A Curious Eye

Next month, Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese is set to end his tenure at the LGBT organization he’s led since 2005. Politically, the transition in leadership comes at an interesting time, with the White House up for grabs in a few months and growing calls for President Obama to not only sign an executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT employees, but also to complete his evolution on the marriage equality front. Multiple states are grappling over marriage, while LGBT-related bills both recent (the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, for example) and long-in-the-tooth (ENDA) are pending in Congress.

Since news broke of Solmonese’s departure in August, the organization has been mum on the executive search process. Reached by phone, HRC spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz declined to give details on when a successor to Solmonese may be announced or who may be among the finalists for the job. Multiple outside sources, meanwhile, speculated that the following LGBT leaders could fit the job description to run the 1-million-member-plus organization.