Abstract
In Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics, Myrl Beam offers a trenchant critique of the dominance of nonprofit organizations as a structure to organize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and politics. Drawing on rich ethnographic and archival data and documenting how drives for funding align with the relatively conservative politics of predominantly wealthy cis-gendered white gay men, Beam explores the “animating paradox” of the book: that “the nonprofit structure actually entrenches the very inequalities that it purports to ameliorate” (p. 7). Beam uses this contradiction to explore the emotional labor people exert working within these nonprofit organizations and how, in so doing, these people can become complicit in forms of politics that they challenge, contest, and even detest.
The arguments in the book are firmly located within both queer theory and the growing sociological and policy critique of nonprofits. The queer perspective is used to understand LGBT politics and capture the “affective turn” (p. 8), while the critique of nonprofits provides the broader sociological context in which the actors and organizations are situated. In the first substantive chapter, Beam provides a strong critique of how charity has been used in the United States to individualize social problems and avoid progressive social action. Charting the “nonprofitization” first of U.S. social movements, and then the LGBT movement specifically, Beam argues that this process has resulted in mainstream “homonormative equality politics” (p. 40) that privileges the politics of wealthy white gay men at the expense of the most marginalized and at-risk in the queer community.
Structuring the book through four case studies of nonprofits in Chicago and Minneapolis, Beam embraces the turn to emotions and affect to examine how these organizations generate complex feelings and challenging lived experiences for workers and users of these nonprofits. The notions of compassion, community, and capital are foregrounded to analyze the impact of the nonprofit structure on emotion and experience. The critique of compassion in Chapter Two is particularly powerful, highlighting how the compassion narrative demands people be in crisis with perverse results: Beam discusses the difficulty uninsured transgender clients had in accessing health care unless they were HIV-positive, only being able to access the care and services that would reduce their risk once they had already contracted HIV. Beam also critiques the way nonprofits frame community within this work, claiming to be centers of “community” but reinscribing classed and racialized boundaries. These nonprofits’ framing of “community” excludes particular groups: “gangbangers,” “troublemakers,” and “sex-trafficked victims.” For Beam, in their quest to seek funding, the nonprofits construct binaries of deserving and undeserving victims of sexual norms and, in so doing, corrupt the notion of community that has been central to much of queer politics.
The final chapter focuses on recent trans politics and movements and is a moving discussion of the work of the Trans Youth Support Network (TYSN) in Minneapolis. The chapter charts the difficulties faced by an organization led by the young people it seeks to help in the broader context of the neoliberal, nonprofit funding model. As with the other chapters, Beam develops a clear argument about how racialization and classism are exacerbated by the nonprofit structure and the focus on financial sustainability. Beam argues that activists must invest less in nonprofits and instead refocus on social movements and activism that are not beholden to funding drives and respectability politics.
Beam uses queer concepts skillfully throughout the book, presenting them accessibly while still foregrounding the rich qualitative data. Yet the book is sometimes constrained by its queer theoretical orientation. Many of the issues that Beam emphasizes—particularly on the central theme of charities seeking financial security at the expense of their fundamental goals and ethos—have been found across the charity sphere. While this is recognized, the queer focus sometimes makes it harder to broaden these powerful critiques beyond LGBT politics. Perhaps this is intentional, emphasizing just how antithetical the corporatization of LGBT politics is to some of the key aims of the queer movement. But still, the theoretical framework means that broader sociological debates about the role of nonprofits in community life feel somewhat marginalized.
The queer framing also means that some issues were treated as fact where more debate could have been productive: for example, it was presumed that the reader would agree that assimilationist politics were inherently flawed and that the pursuit of equal marriage was conservative and misguided. Given the recent evidence that equal marriage laws have resulted in a further improvement in attitudes toward sexual minorities, discussion of when and how more assimilationist approaches might have value would have added further nuance to this sophisticated book.
These critiques should not distract from the importance of Gay, Inc. or its contribution to understanding the role of LGBT charities in contemporary society and the damaging influence of nonprofitization on queer politics. In the concluding chapter, Beam emphasizes the “danger in conflating organizations with movements” (p. 191), and the book is an important reminder that nonprofits are not the same as queer community or activism. This is a valuable book, engaging and provocative, and a welcome addition to sociological research on LGBT groups, their racialized and classed dynamics, and the influence of neoliberal, marketized forces on queer community life.