LOS ANGELES — Glaad almost died in 2014.
After years of fighting homophobic news coverage and working to bring about inclusion in the entertainment industry, the L.G.B.T. advocacy organization found itself losing money, scrambling to adapt to the rise of digital media and struggling to be taken seriously in Hollywood.
“I was given a scary mandate,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, who was named Glaad’s chief executive in late 2013. “Fix it or shut it down.”
Determined to revive the nonprofit, Ms. Ellis pursued new donors, including the oil heiress Ariadne Getty and the Coca-Cola Company. She created a “rapid response” unit to contend with online media; Glaad now advises Twitter and Facebook on content policies. And she rebuilt Glaad’s credibility in Hollywood.
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But Glaad again finds itself at a crossroads. Success has emboldened Ms. Ellis, 47, to push the organization deeper into national politics with a gutsy and potentially historic mission: to build support for a constitutional amendment that would explicitly protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination.
“We are now actively working to make it part of the conversation for the presidential 2020 race,” Ms. Ellis said, adding that she had been galvanized by the Trump administration’s sweeping deconstruction of protections for gay and transgender Americans.
But the Glaad leader is facing early skepticism from a surprising community: her own.
Some gay rights leaders privately complain that the group has gone rogue. Amending the Constitution, they say, is not a realistic way to advance equality, in part because of the polarized nature of American politics. They fret that an amendment campaign could siphon resources from priorities like the Equality Act, which would add gender identity and sexual orientation to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“I don’t think that most advocates see this amendment as a promising avenue at the moment,” said Naomi Goldberg, policy research director at the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that focuses on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender parity.
A few influential L.G.B.T. leaders wonder if the amendment idea is a ploy by the group to raise money — a broader mandate to pitch to donors now that Hollywood has finally started to heed its demands for inclusivity.
A recent Glaad report showed that 18 percent of studio films in 2018 included an L.G.B.T. character, up from 13 percent the previous year. Three of the four acting awards at the most recent Oscars were for gay or lesbian roles. In May, the Elton John bio-musical, “Rocketman,” became the first major studio movie to depict gay sex.
By Glaad’s estimation, 9 percent of regular characters on scripted broadcast series in 2018 were gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender — an all-time high. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” has been a hit for 11 seasons. The CW’s “Supergirl” features a transgender superhero. Disney Channel has gay characters.
“Glaad has done a great job in its lane, and I wish it would stay there,” said a senior official at one gay rights organization, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid “a public spat that wouldn’t be beneficial to the movement.”
Ms. Ellis, who is as reliably upbeat and laser focused as a Reese Witherspoon character, said she understood the cynicism, but rejected it as misinformed.
“We’ve moved from a Hollywood watchdog to a cultural change agent,” she said over breakfast at the Beverly Hilton. “With that, we’ve expanded how we move hearts and minds to create a more accepting world for all people.”
She added: “We have now re-established Glaad. How do we apply our momentum to a big, bold vision?”
Ms. Ellis has powerful supporters in the entertainment industry, including the television mogul Greg Berlanti, whose hits include “Riverdale” and “The Flash,” and Bob Greenblatt, chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, which includes HBO.
“I think she knows that the amendment is a moonshot, but at least someone is talking about it,” Mr. Greenblatt said. “I find her smart and attention-getting.”
Mr. Greenblatt and Mr. Berlanti were two of the Hollywood power brokers whom Ms. Ellis invited to attend a kickoff for the group’s amendment initiative in December. The event was held at a mansion in Los Angeles. Glaad staff handed out hardcover copies of the Constitution, including the 27 amendments. On the final page was Glaad’s proposed amendment, which would also protect women, people of color and disabled individuals from discrimination.
Ms. Ellis started her pitch by citing alarming statistics. Gay and transgender people can still be legally fired from their jobs simply for their orientation in more than half the states. She said roughly 300 anti-L.G.B.T. bills had been put forward in state legislatures since 2016.
“Build this into your scripts,” she told the Hollywood gathering. “You create culture, and we need to build awareness that we’re not protected, we’re not safe — that we need this ultimate protection.”
The next morning, Ms. Ellis flew to Washington to meet with lawmakers about the amendment, which would require approval from both houses of Congress (each by a two-thirds majority) and ratification by at least 38 states.
“I expected some resistance, some ‘you guys are out of your minds,’ but our meetings on the Hill went phenomenally well,” she said, noting that Glaad had hired the Raben Group, a lobbying firm, to help with the effort. “We see a path.”
Glaad calls its idea the Equality Amendment. It is not related to the Equal Rights Amendment, which focuses more narrowly on gender equality and was approved by Congress in 1972; state ratification failed in 1982, although supporters have recently revived that effort. (The ERA Coalition supports the Glaad proposal.)
Glaad, formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, was founded in 1985 to fight homophobic coverage of AIDS in the news media. In time, Glaad expanded its work to advertising and entertainment. It lobbied Hallmark to remove “lesbian” from a list of banned greeting card words in 1991 and helped persuade ABC to allow the title character on “Ellen,” played by Ellen DeGeneres, to come out as gay in 1997.
But the organization started to get an unsavory reputation in the late 2000s. A respected Glaad leader, Joan M. Garry, had stepped down. The group seemed overly focused on somewhat tacky, fund-raising awards dinners. Some studio executives viewed Glaad as a corrupt watchdog — just write a big enough check and it would look the other way.
There were wins, as when the Boy Scouts of America lifted its ban on gay youths in 2013 after a sustained Glaad campaign. But the group had started to bleed cash. Income totaled $3.7 million in 2013 while spending was $4.9 million.
At the same time, Ms. Ellis was becoming an accidental media activist. She and her wife, Kristen Ellis-Henderson, a member of the rock band Antigone Rising, had chronicled their concurrent pregnancies in 2008 for Real Simple magazine and published a memoir about lesbian parenting in 2011. A photograph of them kissing ran on the cover of Time two years later with the headline, “Gay Marriage Already Won.”
Ms. Ellis, who grew up on Staten Island and attended Russell Sage College, had spent her career in magazine publishing, ultimately overseeing marketing for more than a dozen titles at Time Inc. But she could see that magazines were dying, at least in print. She wanted to try something new.
Since taking over Glaad, Ms. Ellis has tripled the group’s annual income. Ms. Getty’s largess helped Ms. Ellis create the Glaad Institute, which trains volunteers across the country to use media (social media in particular) to battle homophobia. Glaad now has 70 corporate sponsors — up from 30 in 2014 — in part because Ms. Ellis and Ms. Getty started to hold annual events at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“Sarah Kate knows how to work with businesses, and businesses are taking more of a stand on these issues now,” said Jim Fitterling, the chief executive of Dow and a Glaad donor. (Ms. Ellis helped him come out as gay in 2014.)
Glaad also changed its approach in Hollywood. Under Ms. Ellis, the group spends more time working proactively with producers. For instance, Glaad reviewed scripts, visited the set and advised on the publicity campaign for “Boy Erased,” a recent Focus Features film about church-supported gay conversion therapy. Netflix recently asked Glaad to advise on its “Tales of the City” mini-series.
Before, Glaad was mostly reactive.
Ms. Ellis said Glaad had a lot more work to do in Hollywood, despite the entertainment industry’s new willingness to embrace diversity.
“A watchdog never goes away,” she said.
But she insisted that Glaad must also expand. “I’m a builder, not a maintainer,” Ms. Ellis said. “Once I’m in maintenance mode, I’m not stimulated.”