SCHOLARSHIPS
The David B. Goodstein Point Scholarship
David B. Goodstein was born in Denver, Colorado in 1932, descendant of a pioneering Jewish family of rough and tumble steelmen, oilmen, and fighters. He felt his difference as a gay youth, a "sissy", from a young age, taking different routes home from school each day to avoid bullies, and hiding under the porch to do his homework so as to avoid his disapproving father and uncle. He rebelled against his father by enrolling at Cornell University to study law instead of a Western college to study business, as his father dictated. He was disinherited, and cut off from most of his family.
After graduating from Cornell University and the Columbia University School of Law, he served in the army, and then practiced law in New York City as a criminal attorney, volunteering his services as a fundraiser and organizer for social service agencies and for the Civil Rights Movement, notably the Freedom Riders. Next, he moved to Wall Street, where he founded Compufund, a pathbreaking mutual fund that introduced statistical analysis of common stocks using computers.
In 1971 he was hired as Vice President for portfolio investment by a major California bank, and was almost immediately fired, ostensibly for being gay. He harnessed his anger and energy to the gay rights movement and the California Democratic party. He was instrumental in attaining the passage of California's consensual sex legislation in 1974, and, together with Steve Endean, founded the Gay Rights National Lobby in 1976, and HRC in 1980. He was a co-founder of Concerned Voters of California, a gay rights group which helped defeat a 1978 initiative that would have banned homosexuals from teaching or working in public schools. He was also the founder and chairman of the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation, a gay service organization dealing with drug abuse.
In 1975 Goodstein bought the Advocate, a Los Angeles-based gay magazine. Within ten years it was the largest circulation gay news magazine in the world, as it remains today. After Goodstein and the Advocate were featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, his father reconciled with him.
Working with Rob Eichberg, Goodstein founded the "Advocate Experience," an intensive weekend long "life-transforming" and leadership workshop designed primarily for gays and lesbians. Goodstein died on 22 June 1985 of complications arising from cancer.
David Goodstein would have been thrilled with the mission and accomplishments of the Point Foundation.