Obama's Gay Fundraiser in Chief

President Obama has come into criticism from GLBT leaders for what some perceive to be a slow pace in implementing the reforms geared toward greater legal equality for gays that Obama promised as a candidate.

Others, however, hail Obama as a leader who has accomplished more on behalf of the GLBT community in two years than any previous president.

Still, as they shrug off decades of legal and social oppression, gay Americans are impatient finally to grasp first-class citizenship, and Obama still receives critiques ranging from his "evolving" attitude toward marriage equality to his careful, and incremental, pursuit of a range of equality measures, the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the abolition of the Defense of Marriage Act, and some form of nationally consistent family parity among them.

Observers believe that the recent victory for marriage equality in New York will give the cause of family parity fresh momentum across the country, with Obama's 2012 campaign a beneficiary of that new energy. But while hope and change may be Obama's watchwords, those things don't happen without enormous infusions of cash, and the president continues to court the GLBT community, as he did in 2008, for their financial support.

Enter gay moneyman Rufus Gifford, 36, banker's son and head of the Obama re-election campaign's fundraising efforts. A July 5 profile on Gifford in the Boston Globe called him "one of the most prominent openly gay operatives in the country," and noted that in 2008 Gifford was given the sobriquet "Obama's Gay Goldmine." The title was not undeserved: Gifford helped haul in a record-setting $745 million for Obama's first presidential run.

To be sure, Obama's 2008 campaign drew considerable support from gay Americans who saw in the Democratic candidate from Illinois a shining figure of hope for a better, and less biased future. But Gifford's task isn't simply to convince gay donors to re-up for next year, though; he must also reach out to other critical funding sectors, especially the business community, which has had as mixed and complicated a relationship with the president as the GLBT community has.

With projections for the 2012 campaign indicating that the next election will shatter spending records anew despite the stubbornly slumped economy, the Obama camp has set a correspondingly high budgetary goal for itself: a cool $1 billion, the Globe article reported.

It's a terrifying goal, but one that Gifford embraces with zest.

"I have not slept through the night in probably two years," Gifford told the Globe, going on to say that along with "the pressure, [there's] also the adrenaline.

"I went into this knowing how difficult it would be, that we were being asked to do something that's never been done before, and for me that's the most exciting part of this job," Gifford added.

The article reported that the fundraiser's "family epitomizes blue-blood New England. Clarence Gifford, Rufus's grandfather, was chairman of Rhode Island Hospital Trust. His grandmother hails from one of Rhode Island's founding families, the Browns." In other words, Gifford is a scion of money and influence, and his understanding of those things will help him in the task of filling the Obama war chest.

The Globe article noted that Democrats are unlikely to field a real threat to the president's nomination, which will save the Obama campaign some cash early on. But the long haul could be costly, given the anxieties of a nation still caught in a long, grinding recession, with no end in sight. Those economic anxieties helped propel a Republican tidal wave in the midterm elections; in 2012, a still-anemic economy could mean backlash against the same ascendant GOP, or it could further diminish Democratic influence.

"It's a prudent decision to be very well-resourced for what could be a difficult campaign," Brookings Institution senior fellow Thomas Mann told the Globe.

The article recounted Gifford's inadvertent coming out to his family. Gifford was still in college, and serving as an intern between his freshman and sophomore years at Brown University. His mother paid him a visit and, upon picking up a notebook, discovered a revealing message scrawled across a page.

"I turned to the back page, and it said, 'I wish the world knew what it was like to be gay,'" his mother, Anne Gifford, told the Globe. "Whoa. My world. It rocked my world."

Father Chad Gifford also paid a visit soon after -- in an attempt, the Globe article said, to coax his son into being heterosexual. Naturally, that didn't work.

"I knew so little, that's where my head was," the elder Gifford told the Globe. "No, that's where my heart was."

"It's not a life you would choose for your child, especially back when he came out," put in Anne Gifford. "It was such uncharted territory for us."

But Rufus Gifford's parents soon came to realize that their son being gay was not a matter of choice or ideology, and they threw their support behind him, with his mother founding a support group and turning her energies toward the creation of a book titled "The Shared Heart: Portraits And Stories Celebrating Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Young People."

Both parents authored a Globe op-ed piece the year that America's first same-sex legal marriages commenced in Massachusetts.

Rufus now says that coming out was, for him, "one of the most lonely feelings in the entire world," but that coming to terms with his own identity allowed him the space to establish himself as an individual, rather than one more rung in the family's lineage.

"It sort of freed me from being looked at in the same lens as other people. And so I could sort of free myself from being a banker's son in Boston, and I could go do something different," he told the Globe.

After a career in Hollywood, Gifford became involved in John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004. The Globe article noted that one of Gifford's classmates at Brown was Kerry's daughter Alexandra. Though he started off at a "very, very low level," Gifford said, he was all too happy to chuck his Hollywood career in favor of politics.

"Having consulted with my dad several times, I said, look, I don't want to do this anymore, and I'm so fed up with the Bush administration that I just want to devote all my time and energy to getting John Kerry elected as president of the United States," Gifford recalled.

It didn't take long for him to rise from his low-level starting point in the Kerry campaign to successful fundraiser, and though Kerry lost the 2004 election, Gifford's trajectory continued. He and his then-significant other, Jeremy Bernard -- now the social secretary for the White House -- became part of the Obama campaign in 2007, attracted by Obama's talk of social and legal equality for gays and his support for measures like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a much-proposed but never-enacted bill that would extend federal protections to GLBT workers.

Since his election, Obama has presided over giant steps forward for GLBT equality, including the Congressional vote to repeal DADT and the signing of the first federal law that extends protections of any sort to gays, the Matthew Shepard James Byrd, Jr,. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

But there have been setbacks, too, many of them centering on the families of gay and lesbian Americans. The very same election that brought Obama to the White House also saw voters in California rescind then-existing marriage rights for same-sex families in that state. Right-wing extremists spearheaded a successful campaign to oust three state Supreme Court justices in Iowa for their part in the unanimous court finding that opened the door to marriage equality there.

And Obama's own reluctance to endorse marriage equality from the presidential podium remains a source of disappointment and disillusionment for many in the community, especially given that in 1996 Obama, then a candidate for the Illinois state senate, said that same-sex families should be afforded marriage parity.

Gifford still stands by Obama as the best choice for those who want a president who honors and understands the modern civil rights movement.

"He is the best and most progressive president we've ever had on gay rights," Gifford told the Globe. "The last two years were two of the most productive years in American history; more was accomplished during the last two years, I would argue, than certainly any presidency in my lifetime," he added. "And if you imagine what we did in two years, think about what we can do with four more years."

Getting gays and straights alike to think along those precise lines -- and open their wallets to help make it a reality -- is Gifford's job for the next year and a half.