The Amazing Pace of Chip Arndt, Co-founder of CouplesforEquality.org

To say that Chip Arndt is excited about his new project, CouplesforEquality.org (C4E) is an understatement. Just get him started. Passionate about it, he will not stop talking about C4E until there is no oxygen left with which to build his next breath. C4E, a digital library of radiant photos and stories of couples—gay and straight—celebrating their love and championing equality, is his baby.

In short, it would not be inaccurate to describe this baby as a reflection of the wonderful love and life to be had after a person learns the “itgetsbetter.org” message of Dan Savage.

Arndt has been a Miami resident for six years and an accomplished LGBT activist locally and nationally since his 2003 win on television’s The Amazing Race 4 made him famous and gave him a strong platform for living. While other men might have used that platform and the blessing of exceptionally good looks to model underwear, Arndt, a product of both Yale and Harvard, aimed higher. Even an abbreviated list of past and present involvements is lengthy and includes The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Care Resource, Dining Out For Life, Gay American Heroes Foundation, AIDS Walk Miami, GLAAD, Lambda Legal, Human Rights Campaign, 2008 Electoral College and The Hetrick-Martin Institute.

Arndt is a business consultant by profession, and in describing the newly launched C4E, he emphasized its careful positioning.

“I’m an entrepreneur who likes to start a business on the back of a napkin. All the same, I do support existing LGBT programs. For me, C4E is like building a different mousetrap, not necessarily a better mousetrap. We took a long time to set this up before launching it on April 16th. Our site will work in partnership with all other LGBT advocacy groups. C4E is additive, not competitive. We’ve come up with a wonderfully simplistic tag line ‘Love Above All’ and the goal is to create water cooler chat among people who might not be part of the LGBT conversation. If a straight person says to a friend ‘You should check out the photo I posted on C4E’, we get one step closer to equality because, as everyone knows, a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Arndt is pleasantly surprised by C4E’s instantaneous growth. He had thought that he would have to “seed” interest in the site by asking coupled friends to post photos. Instead, he reports the opposite.

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