Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS has just announced it is canceling an event it had planned for next month after the event space owners hosted a fundraiser for Ted Cruz.
When Parkview Developers Mati Weiderpass and Ian Reisner, two gay, rich, NYC real estate magnates, decided to host a fundraising event for Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz, perhaps they didn’t understand the backlash that meeting would produce. The men, formerly a couple and now business partners, owe their fortune to the many LGBT people who frequent their gay-focused properties, including The OUT NYC, a hotel in the trendy and heavily-LGBT populated Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. The iconic XL gay bar and nightclub makes its home at The OUT NYC as well.
The pair also own a reported three-quarters of the commercial real estate in the predominantly gay-getaway of Fire Island – where they are planning an “OUTpost Pines Hotel” – along with several dozen other properties in New York City, including the NYC club 42West.
Today, decades-old non-profit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS released a statement announcing they are canceling a May event scheduled for 42West, in response to Weiderpass and Reisner’s hosting of Sen. Cruz.
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Cruz has been a vociferous and strident anti-gay activist, who only recently claimed the LGBT community and its allies who opposed Indiana’s discriminatory Religious Freedom Restoration Act were “waging a jihad.” On Thursday, the Tea Party Republican Senator introduced legislation that would make it constitutional to ban same-sex marriage.
“It is with regret that we have decided to cancel this year’s edition of the Broadway Bares Solo Strips fundraiser, which was scheduled for May 10 at the NYC club 42West. We cannot in good conscience hold an event at a venue whose owners have alienated our community, as reflected in an April 23 New York Times story and an April 24 follow-up post,” Executive Director Tom Viola said in the statement.
“It is a rare instance where the actions of a donor negatively impacts us as an organization and potentially jeopardizes our relationship with others whose support is integral to our success,” the statement continues, suggesting that Weiderpass and Reisner’s hosting of Cruz has made them toxic to the community. “But when it does occur, in a way that’s blatantly against all we stand and work for, we can’t pretend it doesn’t come with consequences. Silence is not a neutral position. It is complicit.”
The group, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars since its inception in the late ’80s, was also quick to point out the cancelation, and distancing from Weiderpass and Reisner, was not “partisan politics or punishment,” but rather in keeping with their mission of “doing what’s right to ultimately ensure that our commitment to the men, women and children we serve cannot be questioned.”
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