The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Editors' Note: From San Francisco, Guest blogger and advocate Michael Petrelis reports stories the mainstream media choose to ignore. Michael has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, CNN, ABC News, and National Public Radio. He has been quoted by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Raw Story, The Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, and Stars & Stripes.

George Orwell would have chuckled a few times over how the Human Rights Campaign skewed the English language when describing their clothing/housewares/useless junk outlet on 19th and Castro as an action center. The closest it came to being a space to organize or politically strategize was when gay tourists took action and whipped out their wallets to spend money on items emblazoned with the HRC equal symbol.

In December, when the group announced it was taking over the lease for what had been Harvey Milk's camera shop and genuine action center for the community, HRC's release stressed the supposed action center aspects of its commercial venue.

That was last month, and now HRC is now longer pretending their store is anything but that and the empty words action center have been dropped from the sign on their old store's window:

This is one of the banners in the Castro storefront that will soon start peddling HRC merchandise:

As I was snapping photos, HRC store workers and volunteers were going in and out of what used to be Harvey's shop, and I took this picture of the still under construction interior that is starting to fill up with t-shirts:

It feels quite strange to be saying something nice about HRC, but here goes. I like that they're finally being honest about the proper word to define their store. Now if only they would get with democratically engaging the community beyond their A-gay donors and Democratic Party bosses, that would really please a lot of gay folks.