A Disjointed Family
by Clay Smith
Donnie Young is picking up where Cornerstone left off, this time with a virtual gay and lesbian community center.
photograph by Jana BirchumFrom the day it openedits doors on June 1, 1996, the board of directors of Cornerstone, Austin's former gay and lesbian community center, sought answers to several basic questions: What kind of community center does the local gay and lesbian population want? Why is that population not supporting Cornerstone financially? Is a central meeting place necessary? If the building were theirs, would they come?
Cornerstone, which officially closed its doors in late December, embodied several paradoxes about Austin's gay and lesbian community. Sandy Bartlett, the community information and education coordinator for AIDS Services of Austin and a founding board member of Cornerstone, has clearly thought through at least one of them. "One thinks of Austin as being a gay-friendly place; one thinks of Dallas and to a degree even Houston as being not particularly gay-friendly places, but Dallas and Houston have community centers. Austin does not. One of the reasons perhaps for that is that Austin's gay community does not face the kinds of persecution and oppressive pressures that some other communities face. It is in a sense relatively easy to be gay in Austin, and if you don't have that sense of oppression and persecution, then banding together doesn't seem quite so imperative. That's one reason we don't have a locale in Austin that might be identified as the gay ghetto." Except, perhaps, on the Internet, where a new community services Web site has taken up residence under the direction of Donnie Young, who served on the board until its demise.Whether it is, as Bartlett says, "relatively easy to be gay in Austin" is a question the board of directors was forced to confront by the end of 1998. Anthony Chapple, who at one time co-chaired the board with Amy Krause, says he heard that question voiced often after Cornerstone sent out a final fundraising letter in October that also solicited applications for a seat on the board of directors. It became clear then that Cornerstone was perhaps on its last leg. Chapple says the letter had two purposes: to notify the community of the financial problems Cornerstone was facing, and to allow the community to "do something to help us." (Nine people did apply to join the six-member board, but the letter brought in only $100.)
Meanwhile, more people were asking whether a community center was all that necessary, given Austin's willingness to accept gays and lesbians into the mainstream. "And then at the same time," Chapple says, "you hear others who say that Dallas and Houston have gay neighborhoods, Austin does not have that and it would be helpful to have a central point where people could go beyond the bars and just hang out, so there's two sides," Chapple says.
Even so, Cornerstone failed to generate the kind of financial or emotional support it so desperately needed, except at its founding, when donors contributed more than $300,000. Bartlett acknowledges that "if Cornerstone from its inception perhaps had a flaw in the process, it is that we asked the community about their desires and needs and met [them] with resounding enthusiasm. What we failed to ask was, 'Will you support it in an ongoing way?' The initial support was absolutely there; we were blown away with the initial financial support. But the ongoing financial support was something else."
The lack of support is more complex than the board's inability to ask the right questions, however. Cornerstone's original mission was to provide a meeting place for Austin's gay and lesbian organizations, not necessarily to plan events. "What the city needed was a center where people could meet, rather than another organization to be a gay and lesbian provider," says the Rev. Bill Zelazny, the pastor of First United-Universalist Unitarian Church and a board member of Cornerstone from its early stages until its closing.
But that mission changed in 1997 under the guidance of Kathy Taylor, who served as Cornerstone's executive director, the center's only paid position, from October 1996 to March 1997. "There was a large number of folks that were questioning what services were actually being provided by the community center, which put Cornerstone in sort of a Catch-22, which is: You can't provide services without funding and yet you couldn't get funding if you didn't have something to show," Taylor says. Potential donors "expected once there was a building, and a 'center,' to see services, and there were some -- some visible, some I guess not so visible -- but they wanted to see a product for their contribution."
"People would say, 'We don't want to pay you just to have a building; we want you to do programming,'" Zelazny recalls. So Cornerstone found itself wanting to program events in 1997 without replicating events other organizations were already doing. None of those organizations had instituted anything similar to Club Skirt, a monthly social event for lesbians that grew out of the absolute dearth of lesbian bars in Austin. Club Skirt made its debut in February 1997 and quickly became a very successful fundraiser for Cornerstone, eventually netting up to $5,000 a month for the center.
But this comfort zone only lasted for so long. Last August, Club Skirt representatives attended a Cornerstone board meeting to relay the news that Club Skirt revenues would no longer go exclusively into Cornerstone's coffers. Instead, Club Skirt organizers had decided that after November, money raised would go to a variety of organizations that would apply for Club Skirt funds. Cornerstone had the option of applying to be among the beneficiary organizations.
Chapple says that while Club Skirt had initially targeted Cornerstone to be the sole recipient of its fundraising efforts, "some of the people on the [Club Skirt] committee thought maybe that was just a little bit too much money just to go to one organization, especially since the bulk of that money was being used to pay our expenses associated with the building. ... In my opinion," Chapple adds, "their doing what they did did not kill Cornerstone; Cornerstone was already in bad shape. It certainly didn't help us."
Brick-and-Mortar IssuesThe building: It comes up again and again in conversations with people associated with Cornerstone, and never in a positive light. The expenses associated with the Red River building were "substantial," Chapple says, and Cornerstone's lease mandated that the organization pay property taxes, insurance, and maintenance of the building. "The air conditioner went out I think three times in '98. We had to pay for that. We had vandalism, we had to pay for that. ... And that was okay if more people I guess were using it," Chapple acknowledges.
Eventually, various groups using the facility begged off the $25 room use fee, which remains a sore point for Sandy Bartlett. "I guess if I am irked by any single aspect, it is the poverty mentality of the gay community and especially of gay community organizations. We envisioned everyone who used Cornerstone's space as helping support it. ... And yet with very few exceptions, people begged poverty; we don't have that, we can't afford that; our members are too poor. I'm sorry, I saw the Jeep Cherokee as y'all drove up. But there is among oppressed people in general -- whether gay or minority, whatever -- there is a serious poverty mentality. And I view this as one of the graver pathologies in gay community culture, given the fact that we tend to do better financially than most people in America. We are not poor, and yet no one with few exceptions actually wanted to pay for the use of the space."
Now that Cornerstone is actually closed, Bartlett and others are already considering how it might all be done over again. "I would take a cheap storefront with a very visible location, say South Congress, carve out a little niche that is secure for an office, and for the rest, let the community slap whatever paint around it they want to and have at it. There would be no additional space, not for OutYouth, not for other organizations, to exist permanently. They would be encouraged to come and meet there, come do their projects there, whatever, but the idea of trying to foster decent permanent space for other organizations, which was a linchpin of Cornerstone's raison d'être, didn't work." Adds Chapple: "This was a very expensive operation to run, and that was not necessary."
In January, former board member Donnie Young sent out a press release announcing that the dissolution of a community center for Austin's gay and lesbian population was not absolute. Young is the founder of Austin Gay and Lesbian Community Services, a "virtual" community center that can be accessed at http://www.cornerstonecenter.org, where listings of events and information about gay and lesbian organizations and gay-owned and gay-friendly businesses can be found.
The virtual aspect of the service may help answer what is now becoming an age-old question: What does Austin's gay and lesbian community want? "I think that's maybe where we should start out and get a gauge to see what we need beyond that," Chapple says.
