Washingtonblade.com, Volume 50, Issue 26, June 28, 2019

COMMEMORATING 50 YEARS OF STRUGGLE AND PROGRESS FULL COVERAGE BEGINS ON PAGE 19

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Special thanks to local artist Lisa Marie Thalhammer who created the artwork for this week’s special cover commemorating the Stonewall Rebellion.

FULL COVERAGE STARTS ON PAGE 19.

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Looking back:

24

Stonewall 50

50 years of the Blade

46

Queery: Gina Nicole Brown

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Comings & Goings

48

D.C. 4th of July events

10

Vigil against violence

50

Arts & Culture

draws 300 to Dupont Circle

52

Bye bye Bobbitt

HRC taps Alphonso David

53

Support system or doormat?

as next president

54

Lyons share

Rep. Brown seeks to ensure

55

NHL expands engagement efforts

equal pay for LGBT workers

56

LGBT Congressional staff happy hour

Georgia’s first Pride

59

Stonewalling equality

parade postponed

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In 1970, news of ‘Christopher Street Liberation Day’ FROM STAFF REPORTS

Forty-nine years ago this month, the Blade reported on the first “Christopher Street Liberation Day” demonstrations commemorating the June 28, 1969 Stonewall Riots.

Per the Blade: “The nation’s first massed-gay demonstration will take place Sunday, June 28 with an estimated 10,000 gays from all over the east coast participating. The event will commemorate the spontaneous reaction of several hundred homosexuals which took place in June of 1969 following a raid on the Stonewall bar in New York City.”

To review the Blade’s one-of-a-kind, 50-year archive, visit washingtonblade.com/archives.

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Comings & Goings A poignant tribute to Daniel Espejel

By PETER ROSENSTEIN

This is a little unusual for this column but something worth sharing. Last week, I attended a “Celebration of Life” for Daniel Espejel a young man who left us much too early. I was honored to know him and his husband Tony Purcell. They had been together for 16 years. Daniel was a brilliantly creative young man with a smile that never stopped. But as I sat at the celebration what moved me and brought most of us to tears was the eulogy written and delivered by Tony’s dad. I thought of Pride and of Stonewall and of how wonderful it would be if every gay boy DANIEL ESPEJEL Photo courtesy Tony Purcell had a family like Tony’s. If every member of the LGBTQ community could be embraced by family like Daniel was. I share this eulogy from Daniel’s father-in-law and hope you will also be moved by it.

Eulogy by Anthony J. Purcell, Sr. We come together this evening to celebrate the life of Daniel Espejel. He would have approved of us holding this celebration in this very appropriate venue, the Women’s National Democratic Club because Daniel’s clientele were mostly women. Everything he did in his flower and cosmetic businesses involved creating beauty and delighting his clientele with his artistic works.

It is said that, “Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life.” Daniel was a true master; he expressed himself using various mediums but was renowned for his floral arrangements. When Daniel entered a building, his beautiful smile and joyous disposition brought energy, love, and life to everyone. His generosity to all was never ending. He was a perfect ambassador for the community to have front and center to soften the hearts and minds of those conservatives who stereotype the community for their beliefs and actions, instead of who they are individually.

Daniel’s business adventure had him hobnobbing with the rich and famous and his resume reads like a “Who’s Who.” His floral arrangements sat at the tables of two Popes, presidents, vice presidents, ambassadors, royalty, heads of state, and many of the society women of Washington, D.C. He touched them all and because of it, they loved him.

Daniel lived the American Dream. He came to the United States at the age of 18 at attend American University. He left behind his parents and 3 siblings in Mexico to achieve his dream and start a new life. A life he would never have an opportunity to have had he stayed in Mexico. All families in America have immigration as their roots because the only real Americans are the American Indians, therefore; we were proud to have Daniel become part of our family. Daniel was able to have an exceptional life in America because of his hard work ethic. He built a successful flower business and he continued to branch out into other business interests.

When we would go out to eat at a restaurant as a family, you could count on Daniel always want to sample some of your meal and to his credit, he would always offer you some of what he had ordered. He loved trying different dishes and cuisines.

He leaves me with the daunting task of decorating our two Christmas trees later this year. This was always his job at Thanksgiving and I am already hearing in my head “That is not the way Daniel did it!”… “Thanks a lot, Mister!” Daniel always thought of my wife and I as his American parents and he would come to me for fatherly advice on numerous issues. My wife always benefitted from Daniel’s expertise in fashion and fads. He spoiled her and buttered her up in ways which I could never match.

The music artist Sting, sang, “When you love somebody, when you love somebody, set them free, free set them free. Free, free, set them free.” We all loved Daniel and that is what we had to do. It is normal for the children to bury their parents, not the parents to be burying their son. We all wanted Daniel to stay with us on Earth, but we took the advice of the medical staff and “Set him free.”

There is no book to reference as a father when you do not have answers that are needed for your son, when he comes to you and asks, “Why?” All you can do is provide comfort, love, and support. Tell him the answers he seeks are not found here at this time and may never be found until the next journey on the road of life. Live one day at a time, then two, then a week, and then a month. Tomorrow will be that one month.

Finally, we want to thank everyone for joining us in celebrating Daniel’s Life this evening. I leave you with thought, maybe, just maybe, Daniel’s clientele has now risen to the very top. He now arranges flowers for God’s table.

Blade reporter robbed on street in Columbia Heights Daytime attack not believed to be motivated by sexual orientation

By LOU CHIBBARO JR. LCHIBBARO@WASHBLADE.COM

Blade reporter CHRIS JOHNSON was shoved to the ground and robbed of his wallet and cell phone on Monday.

Washington Blade photo by Michael Key

Washington Blade political reporter Chris Johnson became yet another victim in a crime spree hitting the D.C. LGBT community in the past two weeks when three male suspects on Monday shoved him to the ground while he was walking on 13th Street, N.W., in Columbia Heights near his home and stole his cell phone and wallet.

D.C. police arrested two of the three suspects believed to have committed the daytime robbery a short time after it happened when a nearby witness called 911 and police arrived while the suspects were still in the area. The third suspect fled before police could apprehend him.

Johnson, while shaken over the incident, was not injured. He said the three young men who committed the robbery did not make any reference to his sexual orientation and he does not believe he was targeted because he’s gay. He said the three were not carrying a weapon.

A D.C. police spokesperson said one of the two arrested is a 17-year-old juvenile male of Southeast D.C. whose name will not be disclosed and the other is 21-year-old Jaleel Ware also of Southeast D.C. A police report says both were charged with robbery.

The robbery of Johnson came at the end of a two-week period in which at least five LGBT people were subjected to violent crimes

or threats of violence. The most serious of the incidents was the June 13 murder of D.C. transgender woman Zoe Spears, 23, who was shot to death in Fairmount Heights, Md., just across the D.C. line near Eastern Avenue.

Prince George’s County police, who are investigating the murder, say they have no suspects and no known motive for the killing.

The other incidents include the attack and assault of a gay male couple walking on U Street, N.W. by a group of nearly a dozen male suspects while one or more of them shouted anti-gay names at the couple. One of the victims was hospitalized after suffering two broken teeth.

During the same two-week period a transgender woman was assaulted by one of three suspects who called her anti-trans names while she was in a grocery store in the city’s Eckington neighborhood.

Another incident involved an unidentified male suspect who pulled out a gun and threatened three transgender women outside the Casa Ruby LGBT community center building on Georgia Avenue, N.W. None of the women were injured.

What appeared to be a sudden crime spree impacting the LGBT community prompted LGBT activists to hold a vigil against violence in Dupont Circle on June 21.

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Vigil against violence draws 300 to Dupont Circle Gathering follows multiple attacks on LGBT community

By LOU CHIBBARO JR. LCHIBBARO@WASHBLADE.COM

From top: A vigil against anti-LGBT violence was held in Dupont Circle on Friday.; RUBY CORADO, center, speaks at the vigil at Dupont Circle on Friday. Washington Blade photos by Michael Key

More than 300 people turned out in Dupont Circle on June 21 for a vigil organized

by LGBT activists in response to five separate incidents of violence against LGBT people in the D.C. area since June 13, including the murder of a transgender woman.

Several speakers at the vigil criticized D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Council for not approving or advocating for a request by a coalition of LGBT groups earlier this year for an additional $3.5 million in the city’s fiscal year 2020 budget for programs that activists say would address the underlying causes of antiLGBT violence.

In a makeshift stage at the Dupont Circle fountain, vigil organizers placed a large poster size photo of 23-year-old trans woman of color Zoe Spears, who was shot to death June 13 in Fairmount

Heights, Md., just across the D.C. border at Eastern Avenue.

Organizers placed another poster size photo on the makeshift stage of another trans woman of color, Ashanti Carmon, who was shot to death on March 30 a few blocks from where Spears’ body was found in Fairmount Heights.

People who knew Spears and Carmon said the two were friends and that Spears told them she was present in the Fairmount Heights area where trans and cisgender female sex workers congregate when Carmon was gunned down.

Trans activist Ruby Corado, founder and executive director of the D.C. LGBT community services center Casa Ruby, told the crowd assembled around the fountain and the two large photos that Spears had been a Casa Ruby client and referred to Corado as “mom.”

“I want you to look at Zoe’s picture,” Corado said. “This is one of the last pictures I took of her. I want you to look at her smile,” said Corado. “And I want to read her last message to me the week before she died.

On Sunday at 12:48 p.m. she said, ‘Hey mom, I’m home … And I love you. Sweet dreams and by the way, happy birthday.’”

According to Corado, on the day before her death Spears sent her one last text message that Corado says she is still trying to understand. ‘Hey mom, can you shoot me $10 so I can eat?”

Corado and others who spoke at the vigil said Spears’ call for money so she could eat was symbolic of her struggle as a trans woman of color to find gainful employment and a sign that existing city programs may be failing trans people in need.

The second of the five incidents during the six-day period last week involving anti-LGBT violence or threats of violence took place June 15 outside the Casa Ruby offices on Georgia Avenue, N.W. Three trans female Casa Ruby clients reported a man approached them in his car and displayed a gun in the parking lot of a restaurant across the street from Casa Ruby. The women fled the area without being harmed, according to Corado.

A D.C. police report of the incident says the same man a few minutes earlier was observed in the Casa Ruby parking lot by a male Casa Ruby employee. The report says the driver of the car told the employee, “I want my dick sucked, go get me one of those trannies.”

One day later, on June 16, Braden Brecht, 21, and his boyfriend, Karl Craven, 24, were attacked, beaten, and robbed by a group of more than a dozen assailants on U Street, N.W., near the gay bar Nellie’s.

The attack left Brecht with two broken teeth and stitches in his lip, which he received during a six-hour stay at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, he told the Washington Blade.

D.C. police, who listed the incident as a hate crime, made three arrests in the case, two juveniles and a 19-year-old male identified as Marcus Britt of Fort Washington, Md. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes crimes committed by adults in the District, said it dropped the charge against Britt. A spokesperson said the office typically drops charges when evidence is insufficient to result in a conviction at trial.

The Office of the D.C. Attorney General, which prosecutes crimes committed by juveniles, has declined to say whether the charges are still pending against the two juveniles arrested in the attack against Brecht and Craven.

Also on June 16, D.C. police said three people were stabbed by one or more unidentified attackers inside the Dupont Circle gay bar Fireplace. Police released photos of two male suspects taken by a video surveillance camera and have asked the public for help in identifying the suspects. Police said the stabbings were the result of an argument between the suspects and victims. The injuries suffered by the victims were not life-threatening according to police.

The last of the five recent incidents took place on June 18 when trans activist Emmelia Talarico was assaulted by one of three male suspects who shouted antiLGBT slurs at her as she was attempting to leave a grocery store in the city’s Eckington neighborhood near where she lives.

A police report says Talarico wasn’t seriously injured. But she has said she and her roommates who live in a house operated by the LGBT and sex worker advocacy group No Justice No Pride became alarmed when one of the three suspects who harassed Talarico at the grocery store apparently followed her and a store employee who drove her home and threw rocks at her house after walking onto the front porch.

The report says someone called 911 and although police did not find the rockthrowing suspect, the incident remains under investigation.

Talarico was among several victims of anti-LGBT violence who spoke at the vigil. She faulted the mayor, the D.C. Council, and other public officials for not supporting the full decriminalization of sex work in the city between consenting adults, saying criminalization of sex work leads to violence against sex workers, including trans women of color involved in sex work.

“No more vigils,” she told the gathering. “We should be angry and screaming in the streets.”

Randy Downs, a gay Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner from Dupont Circle and a member of the recently formed Rainbow Caucus of LGBTQ ANC Commissioners, was among the vigil speakers who criticized the D.C. government for not adequately addressing issues the group said can lead to anti-LGBT violence.

Downs noted that the vigil was taking place two days after ANC Rainbow Caucus members sent a letter to D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson (D-At-Large) and other city government leaders calling for the additional funds in the city budget initially called for by 15 LGBT supportive groups earlier this year.

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HRC taps Alphonso David as next president First person of color to lead nation’s largest LGBT group

By CHRIS JOHNSON CJOHNSON@WASHBLADE.COM

Under David’s counsel, Cuomo signed administrative orders protecting transgender rights and barring widely discredited conversion therapy for youth, as well as bills passed by a new legislature with Democratic control enacting the practices into law. Just recently, David joined Cuomo in announcing the launch of the New York State World Pride Welcome Center in New York City.

