Auckland Pride's co-chair's have responded. Read what they had to say here. It's now eight days since it emerged that the founding creator and organiser of this February's Pride Festival, Julian Cook, had resigned. Cook is well respected. As his resignation became increasingly whispered about through last Monday a growing chorus of glbti community voices, many of whom know Cook or at least respect him for his years of flawless commitment to, and involvement in, some of our greatest Auckland community events, started asking GayNZ.com what on earth had actually happened. GayNZ.com Daily News wondered too. We started to hear that the Pride Board apparently unilaterally cut its direct contact with Cook and instead inserted a newly-appointed Executive Officer into the line of communication and responsibility. So we also began wondering what this need for an Executive Officer was based on, how the position was filled and where was the accountability in the layers beneath all this unfortunate and baffling affair. Accountability to the glbti communities that is. The Pride Festival organisation owes its existence, mandate and funding to the fact that it is supposed to be of, by and for the glbti communities of Auckland. Those of us who have supported Pride every step of the way, since encouraging attendance at the very first public consultation meetings held by the steering group which judged support for an annual major glbti festival in Auckland, know what the aims and hopes were which led to the creation of the Pride Festival. It got off, event-wise and organisationally, to rather a good start. But in recent times Pride seems to be less open and community-focused. Later last Monday the board responded with a narrowly-focused press release, hurried out by the Executive Officer just hours after this mess started becoming public. We read their explanation that Cook had left to "pursue other interests." Hackneyed, glib and dismissive, implying that he had decided to abandon the commitment he had made to the board (and incidentally, to his community) and flit off to something new which had caught his eye. That was, apparently, all the glbti community should, need or want to know. Those of us in the glbti communities with more than half a brain or a teaspoon of journalistic nous instinctively smelled a rat. Cook himself is maintaining a tactful and professional silence. But clearly he was deeply upset about how he was being treated by the board before he resigned, according to a little information which has come our way from some of those to whom he turned for emotional and professional support. On behalf of our tens of thousands of glbti readers, including those in the glbti communities who are incredulous about what seems to be happening, on and below the surface of this affair, GayNZ.com Daily News sent a small starter list of questions to the board last Monday afternoon. The questions we sent the board a week ago Not a whisper has come back, not even an acknowledgement of our email, nor a reproach, nor a stalling response. Not even a "no comment." Nothing. Our news reports of the growing community support for Cook and noting the board's continuing silence have also not generated a single word of acknowledgement, clarification or explanation from the board. Silence. Hunkered down, for eight days now, under their protective dome the Pride board is staying tight and unresponsive, apparently neither listening nor deliberating and certainly not communicating with the glbti communities. Perhaps the Pride board has somehow become collectively naive, or ignorant, or arrogant or disconnected or isolated, or self-absorbed. In issuing that single incredibly simplistic and misleading press release then ducking for cover and seemingly hoping that the communities' unanswered questions will somehow evaporate and our focus move on, this board is displaying further evidence of disconnection with the real wider glbti world out here. There may well be good reasons for the Executive Director role, and for it not being advertised, and for the fallout between Cook and the board – why not simply explain them? If it’s all "business as usual", and we're just making a fuss, as suggested by the board's one or two brief and similarly dismissive social media posts, why not just say so on the record, to the whole community? We're not on a superfluous witch hunt, we are after simple transparency. There are surely at least a few good people on the Pride board... and yet somehow they and their colleagues have got something dreadfully wrong. Those who have brought their professional skills onto the board must surely be wondering how this slowly brewing fiasco will eventually look on their resumes or in a Google search results list. There is clearly some sort of new agenda going on or culture emerging beneath the Pride board's dome of silence that may be at odds with the spirit and intention of Pride's founding and its initial community mandate. It's time this board came out from under the dome and fronted up to its glbti communities in a spirit of transparency, responsibility, accountability and, please, honesty. - Jay Bennie Jay Bennie - 17th November 2014