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David Melson
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David Melson's Statement of Candidacy
October 2008
I am declaring my candidacy for the office of Executive Director for the year 2009. I have served Affirmation this past year as the Senior Assistant Executive Director and as the Washington Chapter Director for the past four years. I was also the Conference Director for the 2007 Affirmation Conference in Washington, D.C.
For the past five years, Olin Thomas has laid down a great base for us to build upon. His tenure as Executive Director represents the greatest period of stability in the history of Affirmation. We have seen the start of a major shift in the church’s approach to gay members, and tremendous growth in chapters and groups outside of the United States. This past summer, Affirmation’s leadership had the great privilege to offer a presentation at the Sunstone Symposium. I am grateful to have been able to serve with Olin and with the other members of the Executive Committee: James, Alyson, Hugo, Bruce, Aaron, and Buck.
For the year ahead, there are ten areas in which I feel we have both an obligation and an opportunity to expand our efforts and to make a difference. Each of these areas is vital to the continued growth, relevancy, and success of Affirmation in our second thirty years.
1. Chapters. The heart and soul of Affirmation are its chapters. But too many of our chapters struggle and too many members and potential members do not have a chapter in their area. It is my vision to have an active Chapter Development Committee this coming year. This committee will develop a means of turning the requests that we receive for groups and chapters into new chapters, hopefully adding at least three or four new chapters each year. Any city with a temple certainly has a population of people who need the support of an Affirmation chapter. The committee will also work with existing groups to help them attain the status of chapter, and with chapters to share best practices and to strengthen each of our chapters.
2. Young Adults. Affirmation began thirty-one years ago on a college campus. Most of the leaders in those early years were people in their twenties and thirties, and we are fortunate that so many of them, including Paul Mortensen, the Father of Affirmation, are still an active and vital part of Affirmation today. But these people that were in their twenties and thirties in the 1970s, are in their fifties and sixties today. If you look around the room at an Affirmation Conference, we are becoming a little grayer each year. Now all of this gray represents a tremendous amount of wisdom, which is a wonderful thing, but to survive another thirty years, and to thrive today, we need some younger blood. Many of the people who should be taking their place are not here; we lost much of an entire generation to war and to AIDS. It is up to the rising generation, people who are now in their twenties and thirties, to prepare to lead Affirmation, but this cannot happen unless they are here. To this end, we have formed an active Young Adults committee this year to identify and address the needs of members in their twenties, and to attract new members. In 2009, we will hold a Young Adult Conference. A major priority will be to attract young people to Affirmation, give them a voice, and give them an opportunity to serve.
3. Leadership. In order to make Affirmation relevant and meaningful to all of its members, its members need to be more fully involved in Affirmation. In order for this “rising generation” to be able to lead Affirmation into the future, their members need to be fully involved in Affirmation and in learning to lead. We are often critical of some of the high leadership of the church who see little except the inside of the church headquarters ivory tower during the week and the inside of a stake center on the weekends where they meet the same people and give the same talk each week. Affirmation sometimes does not do much better. Our leadership needs to be more than just the six faces on the Executive Committee. We need more voices and more opportunities to serve and to gain experience in leadership within the organization. Each of the areas that I am discussing here will need a good chairperson or director to lead our efforts, with a capable committee to guide and support them. It is my goal to find people to fill each of these positions, to support each chairperson or director with ongoing one-on-one training by a member of the Executive Committee, and to provide the resources to help them train each of the members of their committees. I once served under a wise stake president whose philosophy was, “Everything that I ever needed to know about running a successful stake I learned in the Deacons Quorum presidency.” Those of you who have had the opportunity may recognize the model.
4. Cornerstones. Affirmation holds three types of gatherings on a national or international basis: annual conferences (which involve the entire membership), Executive Committee meetings (to which all are invited but which routinely consist of only the six to eight members of the top leadership), and cornerstones. A cornerstone is a mini-conference focusing on either a particular segment of our members, such as young adults, or transgender members, or women, for example, or upon a limited geographical area, such as the Mexico City cornerstone conference a few years ago. My vision is to hold two to three cornerstone conferences each year, to be held in conjunction with meetings of the Executive Committee. One of the first will be the 2009 Young Adult Cornerstone.
