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For a year, airlines have been locked in a battle with San Francisco over the city's "Equal Benefits Ordinance." That law requires city contractors that provide benefits to spouses of married employees either to give equivalent benefits to those with domestic partners or lose the city's business. A gay public relations firm is doing damage-control for the airline identified by city officials and gay activists as the worst offender.

The Equal Benefits Ordinance has been a success, according to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. As of March, the compliance rate stood at 91 percent, and many large companies, including Chevron and Pacific Bell, have been persuaded to provide domestic partner benefits. In February 1997, the city thought it had an agreement with United Airlines to comply as well. At the time, United was negotiating for a new facility at San Francisco International Airport.

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Fair-weather friend

But less than three months after the city signed an interim lease, United joined with fellow members of the Air Transport Association to file a lawsuit seeking to overturn the ordinance. The turnabout angered gay SF Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Leslie Katz, who had been in on the negotiations. The local Harvey Milk Lesbian and Gay Democratic Club called for a boycott of United, which was joined by several other gay groups around the US. United, which has solicited gay travellers, found itself with an image problem.

What they needed was a well-connected gay PR firm. They found one: the Washington, DC-based Window Corporation, headed by William Waybourn, who served previously as managing director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and before that, founded the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. Also listed on Window's personnel roster, with the title "senior counselor," is David Mixner, a longtime gay politico and sometime "Friend of Bill."

Selling out?

Window Vice President Joel Lawson emphasized that the firm is not involved in the ATA lawsuit, but is simply "helping [United] with gay and lesbian issues and helping them reach out to gay and lesbian travellers intelligently and sensitively."

But Milk Club board member Jeff Sheehy accuses the PR firm of "selling out the community for profit."

Window's Lawson rejects the notion that his firm is helping an enemy of the gay community. "I don't feel uncomfortable working for an airline that has the best policies regarding gay and lesbian people in the industry," he says. "United was the first to have a nondiscrimination policy including sexual orientation and the first to have computerized training of personnel relative to sexual orientation"-- whatever that means. "I don't understand why anyone would want to single them out" for a boycott, Lawson insisted, adding that "other airlines have very bad track records."

Skeptics don't need to take his word for it, he added. Independent reviewers such as the gay travel newsletter Out and About have also identified United as the airline industry's leader in gay-friendly policies.

Other controversies loom

Not quite. Out and About's most recent airline evaluation, published in January, directly contradicted several of Lawson's claims. American Airlines, not United, was the first to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy, the newsletter reported. United earned a "Rock Bottom" rating as recently as last July-- about the time they hired Window Corp. Overall, "Until United's recent advances, American has been running circles... around its competitors in the gay marketplace. They continue to lead by a nose." United did finish ahead of several other carriers, including Alaska Airlines, which flunked nearly all of the newsletters tests, and Delta, which has long had a reputation for being unfriendly to gays.

This is not the first controversy for the gay principals involved with Window Corporation. At GLAAD, Waybourn implemented a restructuring in which local chapters were dissolved and authority centralized, causing some to complain that what had been a grassroots movement was losing its soul. In 1995 and '96, GLAAD paid Window Corp. a total of $273,164 in consulting fees. And a few years ago, Mixner worked for an insurance industry-funded campaign to quash a California health care reform proposal enthusiastically supported by AIDS activists.

Waybourn is also president of a second firm, Window Media, which owns two gay newspapers, Houston Voice and Atlanta's Southern Voice, and has announced plans to buy more. Window's Lawson stressed that the newspaper and PR operations are "totally separate," noting that in an editorial earlier this year Southern Voice criticized a Window client, America Online.

But some observers worry nonetheless. Sally Lehrnman, president of the San Francisco chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, argued that even the perception of a conflict of interest is problematic. "I haven't looked into this company," she noted, but, "the situation of a PR firm owning or being a sister company to a publication that represents itself as an independent news gathering organization is very troubling. Even if they try to keep themselves at arm's length it's difficult to keep their independence."

These concerns are not just academic. In April, US District Court Judge Claudia Wilken issued a complex ruling in the ATA's suit against San Francisco. Wilken put significant limitations on the ordinance while upholding key portions of the law and praising its intent. But you wouldn't know that from Southern Voice's April 16 editorial.

The newspaper states that the judge "struck down the ordinance as it applied to airlines and other businesses engaged in significant out-of-state business." Although Wilken did greatly restrict the law's applicability to the airlines, the statement was wrong on several counts, flatly contradicting the clear language of Judge Wilken's ruling. When this reporter-- for seven years a sporadic Southern Voice contributor-- attempted to correct the mistakes via a letter to the editor, the letter was published with a flip editorial note claiming-- again erroneously-- that "the letter writer presents as 'fact' what is actually the legal position adopted by the city in that litigation."

"While I think it's possible for the journalists and editors who work for Window Media publications to remain autonomous and independent," says Robert Bray, who once handled PR for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and who now works for the Institute for Alternative Journalism, such independence "is frequently not the case." Readers, he said, need to ask themselves, "Are they trying to sell us something? What is not being included?"