Prior to working in the public sector, David was a staff attorney at the Lambda Legal Defense & Educational Fund and a litigation associate at the law firm Blank Rome LLP. David, however, began his legal career as a judicial clerk to the late U.S. District Judge Scott Green, a Nixon appointee, in Pennsylvania.

At Lambda Legal, David worked on New York’s first marriage equality lawsuit.

When the route to achieve marriage equality in the courts in New York State ultimately proved unsuccessful, David worked as deputy secretary and counsel for civil rights to win marriage equality through legislation in 2011.

In the past decade, David has worked

as a law professor at Fordham University Law School and is currently at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Cuomo commended David in a statement and wished him luck in his new role, saying he was essential in “helping to enact real change and increasing rights for all residents of this great state.”

The most recent publicly available tax forms from the Human Rights Campaign reveal Griffin in fiscal year 2017 earned $481,375 in reportable income and $20,893 in compensation in related organizations, for a total of $502,268. (The form for the Human Rights Campaign Foundation lists Griffin’s income as $0.)

The Human Rights Campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether the next president will earn the same amount Griffin made upon his departure from the organization.

But an HRC spokesperson confirmed Alphonso would be president of both and the Human Rights Campaign and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the non-profit 501(c)(3) arm of the organization.

‘Harry Truman’ amendment would restore trans military service

ALPHONSO DAVID has been named the next president of the Human Rights Campaign.

After a nearly seven-month search, the Human Rights Campaign announced Tuesday its next president will be Alphonso David — marking the first time a person of color will lead the nation’s largest LGBT organization.

David, a 48-year-old gay black man with an extensive career in New York as a civil rights lawyer, legal adviser and law professor, was named after the board of directors launched an extensive search to replace Chad Griffin, who announced in November he’d leave the organization.

David is set to start in August.

“I believe that together, we can harness the strength that’s inherent in our differences, to stand together in the face of fear and division,” David said in a statement. “And that’s exactly what the Human Rights Campaign was built for.”

“If we want to win full equality, that’s going to require us to come together, to dig deep, to be resilient, to embrace our differences, to tenaciously defend the most vulnerable among us, to fight with every ounce of determination we have,” David continued. “I promise you this, I will fight for each and every one of us.”

In a Human Rights Campaign video, David talks about his past as a U.S.-born individual who spent his youth in Liberia, where he enjoyed roller skating, before violent political turmoil shook up his life.

(David’s uncle, who served as Liberia’s president, was assassinated.) At age 14, David escaped Liberia with his family for a new life in Baltimore.

The transition at the Human Rights Campaign takes places as the 2020 presidential election heats up. David will likely lead efforts in supporting the Democratic nominee to defeat President Trump, who’s built a substantial anti-LGBT record over the course of his administration.

David will be the seventh president of the Human Rights Campaign — which has annual revenue of about $45.6 million — and he takes the reins as the organization approaches its 40th anniversary.

John Ruffier, board chair of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement David is the right person to lead the organization at this time.

“As we approach the Human Rights Campaign’s 40th year and the most important election cycle of our lives in 2020, HRC has never been stronger or better positioned to lead,” Ruffier said.

Previously, David was chief counsel and legal adviser to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, overseeing significant legal and policy deliberations affecting New York State. Before that time, David served in the governor’s cabinet as the deputy secretary and counsel for civil rights, the first position of its kind in New York.

With major defense policy legislation pending before the U.S. House, Democrats have proposed an amendment that would not only reverse President Trump’s transgender military ban, but prohibit discrimination against LGBT service members for the first time under federal law.

The amendment, introduced by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), was submitted to the House Rules Committee Tuesday for consideration as part of the fiscal year 2020 defense authorization bill.

Dubbed the “Harry Truman” amendment, the measure is modeled after the executive order Truman signed in 1948 desegregating the military.

The amendment states the military must consider applicants based on gender-neutral occupational standards and military occupational specialty, but “may not include any criteria relating to the race, color, national origin, religion, or sex (including gender identity or sexual orientation) of an individual.”

Further, the amendment states any Defense Department personnel policy for members of the armed forces “shall ensure equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces, without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, and sex (including gender identity and sexual orientation).”

Aaron Belkin, director of the San Francisco-based Palm Center, said in a statement the amendment “recognizes the success of the Truman policy on equal opportunity in the armed forces.”

“History, research and the U.S. military have told us for years that equal treatment in the military enhances readiness and bolsters national security by helping secure the best talent, and ensuring good order and discipline by applying a single standard to all personnel,” Belkin said.

If the amendment were to become law, it would reverse the transgender military ban the Trump administration implemented in April, allowing transgender people to enlist and serve once again similar to the policy at the end of the Obama administration.

Multiple polls have shown upwards of 70 percent of the American public support transgender military service.

Joining Speier in introducing the amendment are Reps. Joseph Kennedy III (D-Mass.), Anthony Brown (D-Md.) and Susan Davis (D-Calif.). With massive public support and a Democratic majority in the House, the House Rules Committee will likely approve the amendment for floor consideration as part of the defense authorization bill.

The amendment will also likely fare well on the House floor, but when the underlying defense authorization bill heads to the Republican-controlled Senate, where 60 votes are needed to end a legislative filibuster, the measure will face an uphill battle.

CHRIS JOHNSON

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Rep. Brown seeks to ensure equal pay for LGBT workers

U.S. Rep. ANTHONY BROWN (D-Md.) introduced the Fair Pay For All Act. Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers

Rep. Anthony Brown (D-Md.) introduced legislation this week aimed at ensuring equal pay for LGBT workers, which are shown in a recent survey to struggle with achieving financial parity with their straight counterparts.

The legislation, known as the Fair Pay for All Act, would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to expand the definition of sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

“While the Trump administration wages a multi-front assault on the livelihoods of LGBTQ Americans, Congress has to act to ensure all Americans have a fair chance to earn a living,” Brown said in a statement.

“This bill will enshrine equality in the Fair Labor Standards Act and will ensure all Americans receive equal pay for equal work, regardless of who they are or who they love.”

Brown introduced the bill on the heels of offering an amendment with Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) to defense spending legislation that would defund President Trump’s transgender military ban. The amendment passed with bipartisan support by a vote of 243-183.

Joining Brown in introducing the Fair Pay for All Act as original co-sponsors are Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) and Angie Craig (D-Minn.), who are gay and co-chairs of the LGBT Equality Caucus.

“As Americans, we are raised to believe that ‘all men are created equal,’” Cicilline said in a statement. “However, for far too many in a majority of states in our country, full equality under the law remains a

goal, not a guarantee. This important legislation will finally put an end to pay discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community and bring them one step closer to full equality.”

According to a 2018 survey from LendingTree of student loan borrowers, LGBT workers are more likely than the general population to make less than $50,000.

Wage inequality is particularly true for women in same-sex relationships. According to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, a couple made up of two lesbian workers “usually has less household income than a heterosexual couple because of the gender wage gap,” although women in same-sex relationships report having more income than women in different-sex relationships.

Wage disparities are “even more drastic” for transgender people, especially transgender women of color, because they “have to contend with lower pay based on racial inequality in addition to stigma around their identity,” a statement from Brown’s office says.

Among the supporters of the legislation is PFLAG. “On behalf of our 200,000 members and supporters across the country, PFLAG National supports this bill to end pay discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity because harming one family member harms all,” Brian Bond said in a statement.

CHRIS JOHNSON

Utah football players suspended for burning Pride flag Two high school football players from Kearns, Utah have been suspended from the team for posting and sharing a video showing a Pride flag burning and using homophobic language.

The players, from Kearns High School, posted a video on Snapchat of someone lighting a Pride flag on fire. In the video, someone can be heard saying “All gays die.”

The suspended students were the player who initially posted the video and another student who reposted the video. One of the students is a 15-year-old freshman.

Matt Rickards, head coach of the Kearns High School football team, told Fox13 that the incident “sickens” him.

“There’s no place for that in our program at all, and it won’t be tolerated,” Rickards said. “It’s potentially a hate crime, so it sickens me.”

He added, “We have one rule in our program, and that is not to embarrass yourself, your family or your team. That rule was broken. There’s got to be consequences for that.”

A spokesman for the Granite School District says they are investigating the incident and considering proper punishment for the students. Community service and school suspension are being considered.

“We want to make sure every student who walks through our doors feels safe and secure in the environment that they’re in,” District spokesman Ben Horsley told Fox13. “Whether it was done intentionally with a threat in mind or for humor’s sake, it’s inappropriate. And we’re going to address it in a very serious fashion.”

MARIAH COOPER

Mastercard allows trans customers to use chosen names Mastercard will allow transgender customers to use their chosen names on their credit cards, debit cards and prepaid cards.

This is a huge step for transgender customers who can now battle potential discrimination at the cash register by having their chosen names on their cards instead of the names on their birth certificates or driver’s licenses.

“It first starts with their name, that’s who they are, that’s their identity,” Randall Tucker, chief inclusion officer for Mastercard, told CNBC. “We’re paying it forward, not because it’s en vogue, but because it’s who we are as an organization.”

“True Name” cards will be released in early 2020.

MARIAH COOPER

‘Let’s Have a Kiki’ caused Scissor Sisters breakup Former Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears revealed in an interview with GayCities that the group’s demise was triggered by their hit single “Let’s Have a Kiki.”

“I didn’t know what the fuck to say after that song, quite honestly,” Shears told GayCities. “When that song came out and did what it did. I was just like, ‘Well, there it is, I guess we did it.’”

He continued: “I thought, we’ve been recording and touring for 10 years, and I felt like it was time. This wasn’t what anybody in the band had planned to do. So I thought it would be fun to end on a high note.”

Shears also denied that the group broke up because of a rift between him and fellow lead singer Ana Matronic. He admits that “we got into some fights” but an argument wasn’t the reason the group broke up.

However, a Scissor Sisters reunion could be in the works sometime in the future.

“That’s not to say we’re never going to do anything again,” Shears says. “The Scissor Sisters will be back.”

MARIAH COOPER

14 • WA S HI N GTON B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9 • N AT IO N AL N EW S

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JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 15

Georgia’s first Pride parade postponed

Ruslana Panukhnyk told the Washington Blade there were “no major incidents.”

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv on Twitter said dozens of its staffers participated in the parade. Scottish MP Stewart McDonald and U.N. representatives are among those who also took part.

“It was a great Sunday for democracy and human rights equality in Eastern Europe,” Kyiv Pride board member Maksym Eristavi told the Blade. “Kyiv Pride has doubled in size. There were less incidents, more public and international support, superb work by law-enforcement. Saying that, (I) want to emphasize that this is a success of just one day out of 365.”

Panukhnyk said members of “far-right groups” last week attackedseveral people who attended a movie screening that was part of Kyiv Pride. Sunday’s parade also took place against the backdrop of discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity that remains commonplace in Ukraine.

“The rest of the year queer Ukrainians face constant discrimination, violence and fear, while attacks on them are never prosecuted or officially condemned,” Eristavi told the Blade.

MICHAEL K. LAVERS

Gay man to challenge Dominica sodomy law Organizers of Georgia’s first Pride parade that was to have taken place in the country’s capital of Tbilisi on June 22, have postponed the event.

Photo courtesy of Twitter

Organizers of Georgia’s first Pride parade that was scheduled to take place in the country’s capital on June 22 have postponed it.

Giorgi Tabagari, co-founder of Tbilisi Pride, on Twitter said he and other parade organizers decided to postpone the event in order to join protests against Russian MP Sergei Gavrilov, who spoke at the Georgian Parliament on Thursday, and a police crackdown against protesters who tried to storm the building that reportedly left more than 240 people injured.

“Due to (the) current political situation and ongoing protests in Tbilisi, our team had to postpone the march which was planned tomorrow,” wrote Tabagari on Friday. “We have joined the protest at this point and will march once situation calms down.”

The announcement comes less than a week after the Washington Blade reported the Eurasian country’s ombudswoman asked organizers to cancel a nearly weeklong series of Pride events. Hooligans also threatened organizers and a Georgian millionaire called for groups to organize against those who had planned to participate in Pride.

“We welcome the decision by the organizers of Tbilisi Pride to postpone the ‘March for Dignity’ planned for 22 June 2019,” said a statement the U.N., the E.U. and the U.S. Embassy in Georgia issued.

The Austrian, French, German, Dutch, Swedish and British embassies were also signatories.

“Participation in peaceful demonstrations of this sort is an expression of every person’s fundamental human right to freedom of expression and assembly,” it reads. “However, amidst real concerns about safety and security in the current context, we find the LGBTI+ community’s decision highly commendable.”

A State Department spokesperson on Friday referred the Blade to Tbilisi Pride organizers’ statement when asked to comment on the parade’s postponement.

The spokesperson added “senior U.S.

officials have and will continue to urge the government of Georgia to protect and defend human rights and fundamental freedoms for all — including LGBTI individuals.”

“In Georgia and around the world, the United States stands up and speaks out against violence and severe discrimination against vulnerable individuals and groups, including religious, ethnic, or national minorities, persons with disabilities and LGBTI individuals,” said the spokesperson.

“Governments have an obligation to ensure that everyone can freely enjoy universal human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly and association.”

The parade was to have taken place less than a week after State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus defended a policy that prohibits U.S. embassies from displaying Pride flags on official flag poles.

Dozens of Democrats and at least one Republican, U.S. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), have called for impeachment proceedings to begin against President Trump over his involvement in Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Tbilisi Pride organizers have not said when the postponed parade will take place.

