Jennifer Bilek
Jun 28, 20215 min
Updated: Oct 15, 2022
In 1977, 10 New York City women started a small philanthropic organization to support the work of lesbians and women of color. They came from a variety of backgrounds.
Shortly after that, the organization now known as Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice was born. Reporting on its history for “them” magazine, in 2019, Elyssa Goodman spoke with their former director, who said, “initially no one wanted to fund them because they were an organization focused on the needs of lesbians and people of color.” The women were from various classes and ethnicities and decided to create a program that would primarily award funding to other groups led by lesbians and women of color. The funded organizations ran the gamut from gay liberation, workers’ rights, anti-war initiatives, civil rights, environmental principles, and more. The founding mothers of Astraea created one of the world’s first funds entirely for women. They decreed Astraea would always be comprised of at least 50 percent women of color.
In 1980, Goodman reported, the organization’s first grants were given to women organizers and artists throughout the Northeastern United States and ranged from $100 to $1,000. The grants went to supporting the rights of incarcerated women, helping lesbian mothers maintain child custody, developing women’s art spaces, and even a lesbian choir. Astraea became a national organization in 1990.
The first winners of Astraea’s Lesbian Writers Fund in 1991 were: Melinda Goodman, Yasmin V. Tambiah, Mariana Romo-Carmona, Magdalena Zscokke, and Ana Maria Simo, judged by Audre Lorde, Jewelle Gomez, Gloria Anzaldua, and Sarah Schulman. That year, the organization also bestowed its Sappho Award of Distinction and grant upon Audre Lorde.
Those were the days—women for women. I could weep with nostalgia.
A few years later the men moved into LGB social justice work and brought in all the earmarks of big business. Gill Foundation was founded in 1994 and began driving vast sums of money to create systematic change with big donors and, eventually, the power of big money. It represented, for Gill Foundation founder Tim Gill, a vast metamorphosis in philanthropy, which reflected changes in the economy. The so-called “new economy,” according to Gill, “had its roots in the high-technology industry, resulting in more people with disposable income than ever before. Moreover, many of the new economy donors brought with them the values and business practices they had learned from the for-profit community, combined with a desire to create social change in the same way their risk-taking helped create the new economy.” Once gay marriage was procured in 2015, Gill thought just like the businessman he is. Gender identity became the new cause celebre for his LGBT NGO. Gender identity opened markets in sexual identity, identities needing protection. By 2018, “transgender” and “gender identity” took center stage in their funding report.
In 2000, Jon Stryker, banker, and heir to a multi-billion dollar medical corporation, founded the LGBT NGO Arcus Foundation, which saw the deconstruction of lesbian culture, the rise of fetishism, and the gender identity market. Where lesbians, gays, and bisexuals were once offered support in a grassroots movement of their kin, they were now set to be erased.
In 2000, Astraea Foundation received its first Arcus Foundation grant, and its focus shifted from women to sexual and ”gender minorities.” Over the years, Astraea Foundation has seen close to twelve million dollars in funding from Arcus Foundation, the most donations to any Arcus Foundation grantee. By 2020 all that was left of lesbians on the Astraea Foundation Welcome page was the L in the LGBTQI+ acronym.
In 2010 the grants to Astraea took another slight shift to support “gender minorities,” specifically in the global south, a distinct focus of Arcus Foundation. In 2011 beyond their usual hundreds of thousands in annual funding from Arcus, they received $200,000., specifically for initiating the Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE), a gender industry organization fighting for the depathologization of body dissociation & the erosion of women’s sex-based rights & sexual orientation. By 2012 Astraea was receiving three separate grants, in the hundreds of thousands, from Arcus Foundation.
In 2013, GATE, with other gender industry activists and funders, got together in Berlin to explore new ways to bring resources to “trans” communities. At a subsequent meeting two years later in Istanbul, the International Trans Fund (ITF) was born to drive gender identity ideology south. Funded two and a half million dollars from Arcus Foundation to create the initiative, Astraea Lesbian Foundation, supported by Open Society Foundation and the US government under the Obama administration, hosted the meeting.
In 2013 Astraea Foundation, among other monies they received from Arcus Foundation, also procured $50,000. for the Global Philanthropy Project (GPP). GPP is the primary thought leader and go-to partner for donor coordination on global LGBTI work. GPP Director Mathew Hart, with Astraea Foundation, has coordinated a movement to discredit those resisting gender identity ideology, framing anyone who disagrees with this ideology of body dissociation as rabid, bigoted religious conservatives, setting the international stage for global online conferences to promote the same. This GPP and Astraea Foundation movement to discredit those who critique gender ideology is driven by Arcus Foundation and is partnered with, The Baring Foundation in the UK, Dreilinden gGmbH in Germany, and ironically The Global Fund for Women.
In 2014 the “I” was added to the LGBTQ+ matrix to support the idea there are a multiplicity of sexes (a new marketing constituency buying medical identities).
By 2017 China, Dominican Republic, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago were added to the countries being colonized by Arcus Foundation through deep funding to Astraea to drive gender identity ideology (body dissociation) through the global south. A grant to Astraea to bolster the idea that intersex constitutes other human sexes received a whopping $400,000. grant.
By 2018, Astraea Foundation was in full post-modernist mode, supporting queer identities and celebrating their part in getting gender bills passed.
What has all this activism and money from the good ol’ boy's network culminated in? In funding for men, of course, with a mission to empower men claiming unique sex identities. In 2021 Astraea Foundation now exists as a handmaiden of the Arcus Foundation and the global movement toward human disembodiment for the profiteering of the medical-industrial complex. Astraea also receives funding from AbbVie Foundation, part of the worldwide Pharma giant that makes the puberty blocker Lupron, which has a starring role in the arrested development of children caught up in the gender industry. Through their lesbian front for Arcus Foundation, their funding supports the conversion therapy of young lesbians in the guise of "gender identity" and the male fetishization of womanhood. Though they may not be aware, they are contributing to a social engineering goal of deconstructing human sexual dimorphism and the erasure of women. Astraea Lesbian Foundation Mission and Vision statements now advocate for everyone’s issues, aside, it seems, lesbians, who have already been erased.
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