The Advocate.com is reporting that Citibank may be in some hot water after someone at the bank shut down, without notice, the business checking account of a new online gay social networking and travel site, Fabulis.com, before the site even went online. Bank employees reportedly told Fabulis founder Jason Goldberg that the account had been frozen due to the “objectionable content” on the site’s blog, which was operating prior to the site’s launch.
What was the objectionable content? Mainly photos of men in hoodies printed with the word “Fabulis.” As Advocate.com reports: Two other bank representatives said Fabulis’s content was not in line with Citibank’s standards and the banking relationship would be terminated — even though the pre-launch blog features no sex, nudity, or violence.”
Of course, once somebody started complaining, someone else from Citibank called Goldberg — who by the way is also the founder of Jobster.com — to apologize most profusely and to assure him that whoever told him there was a problem with the site’s content was just wrong. The bank even issued a statement today saying it had to do with a tecnical error and some incomplete paperwork and everything is fine now and Goldberg is a valuable customer, etc.
Richard Socarides, former LGBT advisor to President Clinton who is also a Fabulis board member, surmised that perhaps some people at the bank couldn’t handle the videos by young LGBT people talking about coming out and living as out LGBT people. (He said the videos had been sent in as part of a contest asking people to talk about their lives, and maybe it was all just too “jarring” for some at Citibank.)
Socarides also noted that Citibank has a good record on LGBT issues nad has consistently received a 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. But, he added, “if the frontline customer service people at the bank are not educated on these [gay-inclusive] policies, it doesn’t do anyone good.”
It all sounds, as Socarides said, rather “fishy.”
3 Comments
Yes, AT&T has 100 percent rating on HRC index as well. The excuse that frontline people aren’t edumacated on policy is a piss poor excuse. If the bank is so large that they can’t uniformly provide unbigoted service, they don’t deserve a 100 percent rating and they don’t deserve our business. Either require all employees not to be bigots or break the bank up into pieces small enough to properly manage.
Fabulis needs to take their business to someone that wants it.
I’m sure there are plenty of financial institutions, maybe a local credit union or bank, that would love to have access to a big corporate account.
When are these assfucks gonna learn that everybody’s money is the same color?
I’m repulsed by the idea of that nasty gaping hole between womens’ legs, but I still have to do business with them everywhere I go.
My, what a colorful way of putting it, but I agree that Fabulis should send a message by saying “apology accepted” and moving their accounts somewhere where they don’t have to get the green light from the CEO to do business.
And HRC needs to clean up its act and stop giving 100% ratings to companies that check the right boxes but treat their employees and customers like crap. At the very least, anti-LGBT incidents like this should be a nice, big, fat minus 5 points on next year’s rating, no exceptions.