The mainstreaming and amplifying of drag misogyny was driven by two lobby groups: GLAAD and the Arcus Foundation, the biggest funder of LGBT+ organisations in the world. The latter would even pay to enable Mock’s creative role at Pose.
Even if resistance to the pro-trans agenda of Arcus dared to surface the sheer scale of its generosity tends to smother it. In 2015 alone Arcus awarded Astraea, the “Lesbian” Foundation for Justice over $6m to focus on “Intersex” issues.
Astraea was once a fabulous example of grassroots lesbian activism. Then it succumbed to the idiocy of lesbians with shlongs.
Through its donations to an array of other lobby groups such as Astraea, Arcus helps disguise the extent to which it is in the trans lobby’s driving seat.
Jennifer Bilek has revealed how Arcus formally adopted gender identity ideology at a conference it hosted in Bellagio in Italy in 2008. One of the speakers there was Michael O’Flaherty, a signatory to the notorious Yogyakarta Principles, a set of legal demands that have been used to justify Gender Self-ID across the world.
Ever since Bellagio, Arcus has been unstinting in its funding of organisations like ILGA and TGEU which champion Self-ID. In her blog STILLtish (on X) revealed Arcus paid the ghastly Victor Madrigal-Borloz $100k as an “unpaid” and “independent” expert in his UN role of “special rapporteur”.
One of Tish’s readers then discovered Madrigal-Borloz had slurped up another $200k of Arcus donations through Harvard University.
There are dozens of similar examples that prove the Arcus Foundation sits like the proverbial fat spider at the centre of a web of trans lobby influence.
Ruth Baldacchino benefited from the huge Arcus funding of ILGA when she was its co-secretary between 2014 and 2019. It was ILGA who had convened the Yogyakarta Conference that led to the eponymous “Principles”.
In 2015 the Foundation announced a $15m contribution towards a $20m project to push trans “rights” across the world called the Global Trans Initiative.
This $15m was in addition to the generous donations Arcus had already announced to trans groups in the US like the Transgender Law Center. As for the millions it spent every year in grants to “gay” organisations these now came with the proviso they were signed up to the tenets of gender identity. Stonewall hoovered up almost £150k as it too performed a trans pivot.
Immediately after its trans convention in New York Arcus turned its attention to the burning issue of media representation. On that it had a ready made ally. The same one that gave Janet Mock a stage to sound off about a murdered drag queen in 2012: GLAAD.
GLAAD now pressured studios to give cross-dressing fetishists their moment in the Hollywood sun.
In 2016 HBO broadcast ‘The Trans List’ in which Mock interviewed eleven prominent trans people.
Nowhere on any Arcus document I’ve seen does the Foundation acknowledge it helped pay for the film.
Whether Arcus helped pay for the long development process of Pose or underwrote it as part of its media representation strategy I’ve been unable to uncover. Either way somehow Mock would jump from a single television credit on The Trans List to writing and directing on Pose. I’ve never heard of any network approving a writer/director with that little experience.
In this country there are strict rules that prevent Directors of a non-profit benefiting financially. Perhaps in the United States the rules are different. But it’s quite the thing that a non-profit juggernaut put its financial weight behind one of its own Board members.