Dateline–San Francisco, CA

Charismatic leader challenges affluent gay men to transform political agenda

The crowd of more than 200 men could be mistaken for a gathering of young Republicans. Sharply dressed and well heeled, the invited guests fill both floors of the Kenneth Cole boutique in downtown San Francisco and are spilling onto the sidewalk by the time the evening’s program begins.

Shortly after 7:30 p.m., a lithesome man in his early 30s takes the stage. After making a few off-microphone jokes with reporters at the front of the room, Clay Beauchamps announces, “Brothers, you are here to pick up where your late boyfriends left off.” The room falls silent and then slowly fills with applause.

During the next two hours Beauchamps and other speakers will implore, beseech, upbraid, encourage, and motivate the audience to fight for everything from immigrant rights to low-income housing and even universal mental health care. Rather than being put off, the crowd, sipping complementary Absolut cocktails and mingling in a room where $300-a-pair shoes are not uncommon, is electrified. By 10 p.m. nearly three quarters of the men have pledged their time or money – or both – to Beauchamps’s revolutionary campaign.

For the last two years Beauchamps and his small cadre of politically active and financially successful gay men have been organizing similar events in metropolitan areas across the country. Based in San Francisco, the loosely knit team is single-mindedly pursuing an ambitious agenda of transforming the political identity of gay men in the United States.

“Have you heard the one about how to keep minorities out of the country club?” Beauchamps asks. “You let one in and then he keeps the rest out.” Without missing a beat, the wry financier laughs knowingly at his own joke. It is vintage Beauchamps.

Perhaps the key to Beauchamps’s almost cultlike draw is the persistence with which he has challenged well-to-do gay men to “embrace their minority status.” He contends that gay men are at a crossroads and that they can either take a stand for something more than their own welfare or be absorbed into the mainstream.

“In the past, the cause was AIDS, AIDS, AIDS,” Beauchamps explains. “But if all of America is tuning in, our cause must be AIDS and poverty and education and racism. We’re card-carrying minorities with money in the bank. Who better to fight the good fight?”

The scion of a wealthy San Francisco family, the handsome Beauchamps could pass for a stylish jet-setter were it not for what his friends call a “bad case of political Tourette’s.” From the age of 19, Beauchamps has had a knack for putting himself in the center of some rather unlikely debates.

During his college years, the irascible heir to a sizable shipping fortune first angered his parents by picking a very public fight with former California governor and family friend Pete Wilson on the subject of Iran-contra. After graduating, the Stanford economics major camped out in downtown San Francisco for a week to protest the plight of the city’s homeless. Throughout it all, members of the Beauchamps clan have refused to comment publicly on Clay’s polemical escapades. Of course, it doesn’t help matters that this political wunderkind is also unapologetically gay.

Today, Beauchamps’s campaigns are inspiring more than his family’s ire. In the past two years he has raised millions of dollars and deputized hundreds of influential gay men in crusades on behalf of causes not traditionally associated with the gay community. Building shelters for battered women. Funding research on environmental racism. There’s even a job training program for ex-convicts with Beauchamps’s name on it.

Despite his role as catalyst of an unlikely political zeitgeist, Beauchamps bristles at recent press depictions of him as a powerful populist with p.c. leanings. In fact, he attributes his success as much to the social networking opportunities afforded by his “rabble-rousing” events as to the inherent worthiness of the political causes he advocates.

Calling the politicized gay man an endangered species, Beauchamps believes mainstreaming has unsavory cultural as well as political consequences. He defends his own lavish lifestyle as vigorously as he pursues the concerns facing other minorities. “I’m certainly not taking a vow of poverty for any cause,” declares the financier who favors Helmut Lang suits and hundred-dollar haircuts. “However, I’m willing to do just about anything else to help others who are on the outside looking in. I like to think the revolution will be catered.”