that funding something is going to fix it. At the Council's annual conference last year, somebody stood up and said, "You know, we're working on racism. We're not going to finish."

That's what I keep telling my boss, because he's a superb engineer and I'm trained as an engineer. We just instinctively believe that you write a strategic plan, then you bring the resources to bear on it, and you create social change. What an adorable sentiment.

There's a reason why billions will die of HIV, a disease that was allowed to become a global genocide of historic proportions, strictly because of homophobia and racism. And we've barely even started talking about adoption, equal employment rights, marriage, basic things like that.

Coming from the field I realize that the real trick is recognizing an historic opportunity and having both the courage and the flexibility to respond.

You were a founding member and executive director of Gay Men's Health Crisis. Do you feel like the climate has changed since the early days of the crisis?

I have to tell you, this year's been very reminiscent of the early '80s. Back then, people could get on TV and say just the most outrageous things, and America would swallow it. They would say hateful, evil things, about gay people, like Jerry Falwell saying AIDS is God's visitation on homosexuality. And no one—not the clergy, the government, the newspapers—took issue with that, including the Council on Foundations. No one disagreed with that, said a word, issued a press release, changed an employment policy for the first several years.

And this past year I watched Rick Santorum [R-PA] comparing homosexual sex to bestiality. Anyway, they say this as though it is legitimate discourse, and it passes in Washington and on every television show I turn on. They have completely distracted America from a war and the hopeless erosion of the middle-class dream simply by gaybashing. America has remained completely silent. You haven't seen the churches or progressive foundations come to our defense. You've seen very few pundits speak up. You haven't seen any mass outrage, marching, nothing.

Marriage was a carefully chosen wedge issue, because they know they can get away with it. So, there's much to be done. I am even more shocked at the silence and the inaction from my progressive friends. Those of us in these jobs are expected to hold ourselves to a somewhat higher standard. All my colleagues who are members of the Council on Foundations, they know better and they have money.

Anyway, I don't want to sound like I'm beating up on them because some people did step forward, like I said, on the marriage issue. I think the progressive, straight family foundations outnumbered us two-to-one funding those lawsuits and all that community organizing. I wanted to kiss them.

Tell me more about being a founding member of ACT UP and how activism has changed over this time span.

Well, what I do bring to this job is knowing the difference between what can be accomplished through attempts at social engineering and real civic engagement. I can bring a practical, field-tested strategy. We can create all sorts of tools and forums for our grantees that will make them far more effective, starting with human relationships. I know these executive directors and I know these boards. And they know me and we trust each other—we all earned that. We can be a lot more tactical together than if there were some stranger issuing grant guidelines from afar and changing them every six months, then demanding that grantees evaluate their programs in the first year.

No one can say that you don't know what they're dealing with.

And that works both ways. I have said to a few people who've tried to argue need to me, "I just came back from a refugee camp in Africa where 80,000 people are going to die right there."

I don't mean to sound jaded, but you can't argue just need or urgency with me. You have to argue tactical effectiveness. I'm not that grandiose anymore. There's going to be far more suffering and injustice than I can mitigate in this lifetime, so I'm going to focus on where I can be most effective.

What would you say about the current state of the fight against AIDS?

I'm despondent. It's everything that we predicted in the early '80s, and everyone accused us then of being hyperbolic or hysterical that billions of people were going to die. That it was going to be one of—if not—the greatest biological tragedies in human history. All of those things that [writer and AIDS activist] Larry Kramer and [researcher and advocate] Mathilde Krim said back in '81, '82, '83, have already come true. And it's just going to get worse. We could have prevented it. We could have had these drugs earlier, and we could have these drugs in more bodies. We could easily afford that. These people have been allowed to die.

How does your firsthand experience as a caregiver for people who are critically ill inform your grantmaking?

You've stumped me. I don't feel like I've called on a lot of that in grantmaking. I have an organic understanding of what it means to have legal recognition of your family. I instinctively understand—even though I don't have children—why someone needs legal protection of the custody of their own children and medical decisionmaking. It baffles me that other Americans don't see those as just fundamental democratic principles or how anyone could conceive of a constitutional amendment to forbid equal protection of an entire class.

But the caregiver in me, what that really taught me was stamina. No matter how bad it hurts, it's worse for them than it is for me. And that serves me here. I look at our grantees and the people they serve, and I am very much aware of my privilege and my responsibility. We've got all the tools here that you could dream of to fight with.

Speaking of stamina, what did competing as a triathlete teach you?

