There are a lot of cool efforts getting underway to help people who have left or are being evacuated from NO and the Gulf coast. These are a few that have moved me:

  • SF/Fantasy authors Larry Dixon and Mercedes Lackey are offering space and time to help members of the SF & gaming community get back on their feet. They currently have room for 6 and are rebuilding a garage to accommodate another 22. This is a great example of what I love about the fanish community.
  • My workplace just put out an announcement for a donation drive geared
    towards the folks who are being evacuated to Atlanta area shelters and
    hospitals, and launched a site to help people find their loved ones and appropriate resources.
  • Over 47,000 people have offered free housing to people currently homeless because of Katrina, just through this MoveOn affiliated web site.
  • Craig’s List is also full of offers, mostly for housing, some to call your relatives and tell them you’re ok, some seeking local charities for corporate donation drives.
  • And for folks who want their donations to be visibly LGBT, the RainbowFund is also raising money for America’s Second Harvest, specifically to get food & water to Katrina-devastated areas.

Aside: Why might you want your donation to be visibly "gay money"?

Well, most of the charities on the Craig’s List page of organizations helping out are churches. And a whole lot of national church groups do way more than just pray and collect money to help people whose lives have been devastated by Katrina. If you’re Baptist, you may want to let people know that Baptists care about this and Baptists make a difference. You may even think there’s a special way that you can help give survivors hope as a Baptist. But probably you aren’t worried about whether your donation only helps Baptists — under these circumstances, we’re all in this together.

Still, a lot of people have a hard time thinking about gay and lesbian people in any context other than the sexual. I think that is the underpinning of the whole anti-same-sex-marriage issue. Everyone knows that marriage is about more than sex, pop culture jokes aside.

But the fact is that most of the time gay and lesbian people are living life the way everyone is living life — working, eating, talking on the phone, being with their family & friends, watching TV, volunteering, doing stuff in their communities, etc etc. And if you see gay and lesbian people on the subway, in the grocery store, at the movies, or whereever, most of the time, you don’t even know it.

In contrast, popular culture has provided — and the religious right has latched onto — some extreme images of the gay and lesbian community: wild drag queens, obvious BDSM couples, and dykes on bikes at pride parades, just to name a few obvious ones. The overt sexuality of those images does seem at odds with the emotional concept of marriage.

By donating through a group like the Rainbow Fund, we can raise the visibility and the credibility of a different vision of the gay and lesbian community — one committed to helping others and making a difference. And much like my earlier example with the Baptists, one that wants to help the whole community, not just the gay and lesbian community.

(Just to be clear — I’m not saying that the people in those more extreme-looking parts of the community don’t donate, volunteer, otherwise do good, or deserve to get married — just that when you see them in the media, that’s not what you’re thinking about them doing.)