MICHAEL K. LAVERS & ALEX COOPER

More than 8,000 march in Kyiv Pride parade More than 8,000 people participated in the Ukrainian capital’s annual Pride parade that took place on June 23.

The Associated Press reported police kept parade participants separate from LGBTI rights opponents who protested the event.

Officials said nine people were arrested during the parade, but Kyiv Pride Director

A gay man in Dominica plans to challenge his country’s sodomy law.

The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, a Toronto-based advocacy group, on Monday announced the man would file the lawsuit in Dominica’s High Court of Justice in the coming weeks. A press release says the University of Toronto’s International Human Rights Program is among the other organizations that are supporting the plaintiff who has asked to remain anonymous.

Dominica is a former British colony that is located between Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Lesser Antilles.

The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network notes the gay man plans to challenge two provisions of Dominica’s Sexual Offenses Act that criminalizes anal sex and “gross indecency” with up to 10 years and 12 years in prison respectively.

“The claimant at the center of this case is a gay man who could face more than a decade in prison for private sexual intercourse with consenting adult samesex partners,” reads the group’s press release. “Already, he has experienced homophobic hostility, discrimination, harassment and physical and sexual assaults fueled by these hateful laws.”

The press release specifically notes police “refused to investigate” an attack against the gay man that took place in his home and “allowed his attacker to remain free.”

Dominica is among the Caribbean countries in which consensual same-sex sexual relations remain criminalized.

The Trinidad and Tobago High Court in 2018 found the country’s sodomy law unconstitutional. The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network has backed lawsuits against similar statutes in Jamaica and Barbados.

Darryl Philip, founder of Minority Rights Dominica, an LGBTI advocacy group in Dominica, in the press release said the experiences of the gay man who plans to challenge the island’s sodomy law “are sadly not unique and are instead a daily reality of many LGBT people in Dominica and elsewhere in the Caribbean.”

“Because the law criminalizes all LGBT people, it sends a powerful message that other people — whether law enforcement or regular citizens on the street — are entitled to discriminate and commit human rights abuses against LGBT individuals,” added Philip.

Maurice Tomlinson, a senior policy analyst at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, added the law also has an adverse impact on efforts to combat HIV/ AIDS in Dominica.

“Dominica is in the midst of an ongoing HIV crisis,” said Tomlinson in the press release. “A man seeking HIV testing or visiting the doctor for a check-up who indicates he is sexually active with a male partner is actually confessing to a crime.

This reality poses significant barriers to effective HIV and AIDS health programs.”

“Changing these laws is both a human rights and public health imperative,” added Tomlinson.

The planned lawsuit was announced in New York during the 2019 WorldPride Human Rights Conference, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

“The ultimate goal of these legal challenges is to end the criminalization of consensual sexual activity between people above the age of consent, in particular among same-sex partners,” reads the press release. “The courts can make binding decisions obliging the state to end any breach of the Constitution, including by changing its laws.”

MICHAEL K. LAVERS

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JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 17

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1 8 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

DAVID CARTER

is author of ‘Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution.’

RICK VALELLY & MALCOLM LAZIN

Rick Valelly is professor of political science at Swarthmore College. Malcolm Lazin is executive director of LGBT History Month.

VI E WPO I NT • JU NE 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTON B L A DE . COM • 19

RICHARD J. ROSENDALL

is a writer and activist. Reach him at rrosendall@starpower.net.

PETER ROSENSTEIN

is a D.C.-based LGBT rights and Democratic Party activist. He writes regularly for the Blade.

DAVID CARTER

is author of ‘Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution.’

Stonewall’s lessons for today

Selective use of militant tactics helped the movement to grow At the time of this significant anniversary it is natural to ask what lessons we can take from the Stonewall Uprising for our time.

There is also a natural tendency to hesitate to answer because the Uprising was not only militant but violent, and violence cannot be a usual response to political and social problems in a democracy.

Of course one could focus on the Uprising’s broadest lesson, the value of LGBT people standing up for ourselves, but that is so broad that it is not very helpful in terms of specifics. So what lessons can we draw from this watershed event that are practical and relevant today?

As a historian, I feel that the meanings of Stonewall can be best understood if we look at the Uprising in the broadest context: Why is Stonewall historic and how did the Uprising change the movement?

Stonewall would be at best a footnote to history if it had not inspired a new wave of the gay movement, one that spread rapidly and created a mass movement.

I say this since it was the creation of a mass movement by the new phase of the movement that made most of the gains of the last 50 years possible. I feel that the main reason the new movement—the gay liberation movement—spread is that it was militant, unapologetic, and it was very creative at getting in the press in a way that made the movement highly attractive.

For example, as a teenager in high school in Jesup, Ga., I heard about the zaps executed by New York’s Gay Activists Alliance, or GAA. When the city’s marriage bureau said that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to marry, GAA’s members occupied the marriage bureau, chained themselves to the bureau’s desks, and answered the phones by saying that the bureau was only giving out licenses on that day to homosexuals, and then asked, “Are you a homosexual?” When Harper’s published a vicious article attacking gay people and refused to print a response written by gay people, GAA occupied their offices but brought along doughnuts and

coffee. The activists approached Harper’s employees saying, “I’m a homosexual.

Would you like a doughnut?”

And thus the selective use of militant tactics such as carefully and intelligently planned zaps, boycotts, and civil disobedience when ordinary lobbying has not worked has helped the movement to grow while protecting our community and the rights we have won.

For example, when Anita Bryant and her imitators succeeded in overturning laws that banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gay people and our supporters boycotted orange juice. Bryant subsequently lost her job as the spokeswoman for the orange juice industry. When the federal government did not respond to the AIDS crisis, ACT UP acted up, taking over the FDA headquarters, blocking traffic around Wall Street during rush hour, and conducting die-ins. To awaken the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to the effects of their classification of us as mentally ill, gay activists stormed the convocation during their 1971 national conference. Frank Kameny seized the microphone and declared, “Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate. Psychiatry has waged a relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against you.” Before 1973 came to an end, after an intense lobbying campaign, the APA declassified homosexuality as a mental illness.

Two suggestions for applying the lessons of the Uprising to our time: 1. A suggestion for our community on its issues. Donald Trump has been attacking our community. His attacks on us are too numerous to list here, but to mention a few, he wants to take away our right to marry, he has banned trans people from serving in the military, and has revoked the citizenship of the children of gay couples.

It would be appropriate to see a

coordinated campaign to oppose all these actions by Trump using not only traditional lobbying and electoral methods, but also by working to gum up the Trump administration. Suppose LGBT people organized a phone-in time on the first day of each month to tie up all of the White House’s phone lines during lunch hour until Trump ended his ban on trans people serving in the military, for example? If Trump does not end the ban, the time could later be expanded to two days a month. And so forth.

I suggest these kinds of direct action tactics because I have been frustrated at the lack of a nationwide campaign that anyone can participate in to express his or her opposition to Trumpism. When I was young, for example, it meant a great deal to me to participate in the Moratorium events organized to oppose the war in Vietnam.

Could a number of LGBT state and national organizations come together and forget about their disagreements about how to oppose Trump, and instead focus on the goals they agree upon. With agreed upon goals, they could then determine what tactics — actions that any citizen could do on her or his own — could work toward meeting those goals. They could look at ACT UP and GAA, for example, for inspiration. Want to help block traffic this Friday? Want to tie up Senate Republican phone lines this coming Monday?

2. A suggestion for all Americans about our country’s future. Could national organizations of all stripes that oppose Trump’s policies meet and put aside their differences and focus instead on what they can agree upon? More specifically, could they focus on tactics for either changing Trump’s policies or removing Trump from office? I think that if the American people, the majority of whom disapprove of Trump, had a menu of actions they could take against the Trump administration that anyone could do, a great many would act. One reason I

believe this is that it boosts one’s morale to feel that one is acting in concert with others toward a common goal. Also, such a broad campaign would garner significant media attention, which would then reach and energize more of Trump’s opponents.

For example, an anti-Trump coalition could announce a campaign that, on the first Monday of every month, citizens who oppose Trump would not spend any discretionary funds: no going to see a movie or buying oneself a new tie or a pair of earrings or a book on that day.

Instead the money one would have spent for pleasure would be donated to the antiTrump coalition. Or the coalition could suggest that people who drive tie up traffic by driving slowly on the way to work on the first Tuesday of each month. And what if Trump doesn’t change the policies the coalition is demanding that he change?

The traffic slow down could be moved to Friday to have more impact.

Of these two suggestions, I recommend the second one. I say this because I believe with many others that the Trump presidency constitutes an existential crisis for our republic. Moreover, the LGBT civil rights movement is strong enough now that we can afford to think beyond our own immediate needs. I would love for us to call for all anti-Trump organizations to send a delegate to a national meeting with each delegate being empowered to vote. I envision such a national meeting’s purpose as being to set a common agenda with common tactics designed to remove Trump from the Oval Office: to draw up a list of grievances and a declaration about how to address those grievances through a common plan of action. Wait, isn’t this rather like the way in which our country was founded? Yes, it is. And I believe that it is time for revolutionary action to oppose the counter-revolution led by Trump.

(David Carter and the Washington Blade give universal permission to copy and reprint this editorial as long as Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office.)

20 • WA S HI N GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9 • V IEW P O IN T

RICK VALELLY & MALCOLM LAZIN

Rick Valelly is professor of political science at Swarthmore College. Malcolm Lazin is executive director of LGBT History Month.

The invention of Stonewall commemoration N.Y.’s first Pride parade depended on Philly’s Annual Reminder Fifty years ago this month, the Stonewall Rebellion happened. Forty-nine years ago, the first commemoration of the Rebellion occurred in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. That commemoration changed how we all think about the role of defiance and fraternity in the gay struggle. Stonewall was hardly the first episode of gay resistance against police abuse. It became, however, the riot that everyone remembers. The June 28, 1970 marches, the annual Pride parades that they spawned, and the expansion of the gay revolution that they helped to launch are why the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion is celebrated.

But the commemoration that today has a such taken-for-granted aspect — after all, it happens like clockwork every year all over the world — in fact depended on two things that very few of us remember today.

The first was prior commemoration that had a patriotic and Americanist cast to it.

The second was an inventive repurposing of that prior commemoration to instead emphasize identity and resistance.

The 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade built on an event called the Annual Reminder, held at Independence Hall each July 4th from 1965 to 1969. By leading the Annual Reminder at Independence Hall, Frank Kameny of Washington, Barbara Gittings of Philadelphia, and Craig Rodwell of New York linked the nascent gay rights movement to the promise of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution – and thus to earlier struggles for equality and freedom. Their annual action in front of Independence Hall reminded passersby that America’s charters included gay women and men.

The Annual Reminder indeed was the single largest and recurring gay and lesbian protest in American history and the first to call for equality. It grew from 40 in 1965 to 150 in 1969, which was held five days after Stonewall. That kind of turnout was a big deal. In the mid-1960s there were no more than a few hundred gay activists nationwide.

Of the three – Kameny, Gittings, and Rodwell – it was Rodwell who witnessed the Stonewall Rebellion. He owned the Oscar Wilde Bookstore, the nation’s first gay

bookstore, located in Greenwich Village.

What he saw at Stonewall gave him the idea to dramatically scale up the Annual Reminder into a new and different form of collective action, a parade emphasizing liberation.

On the evening of June 26, 1969, the people at the Stonewall Inn hardly knew that they would start a liberation movement.

A Mafia-owned property, the Stonewall Inn was typically populated by gay men, queens, transvestites, and homeless teens. But that night’s spontaneous resistance to police abuse, followed by three days of disruption, built deep bonds between the closeted respectable and the marginalized, and an ethic of previously unknown fearlessness.

Taking a train back to New York from the July 4, 1969 Annual Reminder, Rodwell decided to enlist the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO), a sponsor of the Annual Reminder.

Over the next few months he also worked on his plan with the recently formed Gay Liberation Front. At a November conference of ERCHO, he put forward his idea to suspend the Annual Reminder and to organize in its place a Stonewall march. With the support of Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, ERCHO pitched in for the 1970 Stonewall remembrance.

Their mutual gamble paid off; more than 2,000 people marched in Manhattan, from Greenwich Village up to Central Park. Among them were Barbara Gittings, whose partner Kay Lahusen, a talented and prolific photographer, recorded the demonstration. So was Frank Kameny, holding a sign that read “Gay is Good,” a slogan adopted at a Chicago conference in 1968. The Pride Parade was born. It grew into an international phenomenon.

Without the Pride Parade, we would not commemorate Stonewall. But the first New York parade depended, more than we have recognized, on the Annual Reminder.

Critically, the leaders of that little-known Philadelphia venture were open to change and innovation. The early years of the gay revolution required nothing less if it was to grow – and they knew that. As we mark Stonewall at 50 we should also honor the political entrepreneurship that led to one of the world’s great recurring commemorations.

VI E WPO I NT • JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONB L A DE . COM • 21

RICHARD J. ROSENDALL

is a writer and activist. Reach him at rrosendall@starpower.net.

From bar raids to Buttigieg Altered expectations are Stonewall’s greatest legacy The Stonewall uprising was a flashpoint that fueled a great broadening of the LGBTQ rights movement. It was not the start. Pre-Stonewall organizations included multiple Mattachine groups and the Daughters of Bilitis. Pre-Stonewall incidents included the sit-in at Dewey’s Lunch Counter in Philadelphia in 1965 and the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966.