5. LDS church relations. Earlier this year, the Executive Committee sent a letter to Thomas Monson inviting the leadership of the LDS Church to meet with the leadership of Affirmation. He accepted. You may have heard something about what followed. It is my goal to continue to pursue a meeting with the First Presidency of the Church. Regardless of whether you love the church or hate it, regardless of whether you have ever been a Mormon or not, if you are gay, the LDS Church affects your life, and often in a negative way. The LDS Church is one of the largest sources of funding for anti-gay political activity in the United States. Through botched attempts at counseling, or intimidation, or so-called “reparative therapy,” well intentioned or otherwise, the LDS Church has been responsible for destroying families, for forcing teens into homelessness and a life of living on the streets to survive, and for the deaths of uncounted numbers of gay men and women. This must all end now, and no one is in a better position to help change this than Affirmation. We have staked out the moral high ground, and we will continue to hold forth an invitation to meet with church leaders and for them to come meet with us. When the church’s rhetoric quiets, when their fear subsides, and when the hatred ebbs, then the entire LGBT community, the country, and the planet will have become a safer and better place.
6. Communication. It does not matter what the Executive committee does nor how pure their motivations are unless there is strong two-way communication between the Executive Committee and the membership whom they are called to serve. In addition to the monthly Affinity updates, in 2009, there will be a weekly e-mail from a member of the Executive Committee to all registered Affirmation members with an e-mail address on file, and an annual “State of Affirmation” reporting at conference. During the year, the Affirmation blog will be enhanced, and registered Affirmation members will have access to a special site, with questions answered promptly by a member of the Executive Committee.
7. International. Affirmation exists right now as five almost separate organizations. There is Affirmation U.S., which exists in the annual conference and in the U.S. chapters. There is Affirmation South America, very active and vibrant, but very different from the U.S. organization in function and attitude, and separated by visa regulations, culture, and finances. Then there is Affirmation International, very loose knit, very independent. The Chapter-at-Large crosses into all three of these groups and into the fifth, Affirmation On-Line. I would like to see us bring these groups together into one cohesive organization. Members and chapters outside of the United States need to feel that they are full and equal members and that Affirmation is truly an international organization; this will require a rethinking on the part of some of our American leadership. We need to be more aggressive in establishing chapters outside of the United States and then supporting those chapters with training and communication. The links between the English web site and our many non-English sites needs to more obvious, and we need to work toward establishing regional leadership on each continent.
8. Gay Mormons. There are literally thousands of gay Mormons who want and need the support of Affirmation, who need the alternatives and the guidance that Affirmation can supply, who do not know that we exist. We need to do a better job of reaching out to them, through local LGBT organizations, through the media, through literature for use by local church leaders and community support groups. This will be an important area of focus in 2009.
9. Youth outreach. People are coming out of the closet much earlier than ever before, and we have gay LDS teens and pre-teens who are facing very different problems than we did when we came out at 19 or 20 or 30. While there are some definite limits as to what we can do within our current structure, there is so much more that we can and should be doing. We can help these kids find the resources in their community that can assist them, and then we can prepare the people staffing those resources with information on the special needs and backgrounds of LDS kids. Even within our limitations, we can change lives, and even save lives. The responsibility is upon us to take action in this area as quickly as possible, which we will do in 2009.
10. LGBT community outreach. We do not stand alone in the gay community. As we saw at the 2007 conference in Washington, and in our associations this year with GLAAD, Equality California, Utah Pride, and others, there are many, many other groups out there, and many of them in a position to help us accomplish our mission far more effectively than we could on our own. Within our own faith culture, we have Family Fellowship, Reconciliation, Gamofites, and others that share a common background and common goals. At this point in our mutual history, there is certainly strength in numbers as we come within sight of a sea change in the mores of our society.
Thirty years ago, I am not certain that any of those people huddled with Matt Price at BYU, or sitting around Paul Mortensen’s apartment in West Hollywood, could have accurately pictured what Affirmation would look like in 2008, just as we have no idea what it will look like in 2037. What I do know, though, is that it will be different than it is today, led by a new generation who will have built on the foundation laid over the past three decades. For those who have come before us, from Matt Price and Paul Mortensen to Olin Thomas, we say thank you, for you have truly built better than you know. For those who are about to step up into positions of leadership over the coming months and years, welcome, you hold all of our hopes and our prayers, you are truly Saturday’s gay little warriors. And for those of us who are privileged to straddle these two eras in the history of God’s gay children, we are truly blessed and humble.
Over the next year, I promise that I will listen to you, serve you, and do all that I can to leave our little piece of this world better than I found it. I take this office very seriously, I am thankful for all that Affirmation has given me, and I am humbled by your love and by your support. I hope that you will allow me to serve as your Executive Director for 2009.
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