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This year’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, beginning September 3rd, will be the gayest ever. The sheer number of LGBT delegates is at its highest yet, according to Stonewall Democrats in the Washington Blade:
The upcoming Democratic National Convention is set to have a record number of openly LGBT delegates, although goals for some states aren’t being met, according to new data from the National Stonewall Democrats.
The organization as of Wednesday evening identified at least 470 openly LGBT delegates that are set to attend the convention, but more data is expected to become public at a later time. A total of 5,963 delegates are set to come to Charlotte, N.C.., for the event during the week of Sept. 3.
Having 470 delegates exceeds the goal of 418 delegates at the convention and is already higher than numbers from 2008, when 277 delegates participated.
(For those comprehension-challenged readers who question any discussions of historic LGBT representation, please note no one is being outed here. These are “openly gay” Democrats.)
The DNC itself has not issued exact counts yet, although these are expected sometime before the convention is gaveled to order. In the meantime, we have the numbers crunched by Stonewall Democrats:
Jerame Davis, executive director of the National Stonewall Democrats, said the numbers “for sure” mean Democrats are on track to have the highest number of openly LGBT delegates ever at the convention.
“We’re finally getting to the point where we get closer to appropriate measure of representation as compared to the population at large, although we’re not quite to that point,” Davis said.
It’a also important to note that official delegates are not the only attendees in Charlotte.
Additionally, Davis has identified a total of 518 official LGBT participants at the convention. In addition to the 470 identified LGBT delegates, these participants include 23 alternate delegates, 20 standing committee members and five pages. That’s also higher than the 365 LGBT participants who went to the 2008 convention in Denver and the 282 LGBT participants who went to the 2004 convention in Boston.
For exact counts, including lists of states which exceeded their goals (Yay!) and those which did not meet their own targets (Try harder!) and those states for which exact data is not yet available, please see here.
14 Comments
I clicked the link at the end, and it does not provide exact counts. It lists 37 jurisdictions (states, DC, and territories) that met their goals, but does not say what those goals were or how many LGBT delegates they are sending. Ditto for those that missed — it says how much they missed by, but not what the goal itself was.
Because Stonewall is an ‘outside’ organization, they seem not to be privy to the exact data the DNC presumably intends to roll out soon. I think the article is based on SD’s polling and inquiries, some of which have not been answered by the state/state-like democratic parties.
But, yes — some additional denominators and previous years’ milestones, on the locality level, would be terrific. Hope we get that from the official tally!
From the Blade article linked above:
I saw that. But I’d like to know if (for example) Missouri’s miss was four out of a goal of four, ten, or twenty, and out of a delegation size of 10, 40, or 100.
honestly, I cant stand being referred to as LGBT. I have never once heard anyone in real life ever say it. Its just something I will never get used to.
Well, I don’t consider myself LBGT; I’m a gay man.
But it’s our community. For a while, there was a move to call us GLBT, which I once proposed be pronounced “glibbet” but it never caught on.
It certainly needn’t be your community, of course, but I don’t think anyone is proposing any one person be called LGBT. A dream, united, will never be defeated, et&.
Guess it’s dumb to expect gay people to be MORE progressive than the general population. Oh, well.
:)
There’s always QUILTBAG — it’s pronounceable *and* stylish. :-)
From the LGBT wiki: “Another acronym that has begun to spread is QUILTBAG, from Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Trans, Bisexual, Asexual, Gay.”
There has been a substantial amount of stigma forced onto all of the words contained in that acronym but I suppose the overall community has to have a designation that’s easy and relatively inoffensive. I don’t have a problem with LGBT or even LGBTQ. I draw the line at QUILTBAG though! :)
Ha! :-)
I’ve been using “members of the GLBT community.” Is that any better, or just as foreign feeling to you? If not, what would you prefer? (These are sincere questions, not rhetorical or challenging. I would really like to know.)
If California and Massachusetts, of all states, missed their goals, how hard did they really try?
That said, I don’t trust the DNC on anything anymore. Nothing.
Great!
Lots of us queers in the audience… few of us union members on the workforce…
meh