One of the most notable pre-Stonewall acts of resistance was when Frank Kameny went to court to fight his 1957 firing by the Army Map Service. The Supreme Court in 1961 refused to hear his appeal, but as Charles Francis writes, “Kameny’s powerfully argued petition to the Court marked day one in a revolution of legal argumentation and law for a vast homosexual minority demanding equal citizenship.” The post-Stonewall generation built on that.

To pretend that all we have gotten are crumbs since Stonewall, as some have, is to dishonor those who fought there and those who helped win progress since. The unseriousness of the argument is shown by a partial list of achievements since 1969: the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Workplace protections in Fortune 500 companies. The overturn of anti-sodomy laws. The end of the military gay ban. Openly gay ambassadors. Police liaison units. Greater cultural visibility and normalization. Marriage equality.

From the earliest post-Stonewall days to the present, the movement has always been marked by a divide between reformers and revolutionaries. At a recent rally in D.C., a woman from No Justice No Pride called for abolishing police. I touted the police department’s LGBT Liaison Unit.

The self-styled revolutionaries among us appear to have modeled themselves after the Cuban revolution rather than the American one. By noting that Stonewall was a riot, they appear to advocate perpetual revolution. This misses the point of the uprising. Anger is a great motivator, but those who refuse to channel it productively show they are more interested in collecting grievances than resolving them.

Effective advocacy requires acknowledging both the credits and the

debits, as Ta-Nehisi Coates said in his recent testimony before Congress on reparations for slavery.

The work done by my generation and those that came before has changed expectations in the generations that have followed. To be sure, social progress is not evenly distributed. That and hunger for opportunity are factors in migration to cities like mine. But new media have a powerful reach, for good and ill. Landmark Supreme Court rulings from Lawrence to Obergefell liberated everyone. The ferocity of the rightwing backlash is actually proof of that.

Three decades ago, a gay chorus director said during a rehearsal, “This music sings itself.” If that were true, I replied, then we could put down our sheet music and leave the room.

He wasn’t speaking literally, but I still found it insulting. Votes do not cast themselves either.

We have to show up. We have to participate.

Openly gay and trans elected officials are a shining consequence of participation. The insurgent candidacy of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a historic breakthrough that some of us do not fully appreciate. For example, Greta LaFleur, Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University, wrote a self-parodic article titled “Heterosexuality Without Women” in the Los Angeles Review of Books in May. I don’t wish to challenge her queer credentials, but 12 volumes of her claptrap could not make Pete and Chasten emblems of heterosexuality. This reminds me of former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams being accused of not being black enough.

Let’s not judge the first credible openly gay candidate for president by some academic hothouse hierarchy of queerness, but by his leadership qualities, character, policies, record, and ability to connect with voters.

On the summer solstice, a vigil was held at Dupont Circle to protest anti-LGBTQ violence. As I arrived, a woman was walking around the circle yelling, “Trans rights are human rights!” into a bullhorn. As she passed, I said, “Tell it, sister.” She looked at me, startled, then said, “Okay.” It was as if she wasn’t expecting agreement.

After 50 years, we are still learning to take yes for an answer.

Copyright © 2019 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.

Keep your promise to protect each other.

PETER ROSENSTEIN

is a D.C.-based LGBT rights and Democratic Party activist. He writes regularly for the Blade.

Success 50 years after Stonewall Wills & Trusts Powers of Attorney • Living Wills Partnership & Prenuptial Agreements

We fought for inclusion so corporations, police, military should be welcome at Pride

Though old enough to have had firsthand knowledge of Stonewall (I was 22 when the riots occurred) my understanding of Stonewall came from hearing about it from friends and reading about it many years later. Though I grew up in upper Manhattan, anything having to do with gay life was something out of my experience.

When the Stonewall Riots began on June 28, 1969, I had just graduated from college and was on my way across the country. I was living a deeply closeted life. Even after going to work for gay rights advocate Bella S. Abzug (D-N.Y.) in 1972 it would be nearly 12 more years until I came out. So it was much later that I learned how much I owed those who took part in the riots and how the repercussions were to impact my life.

When I did come out in the early 1980s, I met and got to know Frank Kameny learning he demonstrated for gay rights before Stonewall. A little research confirmed that with a few others Kameny led a picket line protesting government treatment of gays and lesbians in front of the White House on April 17, 1965 — four years before Stonewall.

After coming out, I joined the fight for equality for the LGBTQ+ movement meeting many who were there before me to whom I owed much. Our community must recognize the very fast pace of change that has occurred for us compared to other minority groups and women. Until the Trump administration things were A D V E R T I going S I N Gat Plightning R O O F speed for our equality ISSUE DATE: 10.26.12 SALES REPRESENTATIVE: BRIAN PITTS (bpitts@washblade.com) movement compared to the hundreds of years it took for African Americans and REVIEW AD FOR COPY AND DESIGN ACCURACY. Revisions must be submitted within 24 hours of the date of proof. Proof will be considered final and will be submitted for publication if revision is not submitted within 24 hours of knowing women still can’t get the Equal the date of proof. Revisions will not be accepted after 12:01 pm wednesday, the week of publication.Brown naff pitts NS omnimedia llc (dba the washington blade) is not responsible for the content and/or design of your ad. Advertiser is Rights Amendment passed by states that responsible for any legal liability arising out of or relating to the advertisement, and/or any material to which users GN can link through the advertisement. Advertiser represents that its advertisement will not violate any criminal laws or EVISIONS any rgihts of third parties, including, but not limited to, such violations as infringement or misapporpriation of any was first introduced in Congress in 1923. copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, music, image, or other proprietary or propety right, false advertising, unfair /LOGO REVISIONS competition, defamation, invasion of privacy or rights of celebrity, violation of anti-discrimination law or regulation, So while some think things have moved or any other right of any person or entity.

Advertiser agrees to idemnify brown naff pitts omnimedia llc (dba the ADVERTISER SIGNATURE SIONS washington blade) and to hold brown naff pitts omnimedia llc (dba the washington blade) harmless from any and all By signing this proof you are agreeing to your contract obligations with the slowly, I hope when Democrats once again liability, loss, damages, claims, or causes of action, including reasonable legal fees and expenses that may be incurred washington blade newspaper. This includes but is not limited to placement, by brown naff pitts omnimedia llc, arising out of or related to advertiser’s breach of any of the foregoing representations payment and insertion schedule. and warranties. take the Senate and the presidency we will be able to pass the Equality Act first introduced in Congress by Bella in 1974.

We have gained recognition by society in some ways just as important if not more so than legislation. We have gained the right to marry even though in 37 states we can marry on Sunday and be fired from our jobs or thrown out of our homes on Monday.

I think the debate in our community as represented by the two competing parades

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being held in New York to celebrate 50 years since Stonewall are in some ways emblematic of our success. This year there is a counter march to the New York Pride parade called the “Reclaim Pride” march honoring Stonewall. It is a back-to-basics march without any outside participation from the corporate or government communities. While I can respect the views of the leaders of this march and wish them success, I think our success has been that government and the corporate communities want to march with us.

To me a celebration of those who took part in Stonewall and others like Kameny would include corporate floats, the police and military in uniform. We fought for broad-based acceptance and recognition for members of our community. Why is it a bad thing if a corporation is proud to have its gay employees march openly under their banner in a pride parade? Why should we not celebrate police departments proud to have their LGBTQ members and other officers who support them march openly?

Then there is the military who some object to having participate. We fought long and hard to have members of the LGBTQ community be able to serve openly in the military. Why would we now not want them to march proudly in the uniforms they worked so long and hard to wear?

I am not blind to how far we have to go. There is discrimination in our society, even in our own community, especially toward people of color and women. We must demand our police be appropriately trained and diversify. We must rid police departments of those who allow their racial biases to influence their actions.

We honor those who were at Stonewall when we let corporations celebrate with us after 50 years of our activists fighting for this to happen.

When we needed help fighting antigay laws in North Carolina and Indiana among other places the business community stood with us. Those of us who are out need to live our pride every day of the year. We need to urge more and more people to come out and it’s so much easier if they know their neighbors and their employers say “you are welcome here and we support you.” We honor Stonewall when we are inclusive.

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The most impactful legacy of Stonewall isn’t what happened those few nights, but what grew out of it — annual Pride celebrations, of course, but also the gay press, a proliferation of rights groups, declassification of homosexuality as mental illness, disco, sexual lib, AIDS and more.

Whole books have been written on each of these topics, for anyone interested in further study.

The first Pride parade in New York, 1970.

Photo courtesy Gay and Lesbian Information Center, New York Public Library

Stonewall’s lasting impact Pride, activist groups, the gay press and more take form in wake of ’69 riots

By JOEY DIGUGLIELMO JOEYD@WASHBLADE.COM

THE BIRTH OF PRIDE Some of the people who rioted starting on June 28, 1969, once things settled, started to organize and a group called the Stonewall Veterans Association, which is still in existence, formed.

In November 1969, Craig Rodwell (1940-1993), owner of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop (the country’s first gay bookstore), along with his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy and Linda Rhodes, proposed a New York City march to commemorate the riots. He introduced a resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organization (ERCHO) in Philadelphia.

“We propose that a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street and this demonstration be called Christopher Street Liberation Day,” the resolution said. “No dress or age regulations shall be made for this demonstration.”

The concept of Pride being held in other cities simultaneously was ingrained in the concept from the outset.

“We also propose that we contact homophile organizations throughout the country and suggest that they hold parallel demonstrations on that day. We propose a nationwide show of support,” the resolution stated.

Christopher Street Liberation Day was held June 28, 1970, the first gay Pride march in the U.S. It covered 51 blocks to Central Park with a parade permit reluctantly delivered just two hours before the scheduled start time. Marches were simultaneously held in Los Angeles and Chicago. In 1971, it had spread to Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee and three European cities as well. Pride in Washington started in 1975.

Since 1984, the parade and related events in New York have been produced and organized by Heritage of Pride, a volunteer, non-partisan LGBT group.

THE GAY PRESS The gay press didn’t begin with

2 4 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

Gay News in Pittsburgh and GayLife in Chicago, Alwood writes.

“Unlike the early homophile press, which stressed identity and cooperation, this second generation concentrated almost solely on political change and resistance,” Alwood writes.

The Gay Blade was rechristened the Washington Blade in 1980 and went to weekly publication in 1983. It’s the oldest continually operating LGBT newspaper in the country. It celebrates its 50th anniversary in October.

The late BARBARA GITTINGS and the late FRANK KAMENY in 2005. Their pre-Stonewall gay and lesbian activism wasn’t always appreciated by groups that formed in the wake of the riots.

Photo courtesy National LGBT 50th Anniversary Celebration

Stonewall. The earliest known publication had an inauspicious start. In 1947, an underworked secretary trying to look busy, typed, stapled and distributed 12 copies of Vice Versa, which she dubbed “America’s gayest magazine.” Since then, thousands have followed in her steps producing about 2,600 — at their height — publications ranging from weekly newspapers to more radical tabloids to glossy monthly magazines.

Seminal pre-Stonewall publications included Ladder, Vector and the Los Angeles Advocate.

The number of these publications exploded after Stonewall. It was seen as necessary as even the most liberal alternative press of the day — in New York, The Village Voice, refused to print the word gay. Throughout the ‘70s, people who depended solely on mainstream media for news would hardly have been aware of the gay rights movement,” writes author/ historian Eric Marcus in his 2002 book “Making Gay History.” “With a few notable exceptions, the television networks, daily newspapers and newsmagazines gave little coverage to gay issues.

“After the apocalyptic Stonewall impulse, the press erupted in so many directions that it is impossible to document when each publication was founded, how long it existed or who edited it,”

writes Rodger Streitmatter, author of “Unspeakable: the Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America.”

“Our Own Voices: A Director of Lesbian and Gay Periodicals” listed 150 publications by 1972, Streitmatter writes.

One of the most influential was called simply GAY, started in December 1969 by gay press veterans (and partners) Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, who’d covered Stonewall. It soon became, according to Streitmatter, the “newspaper of record for gay America.”

Veteran activist Lilli Vincenz, who wrote a lesbian column for GAY is quoted in “Unspeakable” as having said, “It was the newspaper of the day. If you were gay and you wanted to find out what was going on in the world, you turned to GAY.” It sold 20,000 copies of its first issue (at 40 cents per copy) and reached a monthly circulation of 25,000 by its second issue, figures that took the Advocate two years to build. Within six weeks, two other New York-based newspapers were launched — Come Out! and Gay Power. GAY continued until Clarke was murdered in 1975.

Streitmatter writes later in the book that the publications “that survived the aftershocks of Stonewall were those with a combination of calm voices and stable finances,” citing GAY in New York and The Advocate in Los Angeles as leaders.

But two months before GAY was

JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 25

launched, in October 1969, Vincenz and a small group of men and women met in the basement of a Connecticut Avenue building to work on the first issue of the Gay Blade. The monthly, mimeographed onesheet issued by a volunteer staff contained three columns of news, community notices and a small advertisement for someone who wanted to sell a car, writes author Edward Alwood in his 1996 book “Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media.”

“By distributing copies at the city’s gay and lesbian bars, they quickly established the Blade as a source of valuable information that was not available from any other source,” Alwood writes.

Editor Nancy Tucker told Alwood they printed “things that we thought were important to the mental health and social welfare of other people like us,” Alwood quotes her as having said. “Periodically we ran warnings of blackmailers who hung around Dupont Circle or the gay bars. We wrote about rough cops. There were plenty of military and government workers who were undergoing some type of security investigation and all of those people needed to know about their rights.

