The Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, sometimes called the Victory Fund, is an Americanpolitical action committee dedicated to increasing the number of openly LGBT public officials in US political life.
The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
In the United States and Canada, a political action committee (PAC) is a 527 organization that pools campaign contributions from members and donates those funds to campaigns for or against candidates, ballot initiatives, or legislation. The legal term PAC has been created in pursuit of campaign finance reform in the United States. This term is quite specific to all activities of campaign finance in the United States. Democracies of other countries use different terms for the units of campaign spending or spending on political competition. At the U.S. federal level, an organization becomes a PAC when it receives or spends more than $1,000 for the purpose of influencing a federal election, and registers with the Federal Election Commission, according to the Federal Election Campaign Act as amended by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. At the state level, an organization becomes a PAC according to the state's election laws.
LGBT, or GLBT, is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the term is an adaptation of the initialism LGB, which was used to replace the term gay in reference to the LGBT community beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s. Activists believed that the term gay community did not accurately represent all those to whom it referred.
The Victory Fund is the nation’s largest LGBT political action committee and one of the nation’s largest non-connected PACs.
History
The Victory Fund was founded in 1991 by Vic Basile and William Waybourn, with Waybourn becoming its first executive director.[2] It provides strategic, technical and financial support to openly gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender candidates and officials across the United States, helping them win elections at local, state and federal levels. Victory has helped elect several hundred openly LGBT candidates to Congress, state legislatures, school boards and city councils. The organization also offers programs and training to elected officials.
Victor Basile is an American LGBT rights activist who was the first executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, serving in that position from June 1983 to June 1989.
Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term was originally used to mean "carefree", "cheerful", or "bright and showy".
A lesbian is a homosexual woman. The word lesbian is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with female homosexuality or same-sex attraction.
Tammy Suzanne Green Baldwin is an American politician serving as the junior United States Senator from Wisconsin since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served three terms in the Wisconsin State Assembly, representing the 78th district, and from 1999 to 2013 represented Wisconsin's 2nd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives.
Barnett Frank is a former American politician. He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013. A Democrat, Frank served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee (2007–2011) and was a leading co-sponsor of the 2010 Dodd–Frank Act, a sweeping reform of the U.S. financial industry. Frank, a resident of Newton, Massachusetts, was considered the most prominent gay politician in the United States.
Sean Patrick Maloney is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for New York's 18th congressional district since 2013. He is a member of the Democratic Party. He was a candidate for New York Attorney General in the 2018 election, losing to Letitia James in the Democratic primary.
In 1995, the Victory Fund was a principal organizer of a meeting between representatives of the Clinton administration and several dozen leaders of gay and lesbian organizations.[6]
In 2008, 80 of the group's 111 endorsed candidates won their elections.[7]
In 2009, the Victory Fund played an important role in the election of Annise Parker as mayor of Houston. In electing an out lesbian as its chief executive, Houston became the largest city in the country to have elected an openly gay person as mayor. Local gay groups, particularly the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, had nurtured Parker's political career and were openly supporting her race. The Victory Fund became a huge player in the race by providing a much-needed source of cash for Parker's grassroots efforts and helping her stay financially competitive with her two chief rivals, both of whose campaigns were lavishly funded. After the campaign, Parker referred to the Victory Fund as her "secret weapon" and thanked the organization for its help.
Annise Danette Parker is an American politician who served as the 61st Mayor of Houston, Texas, from 2010 until 2016. She also served as an at-large member of the Houston City Council from 1998 to 2003 and city controller from 2004 to 2010.
The Houston GLBT Political Caucus is the South's oldest civil rights organization dedicated solely to the advancement of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. It was founded in 1975, and is the largest GLBT political organization in the city of Houston and Harris County. It is known locally simply as "The Caucus." The Caucus is nonpartisan and endorses candidates on the basis of their support for GLBT rights, regardless of political party or candidate's sexual orientation.
Chuck Wolfe, who had served as President & CEO of the Victory Fund since 2003, left the organization at the end of 2014. In 2015 Aisha Moodie-Mills became the new president and CEO of the Victory Fund, which made her the first woman, first black woman and first lesbian to become the head of Victory Fund.[8][9]
In 2017, Moodie-Mills' departure was announced and the new President and CEO was named, former Houston Mayor Annise Parker.
New York Times: David W. Dunlap, "The 1994 Campaign: Homosexuality," Nov. 6, 1994, accessed Dec. 9, 2009. "Some 130 candidates nationwide requested financial help from the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a political-action committee, said its executive director, William W. Waybourn. The fund has supported 27 candidates this year, he said, almost twice as many as in 1993."
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