Veteran Leader Brings Passion for Gay Causes to New Job

The first time Richard D. Burns and Urvashi Vaid met was in 1980. It was the first day of the semester at Northeastern University School of Law and Ms. Vaid was sitting in the law students’ lounge reading the Gay Community News when a person she describes as “this tall, kind of hippieish-looking fellow” approached her and asked if he had seen her somewhere before.

“It was a classic pick-up line,” jokes Ms. Vaid, now the executive director of the Arcus Foundation, which maintains its headquarters in Kalamazoo, Mich.

The two budding lawyers became fast friends. Nearly three decades later, Mr. Burns, who served for 22 years as executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Community Center, in New York, has joined his longtime friend at Arcus, where he started in March as the foundation’s new chief operating officer. (Both work in Arcus’s New York office; the foundation also keeps an office in Cambridge, England.)

Arcus directs most of its grants to two causes: combating discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people; and ensuring the survival of great apes and their habitats. The foundation, which was created by Jon L. Stryker, heir to a medical-technology fortune, has $147.2-million in assets and awarded approximately $25.4-million in grants last year.

Ms. Vaid says Mr. Burns will be responsible for overseeing the foundation’s administrative systems and many of the grant maker’s programs.

Mr. Burns, 53, comes to the post after seeing the community center grow from a staff of three with an annual budget under $250,000 when he took over in 1986 to more than 80 staff members and an annual budget of approximately $8-million, about half of which comes from individuals, 40 percent from government, and the rest from foundations. In between those years, the center, which opened in 1984, grappled with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, was a key player in the burgeoning gay-rights movement, and was where activist groups such as AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and Gay Men of African Descent, first organized.

Currently, the center’s board president, Bruce Anderson, is serving as interim executive director of the center; Mr. Burns’s permanent successor has not yet been named.

Mr. Burns’s salary at Arcus is $210,000 a year; he was making about $225,000 by the time he left the community center, he says.

In an interview, Mr. Burns talked about his more than two decades at the center, and his new job at Arcus.

You are a lawyer by training. What drew you to nonprofit work?

I was actually a gay activist before I was a lawyer. All the way back when I was a student at Hamilton College, I became part of an emerging gay group to change the culture there and to provide support to one another, and I was lucky enough to learn of a newspaper called the Gay Community News, which was at the time the only lesbian and gay newsweekly in the country. It was produced by a large collective in its early days, and I was very, very drawn to that.

I moved to Boston when I graduated from school specifically because I wanted to work there and be a part of this movement. So I got a job as a waiter in Harvard Square so I could volunteer at the paper. I kept showing up until they hired me and ultimately became the managing editor.

I did practice law for a while, but my passion was for LGBT justice work. In ’83 and ’84, when the AIDS epidemic was really hitting our community in a very, very dramatic, crisis way, our friends and lovers were starting to get sick, and many people believed that an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence at that time. So there was a tremendous impetus to say, “I’ve got to look at what’s important and right now it’s working in a social-change movement that is going to force the government to respond to the HIV and AIDS crisis.” These were tough times, and that moment brought many, many, many people into the AIDS movement and into the LGBT movement who hadn’t been involved before. Because suddenly it was starkly clear to everyone that we were a disposable population in the eyes of our government leaders.

Why was this the right time to leave the center?

Twenty-two years is a long time, and I had really never intended to stay as long as I did. It’s such an exciting place, it was hard to leave. It’s such a dynamic, Grand Central Station of the queer community. More than 6,000 people come through the doors of the center every week. It’s open 365 days, from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., and it has everything from support groups for gay dads, to let’s organize a march on Washington, to so much dynamic movement-building and cross-movement work, and a lot of social-services delivery happens there. It’s just a wonderful dynamic environment to be in and I was so lucky to be there, but I knew I wanted to have change, and another career.

How has the center’s work changed over the last 22 years?

One way is in the needs of LGBT immigrants. New York City is a city of immigrants, and I don’t remember the statistic, but probably about 40 percent of the people living in New York were born outside of the United States.

Very often, when someone emigrates from their home county and immigrates to the United States, they end up in a geographic community comprised of people from their homeland, and very often they’re still living in a less free, more homophobic subculture. Over time people are going to come out of the closet, and they are going to get on the subway, and they’re going to look for a gay community.

How have the needs of the people you serve changed?

There’s tremendous need and interest in supporting the development of families. The needs around the HIV and AIDS epidemic have evolved and changed because of the drug cocktails that are available now that enable people to live full, productive, long lives, living with HIV. That wasn’t true 25 years ago. And so the needs of people living with HIV are different today.

There’s an ever-growing interest for more cultural and social opportunities as people who maybe don’t want to just go to a gay bar to meet somebody, or they don’t want to just meet people online, but want to have a whole smorgasbord of possibilities based on interest, whether it’s book-discussion groups, or a film series.

Another need that has evolved is around the issue of substance abuse. Twenty-five years ago there was not a crystal-meth abuse issue, and so that’s a need or a crisis that emerged, and the LGBT community institutions, like the center, always have to be nimble and able to evolve and change to respond to the community’s changing needs.

In what ways, if any, have your views on running a nonprofit group changed?

The needs are more compelling than ever because it’s a much more linked world, both in America and around the world, than it was in 1986.

At the same time, in the last decade, the economic inequality in this country has increased. So that informs to a greater degree what we do because you see it in people who come in who are uninsured or who come in for other services.

And we’re in an era now, much more than two decades ago, where there’s much greater cynicism about government, about the corporate sector, than there was, and it means that there’s also greater scrutiny on our sector. So it’s more important today to communicate about the work we do and the function and value of the nonprofit sector in a society.

Where do you see nonprofit groups’ work on behalf of gay people going in the future?

There’s been an evolution toward not just thinking about LGBT rights, but looking at this as part of a larger social-justice movement that includes sexual orientation, gender identity, and race. That’s the only way any of us are going to be effective. Unless all of these disparate movements work together as allies and support our shared and overlapping goals, then none of us are going to achieve the social justice that we believe in.