These were a heavy orientation for us.”

It was the first of a new generation of gay papers that included Gay Community News in Boston, NewsWest in Los Angeles,

REGIONAL GAY RIGHTS GROUPS Although groups like the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis had been around since the ‘50s, things became more emboldened after Stonewall. The Gay Liberation Front was the first organization to use gay in its name. Previously, all “homophile” (as they were known) groups purposefully did not.

Legendary early activists Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen were vacationing on Fire Island when they heard about Stonewall. Upon returning to the city in September, they began attending meetings of the Gay Liberation Front and encountered a much different group of people and ethos.

“They were huge meetings, it was the best theater in town,” Lahusen is quoted as having said in “Making Gay History.” “This was the heyday of radical chic … and here I was this plain Jane dinosaur from the old gay movement.”

Gittings said there was zero acknowledgement of the pre-Stonewall efforts.

“Suddenly here were all these people with absolutely no track record in the movement who were telling us, in effect, not only what we should do but what we should think,” she’s quoted as having said in “Making Gay History.” “The arrogance of it was really what upset me.”

Gittings said she and Frank Kameny were even asked at one Philadelphia meeting who they were and what they were doing there.

“For once, I think even Frank was dumbfounded,” Gittings is quoted as having said. “As if we owed them an explanation.”

Gittings said right after Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front and the Mattachine Society, which some perceived as having been slow to respond to the riots, were the only two active groups.

“Mattacine was so stuffy and its day was over,” Lahusen said in “Making Gay History.” “These organizations seem to have a built-in life expectancy.”

“Mattachine wasn’t up to managing the lively response to the Stonewall riots and GLF came in to fill the void,” Gittings told author Marcus.

The Gay Liberation Front (a name used by multiple groups over the years), however, disbanded after just four months

when members were unable to agree on operating procedure. In December 1969, some people who had attended Front meetings but left frustrated formed Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), an “orderly” group to be focused entirely on gay issues. A D.C. chapter had formed by 1971. It became the Gay & Lesbian Activist Alliance in the ‘80s, and continues to this day.

Many of the main groups with major name recognition today started later. The National Gay Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force) started in 1973. Two groups merged to form the largest, Human Rights Campaign, in the early ‘80s.

Many of the state groups came much later, uniting around the marriage issue.

The California Alliance for Pride and Equality was founded in 1999 and only became Equality California in 2003. The now-dissolved Empire State Pride Agenda was founded in 1990 through a merger of two earlier groups. By 2005, it was the largest state lobbying group.

AIDS In a roundabout way, Stonewall, in time, also brought attention to the disparate health care needs of LGBT people. That’s the contention of Perry N. Halkitis, dean of Rutgers School of Public Health and author of the new book “Out in Time: From Stonewall to Queer; How Gay Men Came of Age Across the Generations.”

“The riots allowed gay people to say ‘we exist’ and create a demand for health equity,” Halkitis said in a recent interview with tapinto.net. “The civil disobedience of Stonewall served as a catalyst to the activism of the AIDS era, which in turn has contributed to the foundations of how public health today emphasizes social justice and health equity.”

Although initially about wholly separate issues, Stonewall started a movement that was eventually “catapulted” 13 years later when HIV hit, he says.

“As the riots framed the basis for the recognition of gay people as viable members of the population, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s created the circumstances by which they would come to demand that the government and society attend to their well-being,” Halkitis said in the tapinto.net interview. “Before then, gay people kept silent and were invisible to their doctors, who were unaware they were gay or did not understand the mental health and drug issues they were facing.

The AIDS crisis shined a light on the fact that there was this population that needed specific health services beyond what was given to the general population.”

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, deputy commissioner for the Division of Disease Control of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said in a New York Times interview last week that the histories of Stonewall and AIDS are inextricably linked and have affected what’s still happening today.

“It’s so critical that you had an uprising, and it became not just folks being downtrodden by their system but actually then fighting back,” Daskalakis told the Times. “I feel that the fighting spirit now

is like the ACT UP experience in New York. There was a feeling that it was part of LGBTQ rights to ask for faster, better support and funding to fight HIV. … I think the legacy of activism remains powerful decades later.”

As the number of deaths soared, gay and lesbian people and gay rights organizations redirected their energies, Marcus writes in “Making Gay History.”

“Many thousands of gay people who had never participated in gay rights efforts were motivated to join the fight against AIDS,” he writes. “New organizations joined existing ones to provide care for the sick and dying, conduct AIDS education programs, lobby local and federal governments for increased funding for AIDS research, pressure medical researchers and drug companies to become more aggressive in their search for treatments and a cure and fight discrimination against people with AIDS and those infected with HIV.” AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

In the mid-20th century, some homophile activist groups accepted psychiatry’s illness model as an alternative to societal condemnation of homosexuality’s supposed “immorality” and were willing to work with professionals who sought to “treat” or “cure” them, Jack Drescher writes in his 2015 study “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality.”

Other activists, however, forcefully rejected the pathological model as a major contributor to the stigma and in the wake of the Stonewall riots, brought modern sex research theories to the attention of the APA. Believing psychiatric theories to be a major contributor to anti-gay social stigma, activists disrupted the 1970 and 1971 annual APA meetings.

Although, Drescher writes, there were rumblings happening within the world of psychiatry that helped the gay cause, “the most significant catalyst for diagnostic change was gay activism.”

Kameny and Gittings spoke on a 1971 APA panel entitled “Gay is Good.”

They returned in ’72, joined by Dr. John Fryer, who appeared anonymously as a “homosexual psychiatrist.”

APA’s Nomenclature Committee eventually recommended removing homosexuality when it determined it unique among the supposed mental disorders in that in and of itself, it did not cause distress nor was it associated with generalized impairment in social effectiveness of functioning.

It wasn’t a completely cut-and-dried affair; the psychiatric world continued grappling with the controversial decision for years, Drescher writes in his scholarly article, but it was “the beginning of the end of organized medicine’s official participation in the social stigmatization of homosexuality.”

Many people, both inside and outside the psychology profession, claimed the APA had succumbed to pressure from gay activists and while it was true that

many gay men and lesbians had exerted pressure, there were also respected psychiatrists within the organization who worked to affect the change, Marcus writes in “Making Gay History.” One was Dr. Judd Marmor, a Los Angeles psychiatrist.

“We didn’t merely remove homosexuals from the category of illness.

We stated that there was no reason why a priori a gay man or woman could not be just as healthy, just as effective, just as law abiding and just as capable of functioning as any heterosexual,” Marmor is quoted as having said in Marcus’s book.

“Furthermore, we asserted that laws that discriminated against them in housing or in employment were unjustified. So it was a total statement.”

Shortly thereafter, the American Psychological Association and the American Bar Association came out in support of gays.

“It was an important step that we took,” Marmor said in “Making Gay History.”

DISCO Disco music, a type of dance music and the subculture around it that emerged in the ‘70s from the U.S. urban nightlife scene, is inextricably linked to post-Stonewall gay life.

Its “four-on-the-floor” beats, syncopated basslines and shimmery instrumentation flourished in venues popular with black, Latinx and gay nightlife lovers mostly in major cities on the East Coast at the dawn of the ‘70s. The most popular disco artists were Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Bee Gees, Chic, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Village People, Thelma Houston and others. Pop acts like Diana Ross and Michael Jackson who’d had hits in other genres, jumped on the disco bandwagon with success.

In his essay “In Defense of Disco,” gay writer Richard Dyer writes that disco gave gay men a mainstream musical genre they could embrace.

“All my life, I’ve liked the wrong music,” he writes. “I never liked Elvis and rock ’n roll; I always preferred Rosemary Clooney.

And since I became a socialist, I’ve often felt virtually terrorized by the prestige of rock and folk on the left. … Disco is more than just a form of music, although certainly music is at the heart of it. Disco is also kinds of dancing, club, fashion, film — in a word, a certain sensibility.”

Thematically, Dyer (whose essay is included in the 1995 anthology “Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture”), writes that disco has both rhythmic and lyrical appeal to gay men.

“No wonder (Diana) Ross is (was?) so important in gay male scene culture for she both reflects what that culture takes to be an inevitable reality — that relationships don’t last — and at the same time celebrates it, validates it.”

“Our music owes so much to the gay clubs that first nurtured it, which in turn helped to create safe spaces that allowed a marginalized population the freedom to be themselves,” writes Ned Shepard in a 2016 Cuepoint essay.

He cites a comment from Barry Walters from Billboard.

“The history of dance music in America and the history of LGBT folks — particularly those of color — coming together to create a cultural utopia was and still is inseparable.

Neither would have happened without the other,” Walters is quoted as having said.

SEXUAL LIBERATION Sexual liberation in the pre-AIDS era for lesbian and gay activists was a heated topic. Gay men especially enjoyed dabbling liberally without any of the baggage sexually adventurous women — despite this being the era of Helen Gurley Brown and her landmark 1962 book “Sex and the Single Girl” — faced, but the concern that gay rights would be overly associated with a free sex narrative was contentious and variations of that argument continue to this day.

The 1980 William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”)-directed movie “Cruising” was a nadir of the conundrum.

“There was … a political and ideological split in the gay community about whether or not it was valuable or necessary to show the leather and sadomasochism aspect of the community on screen,” recalls “The Celluloid Closet” author Vito Russo in “Making Gay History.” “There were middleof-the-road gays who found this kind of thing horrifying. Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you were necessarily acquainted with the more far-out aspects of gay sexuality, especially in the 1970s.

There were a lot of gay men, and certainly lesbians, in this country who would have been deeply shocked by the sex bars in New York. … Suddenly the issue became, ‘Do we want to present this to the world as the way gay people are?’ The public was not going to distinguish between one group of gay people and another.”

Nancy Walker (not the “Rhoda” actress) writes of her volunteer work in the early ‘70s at the Boston-based weekly Gay Community News in “Making Gay History.”

“We wanted gay liberation but what did that mean,” she writes. “Did it mean equal rights? To me, that’s all I ever wanted. On the other hand, some of them wanted to be able to fuck in the parks. Well, that’s wonderful, but if they did, I wouldn’t take my children there either. How far is sexual freedom supposed to go? Are you allowed to have intercourse on the street corner because you feel like doing it? How does that make you different from a dog? What happens to civilization when people lose all their socialization and have sex, where and with whom they please? We have to have a little bit of self control, a little discipline. I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in sexual freedom. I’m interested in being able to live.”

Ultimately things somewhat self calibrated — AIDS brought a day of reckoning writ large, it didn’t manage to kill off gay bathhouse culture and, of course, antiretroviral meds and PrEP were game changers in the AIDS war. But it’s not all gay “Pollyanna.” Entrapment of cruising gay men remains a problem. As recently as 2015 in Rehoboth Beach, Del., of all places, 12 men were arrested for public lewdness by undercover police officers.

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‘Stonewall 50’ expected to draw millions to NYC Marches, rallies, celebrities to commemorate 50th anniversary of riots

By LOU CHIBBARO JR. LCHIBBARO@WASHBLADE.COM

MELISSA ETHERIDGE is among the entertainers scheduled to perform at the World Pride Closing Ceremony on Sunday.

Photo courtesy of Photo courtesy ME Records

Organizers of the many events this weekend in New York City to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, credited with launching the modern LGBT rights movement, say an expected turnout of 4.5 million people will make it the world’s largest ever LGBT Pride celebration.

In addition to the larger turnout expected from people from throughout the U.S., New York City Pride this year is the official host of World Pride, an international LGBT Pride event originally started in Europe that will take place for the first time this year in the United States.

Heritage of Pride, the group that has organized New York City’s LGBT Pride events for more than 20 years, has said more than 4 million people were expected to turn out for the official New York Pride March on Sunday, June 30. The group says about 115,000 people were expected to march in over 100 contingents and the remainder of the crowds would be lining the streets as spectators.

A spokesperson for Heritage of Pride said a large number of march contingents would be comprised of LGBT people and their supporters from other countries who were coming to New York to participate in World Pride events that began earlier this week.

Among the Heritage of Pride, or HOP, events planned for June 30 is the official World Pride Closing Ceremony beginning at 7 p.m. in New York’s Times Square, which will include “a slate of influential

speakers” and big name entertainers.

Among the entertainers scheduled to perform are Melissa Etheridge, Deborah Cox, Jake Shears, MNEK, and The Prom Musical. Lesbian comedian Margaret Cho will host the event.

The official New York City Pride March, organized by Heritage of Pride, is scheduled to kick off on Sunday at noon at 26th Street and 5th Avenue. It will travel past the Stonewall Inn gay bar in Greenwich Village, the site of the Stonewall riots, which has been designated a U.S. Historic Landmark.

The march will end in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Organizers and longtime activists in New York say in recent past years the march has lasted as long as eight hours or more and this year’s march could last even longer.

For the first time this year a dissident group in New York City, the Reclaim Pride Coalition, has organized a separate Queer Liberation March set to take place the same day as the official New York City Pride March on June 30.

But the Queer Liberation March is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m., at the site of the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village. It will travel from its starting point at Sheridan Square in front of the Stonewall along 7th Avenue to 10th Street where it will turn onto 6th Avenue and travel to Central Park, where a rally will take place.

“The Queer Liberation March is a people’s

political march – there will be no corporate floats, and no police in our march,” according to a statement released by the Reclaim Pride Coalition. “Our march is a truly grassroots action that will mobilize the community to address the many social and political battles that continue to be fought locally, nationally, and globally,” the statement says.