The same thing—stamina. You go on when you can't remember why you're there. You go on when you think you can't go on, because you really don't have any other choice. And then when you get there, you realize you are much stronger than you ever imagined. Preparation and diligence and keeping your eye on the prize year after year after year, all the training and obsession and precision. In the dark of night, when you're terrified out of your mind, lost, dehydrated and sleep-deprived, you just put one foot in front of the next. Some people drink. Some people avoid. Some people go to cocktail parties and tsk-tsk the state of America instead of actually involving themselves civically. In me, it's always the long-distance runner.

This is a 50-year fight. When things seem as hopeless, overwhelming, terrifying, heartbreaking as they do with AIDS or as scary as things are politically now, I won't blink first. I'll just keep grinding away. Go ahead and insult me. Go ahead and make every bad law and appoint every bad judge you want. And 50 years from now, we'll still be coming at you.

Did your Navy experiences have a formative influence on your life?

It did. But I've got to tell you, it's not just the Navy. I was a Navy nuke, which is a different breed. I ran the propulsion plant, the nuclear reactor, on a fastattack submarine up under the North Pole for six months at a time. You can read about it in Blind Man's Bluff now— those missions have been declassified. We were doing espionage, basically.

I learned that when you are 1,000 feet under the water, straddling a nuclear reactor with a polar ice cap over you and a Soviet sub hunter chasing you, knowing one's stuff really matters. On our boats, if everybody didn't execute their jobs by the book every time, we knew that the last seaman in some bilge could kill us all by opening the wrong valve at the wrong time.

We all were from different cultures, different classes. We were all sorts of Americans trapped in a little tube, 100 men, underwater for six months at a time in mortal danger. You did your job, and you did it perfectly every time, because that's what the stakes demanded. That spoiled me.

The Navy taught me two things. First, absolute professionalism. It does not matter what I think about you or what you think about me. You do your job and I do mine and we each accept responsibility for how that impacts other people. Most people do not approach their jobs that way. This is a very wealthy nation, and most of us have no idea how lucky, even spoiled, we are.

The second lesson was simply the gay thing. I was judged by my shipmates strictly on one criteria: They didn't want anybody else on the planet touching that reactor. Those men trusted me with their lives, not because I was gay or straight, but because I was one of the most reliable reactor operators under fire they had ever seen. Even in that macho military world, I was judged on the content of my character. And I loved them for that. Frankly, I was shocked when I came out of the military to find out that the civilian world didn't operate that way as a rule.

I grew up on a farm. I had a gay brother. Our parents were fantastic, encouraging us to do anything. My brother and I grew up thinking we were special, when most gay kids get beaten up and called sissy and faggot. We just basically stomped anybody who got in our way.

Well, it probably helped that you're 6'6".

That's right. We all were so huge. We ran faster and jumped higher and made better grades. And I could gut a deer more neatly than most of the men in Alabama. So I didn't grow up with that trauma of being gay. Obviously, it didn't slow me down. Then that was reinforced in the Navy, where I was valued not on who I was but how I performed. When I moved to New York, I was a little bit surprised when people thought that they could treat me badly simply because of who I was.

What year did you move to New York?

I was honorably discharged from the Navy in 1978 and went to New York later that year. And I was there until I moved here.

So how are you finding Colorado?

When I interviewed here, the board was very concerned about the culture clash. And I kept dismissing it—I didn't know what they meant. What are you so worried about in Colorado that I don't know? I grew up in Alabama. I can drive a stick shift. I'm an expert in several firearms. And I kept steering the conversation back to movement strategies and grants management.

You know what the toughest part of my job has been? Not confronting the vast right-wing conspiracy head on. Not the president's call for a constitutional amendment basically disallowing a thousand rights in perpetuity for me and millions of our people. But just living in Colorado, because the people here are so goddamn nice, and they don't curse. I don't blend.

I love Colorado. I don't regret moving here. They have delivered big time. I adore our mayor. I adore my boss. I adore my team. But boy, is it different. And boy, do I not fit in. Everyone in this town has gone far out of their way to help me, which is probably why I haven't crashed yet or terminally damaged any relationship. They've granted me an extended honeymoon.

But the sense of high-stakes urgency is not the same. Part of it's being disconnected from the front lines. Other directors tell me this world operates on "foundation time." In New York, there's the intense political scene, the activist scene and the epic AIDS scene, not to mention Broadway, publishing and athletic competition. I am just very accustomed to relentless hustle. I don't have a laid-back mode.

It's different in a smaller pond. Tell me a little more about the TurnOut campaign.

DDB Bass and Howes [an issue-based ad agency in DC] had created these terrific ads that had won a Clio and a Cannes Lion. So, I said, "There's this moveable middle you say I can talk to, but I've never seen anyone do it well. Let's retool these ads. Change the tag lines. Change the market. Change the ad buys. Go talk to college-educated women under fifty, who, from all the research we've done and everyone else has done, are the straight people who are most likely to understand our issues."

