Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Every four to six months I receive fucktons of mail from The Gays - the HRC, Lambda, GLAAD, The Point Foundation, etc. Now, I would love to fork over oodles of cash to these organization, really I would, but I'm poor and can barely afford to keep my apartment heated at 59 degrees Fahrenheit. While The Gays are a worthy cause, I find that keeping my cats from turning into catsicles is a deserving monetary pursuit as well. So essentially the only purpose this mail serves is to make me feel incredibly guilty.

I thought that after not giving any money to The Gays for a few years, I would officially be wiped from these organizations' master lists. When I worked in fundraising for a non-profit organization, we'd cull through our rosters every once and a while to see if we had folks in our data base who'd been unresponsive to mailings for several years and then we'd clear them out. The Aboritionistas I gave money to eventually realized that wiping out whole forests in attempt to get my $20 wasn't worth their effort. But not The Gays! Oh, no, not The Gays!

Not only have The Gays continued to send me mail years after my last contribution, they've accurately divined my whereabouts through at least three moves. I gave out my email address to be notified of volunteer opportunities during the height of Massachusetts' gay marriage hoopla, but I don't think that I've ever proffered my mailing address, particularly this current one. So it makes me a bit paranoid to keep receiving, like clockwork, accurately addressed solicitations marked, "YOU ARE NOT A FULL CITIZEN!" and "HELP THE HRC FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS!"

I'm beginning to get suspicious that there's some kind of Gay Master List out there, and I'm on it. Then I get thinking on this track, and I wonder what The Gays would do with their Master List? I think the best conclusion that can be drawn is that The Gays will inevitably institute a tithe. A ten-percent tax on our income will guarantee us the right to marry, not be fired from jobs, and will provide handsome rewards to meth dealing prostitutes willing to expose the hypocrisy of certain anti-gay activists. Either that or The Gays are ultimately going to make us pay up for the bushels of blue and yellow equal sign stickers they've sent us. (I use mine as wallpaper for the kitchen. The downside to this decorating choice is that it induces a mean case of vertigo when you've had too much to drink.)

But seriously, my main complaint here is not that I feel supremely guilty that I can't give money to The Gays, but that they waste so much fucking paper trying to get me to do so. I'd call to tell them I want off their mailing lists, but I just don't think I could reject The Gays like that (as warped as that sounds). I've thought of giving money to the Sierra Club or some other environmental organization to counterbalance The Gays' waste, but I suspect that this solution would only worsen the situation by contributing my name to yet another snail mail-happy group.

At least The Gays seem to have vanquished the onslaught of mail I was getting from military recruiters just after I graduated from college. It would have been quite awkward to try to explain to bunkmates why I kept getting catalogues for man-on-man erotica at boot camp.