Although not as large as the World Pride closing ceremony in Times Square organized by Heritage of Pride, the Queer Liberation March Rally, set to take place on Central Park’s Great Lawn, will include speakers and performers. Among them will be nationally acclaimed playwright and co-founder of the AIDS protest group ACT UP, Larry Kramer.

Among those scheduled to perform at the rally are Kevin Aviance and the lesbian singing group Betty.

Activists in New York who have been following the plans for the two marches say many plan to participate in both since the Queer Liberation March will likely end before the New York Pride March begins at noon.

James Fallarino, a spokesperson for Heritage of Pride, has said that while corporate floats will take part in the New York City Pride March in their role as corporate sponsors, such floats will be far outnumbered by contingents made up of nonprofit LGBT or LGBT supportive organizations.

However, the New York City Pride website says that due to the large number of participants in the march, individuals interested in marching must be part of a group or contingent that has registered in advance to join the march. An individual that shows up on the day of the march won’t be allowed to join the march if he or she isn’t part of a preregistered contingent, although they will be allowed to watch the march on the sidelines, which will be fenced off from the street by security barriers set up by the New York City Police Department.

Ann Northrop, one of the lead organizers of the Queer Liberation March,

said that march will allow anyone to join its ranks at any location along its route.

Northrop said for people unable to come to New York for the weekend events, organizers will be livestreaming the Queer Liberation March and rally on its website, reclaimpridenyc.org.

The New York City Pride March will be broadcast live from noon to 4 p.m. on WABC TV Channel 7, the ABC Television Network’s New York City affiliate station.

It couldn’t immediately be determined whether out of town viewers could see the ABC7 broadcast through a livestreaming on the station’s website.

The following are some of the main events scheduled for this weekend by New York City Pride and the Reclaim Pride Coalition: • Stonewall 50 Commemoration Rally— Friday, June 28, 6 p.m. at Christopher Street and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village • Youth Pride—Saturday, June 29, 12 p.m. at Summer Stage in Central Park • Pride Island Celebration—Saturday, June 29, 2 p.m.; Hudson River Park’s Pier 97. The event will feature big name entertainers, including legendary singer Grace Jones, Teyana Taylor, Kim Petras, Pabllo Vittar, and Amara La Negra.

• PrideFest street fair—Sunday, June 30; 11 a.m.; 4th Avenue between Union Square and Astor Place. The event includes exhibitors, entertainers and fun activities.

• Queer Liberation March—Sunday, June 30, 9:30 a.m., begins at Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village outside the Stonewall Inn. The march ends in Central Park, where a rally will be held.

• New York City Pride March—Sunday, June 30; 12 p.m.; begins at 26th Street and 5th Avenue. Grand marshals include the cast of “Pose,” Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, Gay Liberation Front members, the Trevor Project, and Monica Helms.

• World Pride Closing Ceremony— Sunday, June 30; 7 p.m. in Times Square; Melissa Etheridge is among the entertainers scheduled to perform.

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MARSHA P. JOHNSON’s family says the criminal justice system in New York failed her.

Photo couresy of Netflix

The Marsha mystery and mystique Johnson and pal Sylvia Rivera key players in Stonewall legacy

By PHILIP VAN SLOOTEN Ten-year-old Xander came out as nonbinary-femme this year to their elementary school. Transgender service member Terece began transitioning to female while still a sailor on active duty.

Both recognize their historical debt to Stonewall activist Marsha P. Johnson.

According to many sources and records, Johnson was an African-American self-identified drag queen and regular at New York’s Stonewall Inn, a mafia-owned gay bar catering to a crowd of mostly queer minorities, gender non-conformers

and homeless youth.

On June 28, 1969, the bar was raided by police and many reported Johnson and others fought back, resulting in rioting and later a commemorative march that would evolve into modern Pride parades.

Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman of color and her friend, would go on to found STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, a charity and shelter for homeless transgender teens.

After decades of activism punctuated by poverty, homelessness and mental illness, Johnson died in 1992 under suspicious circumstances. Rivera would die 10 years later from liver cancer after a lifetime devoted to trans activism.

But it’s a history Millennial and Gen Z genderqueer youth like Terece and Xander have had to learn on their own.

“I have heard of Stonewall,” says Xander, who uses they/them pronouns.

“I’m actually reading a book about the Stonewall riots … and I listen to a queer history podcast.”

“I know a little about the Stonewall uprising,” Terece says. “I’m learning on my own. I went to school in the ‘90s … so anything regarding LGBT rights has been self-study in my adult life now.”

Both are aware of its impact on their lives.

“I am aware of Marsha P. Johnson and her role in the Stonewall events,” Terece says. “To me Marsha is a trans woman of color who saw abuse and misjustice within her community and decided to take a stand. She is a figure of which we look to for guidance for how trans people should be treated.”

Xander is just starting to hear about people like Rivera and Johnson. Some previous wrongs are slowly being righted.

Johnson’s likeness is front and center on a new YA book called “What Was Stonewall?”

by Nico Medina. In 2018, Johnson received a lengthy obit in the New York Times in its “Overlooked” series that supplies obits of those initially overlooked at the times of their deaths.

Albert Michaels, Johnson’s nephew (who’s straight), says Johnson’s legacy and name recognition are sadly uneven.

“I’m finding ... especially in her hometown of Elizabeth (N.J.), Marsha’s not really known there,” Michaels says. “Every time something goes on (to commemorate her) I post it to my Facebook page or post it to a community page. I mean, here, nobody really knows about Marsha, straight

3 0 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

MARSHA P. JOHNSON, seen here the year she died, left behind a complex legacy.

Photo by Randy Wicker

community, trans community or otherwise.

Even when I did an interview the other day in front of Stonewall and I went inside for the first time into the bar, no one really knew about Marsha. There was one guy who knew … and yet they all had these T-shirts and were selling them for Pride. But there would be no Pride or no Stonewall if this whole event didn’t happen.”

Though he was just 8 in 1969, the weight of the loss adds emotion to his voice.

“It’s sad to me. I went there (to Stonewall Inn) for some kind of enlightenment ... and I felt very disappointed. … I never saw Marsha in New York and to this day that is one thing that I regret. That I never went to search for Marsha, never walked the streets with Marsha … and to see things through Marsha’s eyes.”

David France, director and producer of the Netflix documentary “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson,” did meet Johnson in New York after moving there in 1981 and deeply appreciated the opportunity.

“The queer community was still a very small and geographically bounded community and all gay life centered on Christopher Street,” he says.

France’s voice lifts as he remembers a happier time as well as “Marsha’s joy.”

“Christopher Street had a number of prominent characters,” he says. “And the most prominent of them was always Marsha. If you got in with Marsha, you felt like you had found a home. She made you feel at home. I was introduced to her in 1981 and not that she and I were friends, but I can say she served as a kind of an

JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA DE.COM • 31

ambassador’s role to newcomers as they arrived in the city. And especially to the young people that she took under her wing. And I felt that in a small way she had bestowed some of that attention on me and I especially looked up to and felt grateful for that.”

Michaels also appreciated Johnson’s motherly attention.

“I knew Marsha all my life as a kid,” Michaels says. “When my memories shift of Marsha, I go back to the ‘70s and that 8-year-old kid.”

His early memories of Johnson and the riots add color to the often white, middleclass narratives younger generations like Terece and Xander are reading.

“Marsha was quite blunt and quite frank with me,” Michaels says. “She would talk about harassment from police and people mistreating her and how people were evil to each other. Telling me be true to myself and don’t let anyone change me, and to get my education. Basically, the things that a mother or a father would tell their children, basic things in life to try to get you along.”

She once spoke of getting shot in the butt by a taxi driver. And of being beaten by cops and her “johns.”

“She was straight with me,” he says.

“She said you gotta be aware. And that actually helped me. That helped me be who I am today.”

Although he was young and didn’t understand the significance of it at the time, Michaels remembers Johnson coming home shortly after Stonewall frustrated and angry.

“I think she said there was some kind of riot,” he says. “And that she was tired of ‘them pigs’ and they couldn’t take it anymore and they finally stood up for their rights.”

“Half of it went in and half of it went out, but I remember pieces of it,” he says.

France fills in some of the gaps with his own research and personal knowledge.

“Marsha and Sylvia were a partnership,” he says. “Marsha helped raise Sylvia … and they did everything together using different strategies.”

They built one of the first trans empowerment organizations called STAR and embraced the “people power movement” of the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he says.

They envisioned it becoming the chief activist trans movement and tried to build community with other iconoclastic groups of the era such as the Black Panthers.

France says Johnson and Rivera helped start “today’s conversation” about gender nonconformity and civil rights.

“They were the first people who conceptualized the idea that the trans community was a distinct community,” he says. “With a deep sense of the unifying goals and needs … they organized specifically around that. I think this had not ever before been conceptualized in that way. In that way I think they were genuine revolutionaries.”

However, France describes a pervasive lack of acceptance even among gays, culminating in Rivera being ostracized from the movement. Some didn’t want “transvestites” seen as part of their efforts.

Rivera jumped on the stage at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally (i.e. New York Pride) and argued for trans inclusion in the movement.

France says seeing so much racism, transphobia and trans murders, especially for trans women of color, inspired him to explore Johnson’s death. He was hired by the Village Voice to investigate her murder in 1992 but never solved it.

“I remembered Marsha and her gift and (her death) being a significant tragedy in the community from the early ‘90s. I remember it because I was up there and I knew Marsha,” he says.

“That was a terrible year,” he says, noting he lost a partner to AIDS about the same time. “And I always felt like I had let that story down and had let Marsha down as a result. And I felt that if I could tell her story with some power I could really find a way to bring attention to this new unaddressed epidemic of violence against the trans community … that was my goal when I started the film.”

Johnson’s nephew also felt her death personally. He says the criminal justice system failed her and others in similar situations.

“First thing I knew about her murder,” he says, “is basically from what the police report said. She was going to different community functions … and initially the police had her death down as a suicide.

(Later) people were calling our house, trying to get in contact with us. They saw Marsha and (said she) didn’t appear suicidal. So, we were trying to get that report changed.”

Unfortunately, not much progress has been made in the investigation.

“As far as we know, it’s in some kind of limbo,” France says. “Does that mean it is still an active file? They will not report that to us … so, we don’t know if they advanced the investigation.”

Today, Michaels attends Black Trans Lives Matters events “to lend support” on behalf of his slain, pioneering aunt.

“I think Marsha’s legacy is important to all walks of life, no matter what your sexual orientation is and no matter what your gender expression is,” he says. “You always have the people who are trying to lead the way as examples. Marsha and Sylvia, what they started; this is not over. They lit the flame, but this is not over.”

France says modern trans organizations have their origins in Johnson and Rivera’s work.

“We would not be having this discussion today if it were not for them,” he says. “They gave us the framework for this discussion.”

Johnson’s nephew speaks of continuing her legacy.

“I keep in touch with Sylvia Rivera’s adopted daughter, Xenia. We were talking about even starting up another program like STAR, but I’ve never done anything like that before so I have to get in contact with the right people.”

Michaels remains hopeful.

“Xenia is an advocate and she’s been keeping me up to date on what’s been going on,” he says. “And we sort of said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Sylvia and Marsha kind of rose again?’”

Stonewall eyewitness clarifies a few misconceptions ‘It was time for society to decriminalize our lives’

By YULANI RODGERS

Retired college professor and author KARLA JAY in 1971 and today.

Photos courtesy Jay

Stonewall wasn’t bloody enough to be considered a true riot. That’s the contention of one activist who went the second night to see the brouhaha she’d heard about first hand.

“I’d prefer to call it a rebellion or an uprising,” says scholar/author Karla Jay. “A riot is more bloody with fighting in the street.”

Jay was born Karla Jaye Berlin in Brooklyn to her parents Rhoda and Abraham Berlin in 1947. She was raised in a non-observant, largely secular Jewish home and graduated from Barnard College in 1968 after participating in the student demonstrations at Columbia University.

She’s a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University in New York where she taught English and directed the women’s and gender studies program from 19742009. She’s considered a pioneer in the field of lesbian and gay studies and is author of books such as “Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation,” “Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation” and won Best Lesbian Studies Book in 1996 for “Dyke Life: From Growing Up to Growing Old — A Celebration of the Lesbian Experience.” When asked to confirm her sexual orientation, Jay says she eschews labels.

Jay became involved in her activism by participating in various movements such as the peace movement, the women’s movement and the movement against the war in Vietnam. Although her views aligned with the left, she ran into issues.

“The problem with the groups on the left were they were pretty homophobic and

the people who were involved, like myself ... had to basically compartmentalize our lives” Jay says.

Their lack of inclusion pushed Jay into the forefront of fighting for the rights of LGBT people, which started with the Gay Liberation Front and the Stonewall riots.

Contrary to popular belief, films documenting what took place at Stonewall with real footage are inaccurate according to Jay. “There is no footage of the Stonewall activity. So if you’ve seen any footage of the riots, that’s fake news,” she says.

What is known about the events is that on June 28, 1969 the New York City police department went into the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village for what they expected to be a routine bar raid. Things went “wrong for the police” when several patrons at the bar refused to go quietly into the police wagon.

“It was time for society to decriminalize our lives. That’s what happened at the Stonewall” Jay says.

Before Stonewall, New York gays were routinely humiliated, scrutinized and arrested solely for being themselves, especially in the bars.