So we ran those ads in four markets—Lansing, Flint, Denver and Tampa Bay. We did pre- and post-polling there and also polled in Milwaukee to have a control group that matched them demographically. I thought I was going to disabuse everyone of the notion of paid advertising once and for all, in a rigorous, methodical way. My impression was, "If I could tell people what to think, don't you think the Republicans and Democrats would be paying Madison Avenue $100 million a year to do that?"

Well, guess what? Our preliminary ads ran, and those marketplaces shifted significantly, undeniably—which just threw my argument back in my face. So now we're talking about messaging tactically. We chose those marketplaces because there was nothing specifically gay going on there. There wasn't a candidate who was running against us or a marriage referendum, so the experiment would be pure. So now you've got Washington, Wisconsin, Maine and Texas battleground states coming up next year. And on marriage alone, you've got California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey and more to come in the next two to three years. I'm not lobbying for a candidate or a specific piece of legislation. I'm just raising awareness among our constituencies like any thoughtful foundation should.

So you've been at the helm about six months now. What are the biggest challenges so far?

Well, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights movement is greatly in disarray, particularly financially. And not just the LGBT movement, but many pieces of the progressive movement are not funded to scale. No strategic vision is guiding all those various funding streams. Not that we would presume to lead the movement, but we can arrive at consensus on a number of pressing issues, for example, whether and how hard to fight, marriage and adoption—state by state—and what role we play in other progressive movements.

We've examined our operating plan and budget. We're going to be giving large grants, general operating grants, to our established national grantees in multiyear contracts, so that we spend our grants evaluation time and effort on newcomers and around the margins with groups who need more help.

And we're not talking about clichéd technical assistance and capacity building, which in the foundation world usually means, "I'm going to send you to one day of training and give you less money next year." We're doing real capacity building with several of our grantees, not going near their mission or their identity. Let me put the technology in your office. Let me put the financial controls in your office. Use my lawyers. Use my communications firm. Use my mail house. Now go be what you can be. Instead of me issuing guidelines in Denver to organizations five states away or, for example, telling the National Black Justice Coalition in Washington, DC, what we're going to pay them to do this year, why don't we just pay the rent and utilities for the next few months and [tell them], "you go be the National Black Justice Coalition?"

We're also working very closely with our progressive friends who are wrestling with race, gender, labor, choice, the environment and gun control, realizing that we have many of the same enemies and the same end goals. A lot of lip service has been paid to coalition building over the years, but there are very few working examples. I can cite from experience a couple of good ones, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, so I know it can be done. My priorities are calling up the progressive movement and making it far more strategic, results-oriented and evidence-based.

The far right funders align with people with whom they are ideologically in agreement. They do not mess with any grantee's mission or their identity. They do not issue program guidelines. They fund large general operating grants in multiyear contracts, even decades at a time. I'm not going to cut off the ACLU or the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force. I'm not going to "wean" them off our funding. We're going to hand them a big check, not tell them specifically what to do with it, then ask them what else we can do to help.

So, you're still doing a lot of unrestricted grantmaking?

To our national partners, the people we have worked with most every year since our existence who are leading the field. Gill won't dictate funding priorities to them. We're asking our colleagues, "What is important to get done this year, and how can we help make that happen?" And the way you do that most often is writing a check to reliable folks and getting out of their way. Our job is to get all the resources into the field needed to win this fight.

How do you feel sexual orientation is working as a diversity component?

Just the word diversity strikes me as the euphemism of the season. You mean not white, right?

Not male and white. Foundations focused on diversity a number of years ago.

I remember even 20 years ago, every foundation officer I met literally was a white, straight man in his 60s or 70s from Harvard or Yale. I went to my first Council on Foundations meeting this spring, and I was knocked out. It seemed like half of the room was queer and the other half was women—and almost 25 percent of the room was colorful. I'm like, "What did they do with the old men's bodies?"

There were still a few of the best of them up on the panels here and there, I noticed, but it wasn't how I perceived the foundation world. The queers and the girls have really moved up, haven't they? Is that just a visual thing? Or is that actually happening?

That's definitely been a trend, but there still aren't very many people of color in higher level positions.

That's right, on boards or at the top levels of management. And I'm a white guy, but I've got the gay perspective going. In fairness to [foundation president and founder] Tim Gill, two women [Claudia French and Katherine Pease] had this job before I did. Plus, the progressive movement is aging. Whatever started in the 1960s and 1970s in earnest, that our generation was introduced to by the old lefties of the 1930s—well, we're in our 40s and 50s now, and women and people of color and queers are becoming the CEOs of foundations.

We have the track records and relationships. We're just now old enough to contend for those jobs, so we shouldn't be surprised that a few people who've distinguished themselves are finally in those jobs. They deserve them.

Photographs by Ray Ng