Wal-Mart puts on a gay-friendly face.

Wal-Mart offers no domestic-partner benefits and has been known to decline to sell certain LGBT-oriented products. So it wasn't surprising that a national debate erupted August 21 when the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce announced a partnership with the international retail behemoth as part of its supplier diversity initiative.

Gay union leaders quickly weighed in. "There's nothing about Wal-Mart that's friendly to any worker or customer, not just those from the LGBT community. Wal-Mart may have low prices, but these low prices come with a high cost," said Jeremy Bishop, program director of Pride at Work, a constituency group of the AFL-CIO, referring to the Arkansas-based company's limited health insurance and worker benefits. "Wal-Mart is [just] looking for a way to get more LGBT people to go to their stores and buy from them."

In a case of strange bedfellows, the far right more or less agreed. Longtime antigay crusader Peter LaBarbera [see page 18] condemned the company--"a favorite of God-fearing Middle American customers"--for aligning with "extremist homosexual activists."

Bob McAdam, Wal-Mart's vice president of corporate affairs, responded that there's "a lot of misinformation about our policies and what we stand for," and noted that the company added gays and lesbians to its antidiscrimination policy and founded an LGBT resource group three years ago.

The partnership with NGLCC means that Dee Breazeale, a Wal-Mart vice president, will join the chamber's Corporate Advisory Council, which works to increase awareness of the importance of workplace diversity, and that Wal-Mart will sponsor two upcoming chamber conferences. That, said Justin Nelson, NGLCC's president and cofounder, showed that the company is committed to change.

"Anyone who says they're unwilling to sit at a table and talk with a company interested in reaching out for help would be doing a great disservice to the LGBT community," Nelson said.