“People from my generation who went to the bars, we knew about bar raids. They happened pretty frequently and there were bar raids before Stonewall and there were bar raids after Stonewall” Jay says.

It was no surprise to Jay that an event like Stonewall happened. What made her know things were going to be different were the responsive actions of the Gay Liberation Front.

“When I heard it was going to be a different kind of group, a more radical way ... not like the others had been, that’s when I knew it was going to be different,” she says.

A common question that pops up when hearing about Stonewall is what started it all? Some say they threw the first brick while others say they threw a shot glass.

According to Jay, neither of these is what the historic moment was about.

“It had to do with a routine police raid, police pay offs, anger at police pulling them aside, stripping them, arresting them for their clothing,” she says.

Another important piece Jay points to is the “context of other historical acts of defiance.” At this point in American history, several other acts of defiance had happened across the country including the Montgomery bus boycotts, the March on Washington and the draft resistance.

“Events do not happen in isolation,” Jay says.

Although there is no doubt that a sense of change and rebellion were in the air during the 1960s, there are quite a few disputes about what happened at Stonewall.

The first misconception is that the Stonewall events were violent.

“When I went down there the second night, the door was still intact, the windows were still intact,” she says. However, she does not diminish its importance saying, “it was a rebellion.”

Second, is that the death of beloved actress Judy Garland sparked the rebellion.

“It did not happen because people were so upset about (it),” Jay says.

The last major misconception Jay addressed, which may explain the questions people have about Stonewall, is how many people place themselves in the action.

“I think people want to be recognized and we all want to see ourselves in the heroism of everyone that stood up,” she says.

Regardless of the blurred lines, Stonewall’s significance can’t be overstated. It led to a new way that people presented themselves based solely in pride of who they were.

This newfound sense of pride was soon followed by an organized movement called the Gay Liberation Front. Jay says it “changed everything ...we changed the culture.”

It was comprised of a mixture of identities standing up for what they believed was right and decided to push for legal and social action.

“It made it a wonderful kind of group for a new movement because the old movement didn’t really welcome all these people, particularly trans people. It was a new wave with new beginnings of radical resistance to oppression,” Jay says.

This new wave of resistance left its mark on the world and since then has trickled down into the movements of today like Gays Against Guns and the ever-growing dyke and trans marches.

“We are on the cusp of a new era of taking to the streets” that will eventually grow into a “new wave of radicalism” that will address the legal backlash the LGBTQ community is facing,” she says.

In light of all the movements that are pushing for social change, some institutions have thought to address their involvement in harassment against LGBTQ people, including the New York City Police Department.

According to the New York Times, the commissioner, James P. O’Neil, said, “The actions taken by the N.Y.P.D. were wrong — plain and simple.”

Jay thought the apology was “a great first step.”

“I want to know what are they doing to protect our community now in a different and meaningful way, particularly that trans population. Your apology means nothing without concrete action,” she says.

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LGBT Health Forum 2019

Getting the Word Out: Stonewall, the Power of Information, and LGBTQ Health The 7th annual LGBT Health Forum will be held on July 9th in Washington, DC. The Forum is the primary annual public event of the LGBT Health Policy & Practice Graduate certificate program at the George Washington University wherein leaders, experts, and activists tackle topics related to the health of the LGBT population, locally, nationally, and globally.

Tuesday July 9 • 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm

Marvin Center Amphitheater, 800 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC Topic: Getting the Word Out: Stonewall, the Power of Information, and LGBTQ Health Admission: Free Post-Event Reception w/Panelists and VIP guests starting at 7:30 pm ($20 suggested donation)

2019 Forum Description

This year, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Stonewall rebellion, the LGBT Health Forum will consider how the 1969 uprising set in motion events that positively impacted the health of LGBTQ people. Specifically, we will examine how disseminators of ideas and information – authors, journalists, essayists, activists, novelists, and scientists – enabled the movement to grow and realize gains for LGBTQ people in their health and rights.

Victoria Cruz

Stonewall Veteran/Activist

Michael Denneny

Gay Publishing Pioneer

JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 33

Joshua Johnson Host of NPR’s “1A”

Kevin Naff

Washington Blade Editor

Esther Newton

Queer Anthropologist

Charles Silverstein

Psychologist DSM Reformer

Steps to Stonewall Early ‘60s D.C. protests laid groundwork for riots, activists say

By JOEY DIGUGLIELMO JOEYD@WASHBLADE.COM

Members of the Mattachine Society gather in 1986 for a 25th anniversary celebration. Lilli Vincenz is fourth from left in the back row. Frank Kameny is first at right in the back row. Paul Kuntzler is bottom right in front of Kameny.

Washington Blade photo by Doug Hinckle

Editor’s note: This story is reprinted from the June 5, 2009 edition of the Blade.

The widely held notion that 1969’s Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village were the start of the modern gay rights movement is inaccurate local activists say as they were meeting and picketing years before.

“When people say as you so often hear, that the gay movement started with Stonewall, if I have a chance under the circumstances in which it’s said, I invariably correct them very insistently,” says Frank Kameny, 84, a legendary gay activist widely recognized as one of the great leaders of the homophile movement, as it was then known. “And point out that the movement was just sort of 20 years old already and there was a groundwork.”

Kameny and others who were involved in the early years agree, though, that Stonewall’s influence can’t be overstated, through its significance wasn’t immediately apparent.

Kameny, Lilli Vincenz, Paul Kuntzler, the late Barbara Gittings, the late Jack Nichols and others had been involved in East Coast gay activism for years. An April 1965 picket at the White House by the Kamenyand-Nichols-founded Mattachine Society of Washington was the first of its kind, but involved a small group dressed — at Kameny’s insistence — in shirts and ties for the men and dresses or skirts for the women.

“Things culturally were very, very different then,” Kameny says, describing the scene of an early picket at the Civil Service Commission to protect the inability of gays to get security clearances. “In 1965, men’s shirts were white.

Period. There were no other kinds. Dress was very conservative. It changed over the next half decade, changed very significantly … but in terms of those days, if we’re gonna picket

to be employed, we have to look employable by their standards.”

A handful of gay groups existed on the East Coast and met regularly as the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). Those involved say it was a different world.

“Most gay people at the time were not interested in any kind of civil rights activity,” Vincenz, 71, says. “So we were seen as kind of Don Quixotes chasing windmills. I felt they could at least give us some money, but they didn’t do that either. They were worried about their careers and they thought it was a lost cause. They couldn’t imagine it. So I was seen as a crusader and so we were a small group.”

Kameny says it soon became obvious from ECHO gatherings that D.C.’s Mattachine Society was a trendsetter taking on the Civil Service Commission, the qualification of homosexuality as an illness by the American Psychiatric Association, security clearances, the military gay ban and more.

“All those things we were doing, nobody else was doing to any meaningful extent anywhere,” Kameny says. “We had ECHO meetings in October of each year in ’63, ’64 and ’65 and monthly meetings here in Washington, Philadelphia and New York over that period and the Washington Mattachine was doing things and reporting to everyone else what we were doing. Philadelphia had two women … the New York Mattachine had monthly meetings but they were just meetings, they weren’t accomplishing anything particularly. The things that were being done were being done by us here.”

Kuntzler met Kameny one night at the Chicken Hut, a gay D.C. bar, in late February of ’62 and found a kindred spirit. He remembers the sign he made to carry in the

first White House protest.

“Jack (Nichols) saw my poster and wanted it, so I let him carry it,” Kuntzler, 67, says with a chuckle. “He ended up in the front of a photo carrying my sign.”

“That was the first time we had any visibility,” Vincenz, who’ll be honored as a Pride “superhero” with Kameny at this year’s Capital Pride parade, says. “Confidential magazine picked us up and put our pictures everywhere. … We’d never had any visibility before that actually.”

One of ECHO’s signature yearly events was an Independence Day protest each year at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The one held in 1969, though, which turned out to be ECHO’s last, was markedly different.

Stonewall had happened less than a week before and changed things forever.

None of the Mattachine activists were involved in the Stonewall riots. Because it was a spontaneous event that quickly gathered steam during a then par-for-the-course police raid on the gay bar, the only people involved were those who happened to be at the Stonewall Inn, a seedy, Mafia-owned dive that attracted drag queens and homeless gay youth, that night. But they heard about it almost instantly.

“We were all in contact through ECHO, so we heard immediately of what had happened,” Vincenz says. “This was a big event that somebody had, so many people fought back against the police.”

Kameny doesn’t remember exactly whom he heard the news from first but says he was “elated.”

In Philadelphia just days later at the ECHO protest, it was clear the formal Mattachine members had some new allies.

“It looked very different,” Vincenz says.

“People didn’t care about any dress rules.

The Stonewall crowd came over and there we had, we weren’t supposed to have beards and sandals but now we had beards and sandals. I remember two women, black, white, holding a baby and holding hands. It was just new. And there was some of kind of disgruntlement by some of the old guard.

This was a new influx of grassroots activists.”

While the Independence Day picket seemed slightly different, it became apparent that things were much different on June 28, 1970 for the first Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March, a one-year

commemoration of Stonewall that morphed into the annual Pride parades.

Kameny, who attended, was dumbfounded by the turnout.

“I remember … seeing this vast horde of people and I was absolutely speechless,” he says. “Flowing in like a river into the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. If nothing else, there it was in front of one’s eyes. It would have been impossible in terms of anything movement-wise prior to that. We had clearly overstepped a line. We had transitioned.”

Cliff Witt, a longtime local D.C. gay activist, accompanied Vincenz to the parade as a camera assistant for the film she made called “Gay and Proud.”

“I had heard of Stonewall before, but I don’t remember how I first heard,” he says. “I had many trepidations. You could not be gay in those days. Lilli was out through her Mattachine work. I agreed that I would be like the press, running along side, but not part of it.”

Back home in Washington, huge changes were underway. The Mattachine Society was winding down, eclipsed somewhat by the newly formed Gay Activist Alliance (GAA, which became the Gay & Lesbian Activist Alliance in the ‘80s), a spin-off of a similar New York group.

Stonewall’s significance is almost universally recognized but it’s not the whole story players active then say.

Kuntzler says Stonewall-type events were also brewing in Washington around that time.

He recalls a May 1969 night at D.C.’s Plus One, a gay bar on 8th Street, S.E. It didn’t turn violent and wasn’t as dramatic as Stonewall, but the long line of gay men waiting to get in that Thursday night didn’t turn and run when a mammoth flock of police cars arrived.

“They hardly paid any attention (to the cops),” Kuntzler says. “It just didn’t work, so the cops went away. This was a liberation in a way, too. It was indicative of a profound psychological shift that had started.”

“It was like Stonewall started the mainstream gays,” Witt says. “It sort of started the organization of the gay liberation movement as we came to know it. … It became more militant and demanding and in your face. We weren’t polite any longer.”

Kameny puts it succinctly: “I feel we created a mindset without which Stonewall would not have occurred at all.”

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Before Stonewall, newspapers complicit with police in gay bar raids D.C. outlets reported names, addresses of men arrested for public sex ‘The Post never made a big deal out of it,’ said former Washington Post editor BEN BRADLEE of covering arrests of gay men for public sex.

Photo by Miguel Ariel Contreras Drake-McLaughlin; Courtesy of Flickr

Fifty years ago, members of the LGBT community tired of continuous police raids on gay bars were driven to riot in the streets of New York City after the latest incursion at the Stonewall Inn on the evening of June 26, 1969.

But police raids on gay bars in the days before the Stonewall riots went hand-in-hand with the subsequent reports in newspapers the next day outing individuals caught in the raids, which would have potentially blacklisted them for the remainder of their lives.

In terms of Washington news coverage, the authority on newspapers outing gay men caught in police raids is Edward Alwood, a former CNN correspondent and now adjunct lecturer at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at University of Maryland, College Park.

Alwood wrote about the practice in his 1996 book “Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media,” and spoke about it in an interview with the Washington Blade.

“Washington was very different from New York,” Alwood said, “in that so much of the gay community here was connected with the federal government, and for that reason…gay men were much more closeted here and much less likely to protest as they did in New York.”

That perspective within D.C.’s gay community started to change, Alwood said, when gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny was outed, lost his job in the federal government as an astronomer and formed the Mattachine Society. Nonetheless, Alwood said during that time there would be newspaper

articles reporting on gay raids that named individuals who were caught.

Reading from his book, Alwood said the D.C. press after World War II made vague references to homosexuals in describing street crimes, “particularly police campaigns to clean up public parks, including Lafayette Park across from the White House.” (Lafayette Park had been a place where gay men would meet to have sex discreetly.)

The Washington Post in the 1940s, Alwood said, described how officers shuttled groups of men from the park to the city jail throughout one night in July 1947 as 41 were arrested in the park.

The Washington Star reported that the metropolitan police staged a raid just to see who the men were. Similarly, the Post celebrated a crackdown a year later, when a headline read, “One-Man Vice Squad Arrests Eight More.”

“The article lavished praise on a handsome undercover officer who was deemed the the city’s most successful weapon in combating vice,” Alwood said.

“Neither newspaper explained why the police felt compelled to target law-abiding citizens because they were considered unwelcome in public parks.”

Alwood quoted Benjamin Bradlee, the Post editor during its Pentagon Papers and Watergate coverage in the 1970s, as dismissive of the coverage in reflections of the time when he started at the newspaper covering vice on the crime beat.

