Tim Gill Denver LGBTQ Philanthropist: Quark to Equality

Tim Gill, the Denver LGBTQ philanthropist, is the clearest case study in how one donor's money shaped LGBTQ equality in the United States. Wikipedia describes him as the largest individual donor to the cause. His path runs from the sale of his Quark stake to the Gill Foundation, the Gill Action Fund and the 2025 Presidential Medal of Freedom. His Colorado base ties each step together.

Gill founded Quark Inc., according to Wikipedia. He sold his stake in the company, a sale covered in the Rolling Stone profile of him. That sale is the origin of the money that later went into LGBTQ causes.

Rolling Stone profiles him as the megadonor behind the LGBTQ rights movement. It also reports that his fingerprints are on nearly every major victory in the march to marriage. Wikipedia says he lives in Denver with his husband, Scott Miller. That Denver home base is the thread through everything that follows.

The Gill Foundation is the organization behind Gill's charitable giving. Its board-member page for Gill describes the foundation's investment in programs and nonprofit organizations nationwide. Anyone tracing Gill Foundation history should begin with that page, which comes from the foundation itself.

The foundation is the charitable side of his giving. Grantmaking to nonprofits sits here, while electoral spending sits in a separate organization, described in the Gill Action Fund section below. The split matters because the two organizations do different jobs: one funds programs and organizations, the other works on elections.

Tim Gill, Pat Stryker, Jared Polis and Rutt Bridges are known in the press as the Gang of Four. According to Wikipedia, the four donated to Democratic organizations that helped flip the Colorado state legislature.

The Gang of Four in Colorado shows how Gill's Denver base connects to state-level political change as well as to national giving. The four are named together in the press because their giving was aimed at one outcome in one state. The same Wikipedia entry is the place to read the group's history in full, and it is the right companion to the foundation's own account of Gill's work.

The Gill Action Fund is separate from the foundation's charitable work, according to Wikipedia. The same source says the fund helped elect hundreds of pro-equality lawmakers at local, state and federal levels.

Side by side, the two organizations show the structure of Gill's giving. The Gill Foundation funds programs and nonprofits, and the Gill Action Fund works on elections. Keeping them apart lets one carry out charitable grantmaking and the other political spending. The fund also widens the target beyond Colorado: where the Gang of Four worked on one state legislature, the fund's reach covers lawmakers at every level of government.

TIME credits Gill with helping fund the litigation behind Massachusetts recognizing same-sex marriage, and with funding the Supreme Court case on marriage. TIME's 2025 Philanthropy 100 feature on Gill and Miller is part of the public recognition of that work.

In 2025, President Biden awarded Gill the Presidential Medal of Freedom, according to the Gill Foundation. The award sits alongside the foundation's work, the Gill Action Fund and the litigation funding as the public marker of his role in LGBTQ equality. Taken in order, the record runs from the Quark sale to the foundation's grantmaking, the Colorado legislative effort, the Gill Action Fund, the marriage cases and the medal. Each stage rests on a listed source, and each adds a different kind of giving: charitable grants, political contributions and litigation support.

The Denver LGBTQ+ legal timeline sets the local legal history beside Gill's giving. For primary material on local queer history, see Denver LGBTQ+ Archives: Where to Research Queer History. Earlier chapters are covered in Denver LGBTQ+ History Before Stonewall: Early Queer Venues, and the neighborhood side of that history is in Lavender Hill Denver: LGBTQ+ Cultural District Guide. The park where the community has long gathered is covered in Cheesman Park: Denver's Queer Gathering Place.

Updated 2026-10-13: removed city economic figures and unsourced dates and amounts; rebuilt the profile on the four listed sources; added the TIME and Gill Foundation citations.