Jul 04, 2008  |  By: REBECCA ARMENDARIZ  | COMMENTS     

Rea Carey was happily serving as interim executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force until a few months ago. The organization had embarked on an extensive search to find a replacement for Matt Foreman, who resigned in January.

Carey, who at first says she wasn’t interested in the position, thought better of it when the board of directors re-approached her.

“They had gone through a very intentional process of talking to people in a wide variety of sectors and backgrounds,” she said. “So I thought I should pay attention when they came back and talked to me.”

Carey has been a gay activist since she came out at age 16 in high school in Denver.
“Whether it was a speaker’s bureau in college or my HIV activism, it’s just been what I’ve done,” she
said.

She was one of the founding members of the National Youth Advocacy Coalition, which works on behalf of gay youth. Carey has made D.C. her home for 19 years, and been with her partner, whom she met while playing in a lesbian poker group, for the past eight.

Prior to becoming Foreman’s temporary replacement, Carey served as a consultant for the Task Force and as a senior strategist for the organization.

“There’s so much that I can continue to contribute,” she said. “This is the next step in my contribution to my organization.”

Foreman made headlines last year after speaking out against a version of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that was stripped of transgender provisions. The gay-only bill passed the House but has not been introduced in the Senate.

Foreman was a prominent advocate of United ENDA, a coalition put in place to “accept no substitutes” to the original act, which included transgender provisions. Carey said her position on ENDA is the same.

“Our organization, in its core values, is an organization that will always fight for transgender inclusion,” she said.

Since Carey isn’t a fresh face for the Task Force and has helped create the strategic plan for achieving its goals over the past few years, the organization will continue on its same trajectory.

“We have a particular expertise in partnering with organizations all over the country to achieve goals,” she said.

One piece of advice Carey gives to those working on the ground as activists is to start early. The Task Force did just that in California.

Carey has sent staff to the state to campaign against the ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriages.

The Task Force is staffing the field operation of the campaign itself. Six full-time staff members work only on the campaign; the Task Force has dedicated its four summer fellows to working on it as well.

“We must maintain the freedom to marry in California,” Carey said.

Another priority for Carey is to make sure that communities across the country that are seeking to add gender identity protections to non-discrimination laws have the data and resources they need to do so.

Soon, the Task Force will launch the largest ever survey of discrimination issues that transgender people have experienced in a variety of areas, such as housing and employment.

“We want to make sure that there’s no excuse. Someone could say, ‘What discrimination do trans people experience, anyway?’ We want to have that answer.”

The excitement in Carey’s voice is genuine. She said that it feels that the gay community is about to experience some society-changing advances.

“It feels like we are really about to move into a new time,” she said. “I am honored to be able to contribute in some way as the Task Force’s executive director.”

Foreman moved to San Francisco to head the gay program division at the Evelyn & Walter Hass Jr. Fund, a foundation that supports liberal social causes.

“I don’t want to get sappy, but I just feel incredibly privileged to have been at the Task Force during what I think has been a pivotal time in our movement’s history,” Foreman told the Blade earlier this year. “We faced many incredible and in many ways unprecedented challenges, and at the same time there has been really unprecedented progress.”

Foreman said two main goals for his successor would be to preserve same-sex marriage rights in Massachusetts and to increase efforts at fighting HIV and AIDS. He noted that although 70 percent of people in the United States living with HIV are gay or bisexual, gay Americans and organizations are not sufficiently engaged in efforts to combat the disease.