How the Hormel ‘SPAM’ Fortune Changed the History of LGBT Rights

James Hormel, the billionaire philanthropist whose father built a family fortune producing one of the most popular canned food products of the 20th century, SPAM, singlehandedly changed the course of LGBT history through his financing of causes throughout his life.

A proud alumni of Swarthmore College, where he was an undergraduate, Hormel went on to attend the University of Chicago Law School afterwards. 

Hormel, who died in August earlier this year, is one of the individuals featured in “The Lives They Lived” story in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

Hormel provided the seed money for the Human Rights Campaign Fund — now the Human Rights Campaign and the largest L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group in the country — and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. He also made smaller donations to countless other groups and efforts, ranging from a documentary film that taught tolerance to elementary-school students to an annual L.G.B.T.Q. academic conference at his alma mater. Alongside the conference every year, Swarthmore students hosted a debauched, gender-​bending party, where the silver-haired Hormel, in a business-​casual uniform of oxford shirt and khakis, would dance awkwardly but enthusiastically alongside cross- and undressed college kids.

When Bill Clinton sought to make Hormel the ambassador to Luxembourg, an unremarkable political appointment often offered to large political donors suddenly became a referendum on LGBT rights when faced with pernicious Republican refusal to accept Hormel as a candidate.

New York Times: The ambassador appointment from Clinton, one of the many Democratic politicians to whom Hormel had donated prolifically, that cemented Hormel’s place in L.G.B.T.Q. history. Hormel was poised to be America’s first openly gay ambassador, and Senate Republicans objected to his nomination not because of his lack of foreign-policy experience — awarding ambassadorships to political contributors was a bipartisan practice — but because of his sexuality. Hormel, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma warned, was “a gay activist who puts his agenda ahead of the agenda of America.”