“The police sent these guys into men’s rooms where they sort of lollygag around

By CHRIS JOHNSON CJOHNSON@WASHBLADE.COM to see if anybody would make a pass at them,” Alwood quoted Bradlee as saying.

“They would make sure the press heard about it. The Post never made a big deal out of it. We had little one paragraph that had that no news value, of course, but that’s what it was.”

For lesbians, Alwood said, the situation was different. For starters, sodomy was an offense perceived as something only men could commit, he said, so homosexual acts weren’t considered against the law. There were no lesbian bars, he said, so women met instead at women’s homes.

“They had these social clubs, so that’s part of the difference that happened, which is why so many more men wound up having their names and their ages and their street addresses listed in the newspapers,” Alwood said.

Nonetheless, Alwood said there was coverage of lesbians. One piece in the Washington Times-Herald, drew on the Red Scare of a Russian threat during the Cold War for a sensational article.

Under the headline, “Reds entice women here in sex orgies,” the article described an alleged plot by Russian agents to entice women employees of the State Department into homosexuality,” Alwood said.

“Russian agents were waging a systematic campaign to bring women employees of the State Department under their control by enticing them into a life of lesbianism,” Alwood said. “As many as 65 or 70 persons attended a single one of these lavish get-togethers, according to a congressional committee. Many were garbed in rich Oriental costumes to help them get into the spirit of things.”

Such coverage isn’t found today in

Washington-area newspapers, which have been accepting of the D.C. LGBT community and seek to capitalize on LGBT events, such as Capital Pride. The Post, however, didn’t respond to the Washington Blade’s request for comment on past coverage outing gay men and whether any formal decision was made to change it.

Alwood said he’s unaware of any one instance that indicated “any flipping of the switch, so to speak,” but said the arrest of Walter Jenkins, a close aide to former President Lyndon Johnson, in 1964 on “moral charges” at the YMCA was a turning point.

“I think it was a wake-up call for journalists in this city because now it wasn’t just anonymous low-ranking people in men’s rooms and parks getting arrested, it was a high-level front page story of a presidential aide,” Alwood said. “And I think as a result of that, I’m just guessing, more journalists, such as those at the Post, realized they knew gay people and they didn’t fit the stereotype.”

Also at that time, Alwood said, more and more D.C. gay groups were protesting police actions, which led to a re-examination of the strict laws.

One period that marked a change, Alwood said, was when Albert Finney became managing editor of the Post.

During his tenure, Alwood said Finney assigned a reporter to write an in-depth series about gay people in D.C. “The series was stunning for its time,” Alwood said. “It was in-depth, bold, insightful.

Though its premise rested on old stereotypes and clinical language, like homosexual, it pushed the boundaries of ignorance and denial to a new level of openness.”

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JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 37

Five decades of progress since Stonewall 20 events that shaped the LGBTQ movement

By MICHAEL K. LAVERS MLAVERS@WASHBLADE.COM This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which are credited with launching the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Since that time, the country has seen tremendous progress in LGBTQ equality and acceptance. Here is a list of 20 events that have shaped the LGBT rights movement over the last 50 years.

June 28, 1970: Upwards of 2,000 people took part in New York’s Christopher Street Liberation Day that commemorated the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. This march is seen by many as one of the first Pride events.

Dec. 15, 1973: The American Psychological Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness.

June 8, 1977: Voters in Dade County, Fla., repealed a gay rights ordinance the Dade County Commission approved earlier in the year.

Anita Bryant’s campaign against the ordinance ahead of the referendum prompted outrage among LGBT activists across the country and a boycott of Florida orange juice. The Miami-Dade County Commission in 1998 approved a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation.

From top: Dan White assassinated City Supervisor HARVEY MILK and Mayor George Moscone inside San Francisco City Hall on Nov. 28, 1978. Photo by Ted Sahl; Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; and EDIE WINDSOR challenged DOMA after she paid $363,000 in federal estate taxes when her wife passed away in 2009. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 found DOMA unconstitutional.

Washington Blade photo by Michael Key

Nov. 27, 1978: San Francisco Supervisor Dan White assassinated City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone inside San Francisco City Hall.

The assassination of Milk, a pioneering activist who was the first openly gay man elected in California, sparked an outpouring of grief that included a candlelight vigil in which up to 40,000 people participated. White’s sentence for voluntary manslaughter in connection with Milk’s murder sparked what became known as the White Night riots that took place in San Francisco in May 1979.

Oct. 14, 1979: The National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights took place in D.C. The gathering was the first of several large LGBT rights marches that have taken place since the Stonewall riots.

July 3, 1981: The New York Times published an article on a “rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer” that later become known as AIDS. The AIDS epidemic has killed more than an estimated 600,000 people in the U.S. It also sparked activism that persists to this day, even though medications and access to treatment have allowed many people with HIV/AIDS to live longer lives.

June 30, 1986: The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick ruled the Constitution does not protect consensual same-sex sexual activity. The decision upheld a Georgia law that criminalized oral and anal sex among consenting adults.

Sept. 20, 1996: President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevented the federal government from recognizing the marriages of same-sex couples that were legally performed.

Edith “Edie” Windsor challenged DOMA after she paid $363,000 in federal estate taxes when her wife passed away in 2009. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 found DOMA unconstitutional.

Oct. 12, 1998: Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming college student, died after two men brutally beat him and left him tied to a fence.

Shepard’s death sparked outrage across the country. It also prompted his parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard, to become vocal LGBT activists through their work with the Matthew Shepard Foundation they created after their son’s murder.

President Obama in 2009 signed the

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Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which added sexual orientation and gender identity to the federal hate crimes law.

June 29, 1999: James Hormel became the first openly gay U.S. ambassador.

President Clinton named Hormel to represent the U.S. in Luxembourg.

More than half a dozen other openly gay men have been named ambassadors since 1999. These include current U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell.

June 26, 2003: The U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas ruled sodomy laws are unconstitutional.

Nov. 2, 2003: New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson became the first openly gay bishop ordained by the Episcopal Church.

May 17, 2004: Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to allow same-sex couples to legally marry.

Feb. 1, 2009: Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became the world’s first openly LGBT head of government when she was sworn in as Iceland’s prime minister.

Sigurðardóttir left office in 2013.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and Luxembourgish Prime Minister Xavier Bettel are openly gay, while Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabić is a lesbian. Elio Di Rupo, who was Belgium’s prime minister from 2011-2014, is also openly gay.

Sept. 20, 2011: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the law that prohibited openly gay people from serving in the U.S. military, was officially repealed.

“As of today, patriotic Americans in uniform will no longer have to lie about who they are in order to serve the country they love,” said then-President Obama. “As of today, our armed forces will no longer

lose the extraordinary skills and combat experience of so many gay and lesbian service members.”

The Pentagon in 2016 announced it would no longer prohibit openly transgender people from the military. The Trump administration has reinstituted this ban.

Nov. 6, 2012: Tammy Baldwin became the first openly LGBT person elected to the U.S. Senate.

June 26, 2015: The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges extended marriage rights to same-sex couples across the country.

James Obergefell, who was the lead plaintiff in the case, legally married his late-husband, John Arthur, on the tarmac of Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in 2013 after the Supreme Court struck down DOMA. The couple’s home state of Ohio did not legally recognize their wedding.

June 12, 2016: A gunman killed 49 people inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. The massacre was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history until a gunman killed 58 people and injured more than 500 others at a Las Vegas concert on Oct. 1, 2017.

The Pulse nightclub massacre sparked renewed calls for gun control from LGBT rights advocates and their supporters. It also prompted President Trump, who was running for president, to renew his calls to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Nov. 7, 2017: Danica Roem became the first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature in the U.S. when she defeated then-Virginia state Del. Bob Marshall (R-Prince William County), a vocal opponent of LGBT rights.

Nov. 6, 2018: Colorado Gov. Jared Polis became the first out person elected governor of a U.S. state.

JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA DE.COM • 39

From top: PRESIDENT OBAMA signed a repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in 2011; JAMES OBERGEFELL was the lead plaintiff in the case that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states. and TAMMY BALDWIN became the first openly LGBTQ U.S. senator in 2012.

Washington Blade photos by Michael Key

Stonewall wasn’t the only LGBT riot Lesser-known protests erupted in San Francisco Rioters outside San Francisco City Hall on May 21, 1979 responding to the verdict in the Dan White murder case.

Photo by Daniel Nicoletta via WikiMedia

With the 50th anniversary of the June 1969 Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village taking place this weekend, the compelling story of how LGBT people fought back following the police raid on the Stonewall Inn gay bar will likely capture the attention this week of the LGBT community and its allies.

But those familiar with LGBT history point out that there were three other riots besides Stonewall in which LGBT people fought back against injustices by police, government officials, and society in general.

All of them took place in San Francisco.

Compton’s Cafeteria Riot One of them, known as the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, took place in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood in August 1966, three years before Stonewall. Those familiar with it say it was led by LGBT people known then as drag queens and “cross dressers” but who today would be known to be transgender women.

Many of them hung out at the late night cafeteria, which operated as a restaurant.

According to an account by transgender historian Susan Stryker in her 2008 book “Transgender History,” the cafeteria’s trans customers and their gay male friends were frequently harassed by the cafeteria’s management and by police in the early and mid-1960s.

At the time, so-called “cross-dressing” was illegal in San Francisco, and police and local regulatory agencies often threatened to close bars or eateries like Compton’s for allowing such people to patronize their establishments.

Stryker reports in her book that the Compton’s Cafeteria riot was triggered when a police officer attempted to arrest a trans woman inside the cafeteria and she responded by throwing the coffee she was drinking in the officer’s face.

That act of defiance, coming on the

heels of years of harassment by the police, prompted other trans people and their friends to “erupt,” Stryker wrote. People began to throw dishes and furniture and the cafeteria’s plate glass windows were smashed. When police reinforcements rushed to the scene the fighting spilled into the street, where people smashed the windows of a police car and set a sidewalk newsstand on fire.

Stryker, who also co-produced a documentary film on the riot called “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria,” reports that more than a dozen people were taken away by police in paddy wagons that night.

She reported that on the next night more transgender people, sex workers, Tenderloin neighborhood “street people,” and LGBT people in general returned to the scene to picket Compton’s Cafeteria after learning the management had banned transgender people from going back to the establishment.

In what observers consider an important pre-Stonewall development for LGBT rights, trans and LGBT youth under the guidance of the progressive Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco formed a group that staged protests over the next year or two against police harassment of trans and gay youth in the Tenderloin area.

White Night Riots What has become known as the White Night Riots erupted in San Francisco on May 21, 1979 hours after news broke that a jury had rejected prosecutors’ call for a first-degree murder conviction for the man who assassinated gay rights icon and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the city’s pro-LGBT mayor George Moscone.

To the shock and horror of San Francisco’s large LGBT community and its allies, the jury instead convicted ex-police officer and former supervisor Dan White of

By LOU CHIBBARO JR. LCHIBBARO@WASHBLADE.COM voluntary manslaughter for the two killings, prompting a judge to sentence him to seven years and eight months in prison.

With good behavior, he would be eligible for release after serving just five years.

Legal observers said the jury appeared to have been persuaded by the defense attorneys’ argument that White suffered from an impaired mental state due to depression and the excessive consumption of fast food, which later became known as the “Twinkie defense.”

Police and prosecutors said White shot Milk and Moscone on Nov. 27, 1978 multiple times in the head and body execution style with a handgun inside their offices at City Hall, which White entered through an unguarded door he knew about as a former supervisor.

According to accounts by the media and by longtime LGBT and AIDS activist Cleve Jones, who worked on Milk’s staff and who was present during the riots, the LGBT community responded to the news about White’s verdict by organizing a peaceful protest in the city’s largely gay Castro neighborhood.

What started with about 500 people quickly grew to 1,500 as the protesters marched through the streets and swelled to more than 5,000 as the crowed reached City Hall in what observers described as an angry mood that took on the air of a mob.

Media accounts say some in the crowd began to smash the windows and glass front doors of the City Hall building as several of Milk’s friends and longtime supporters attempted to hold the crowd back. Although police officials said later that the large number of police officers dispatched to the scene were directed to hold back the crowd, many officers waded into the crowd and attacked the protesters with nightsticks, inflaming what was already a volatile situation.

The police action prompted angry protesters to begin smashing the windows of police cars and setting them and other cars on fire by tossing lit matchbooks into

the cars, causing the gas tanks to explode.

At least a dozen police cars and eight other cars were destroyed that way before the rioting ended later in the evening.

Media reports said at least 61 police officers and an estimated 100 or more protesters or members of the public were hospitalized as a result of the rioting.

Additional people were injured, media reports said, when a group of police officers disobeyed orders from the chief of police not to retaliate and raided a gay bar in the Castro neighborhood later in the evening.

Witnesses said the renegade officers, who placed tape over their nametags and badges, smashed the Elephant Walk bar’s windows and attacked its patrons for about 15 minutes. They then went out on the street and attacked others they believed to be gays who participated in the rioting.

Further LGBT organized protests took place in the following days that did not trigger violence. One of the later protests drew more than 20,000 people who assembled peacefully at Castro and Market Streets. The city’s then mayor, Dianne Feinstein, and gay Supervisor Harry Britt, who replaced Milk on the Board of Supervisors, vowed to take steps to protect the rights of LGBT people and curtail anti-LGBT violence.

AB 101 Veto Riot The last of the three known other LGBT riots took place in San Francisco on Sept. 30, 1991. Similar to the White Night Riots, it was triggered by breaking news earlier that day.

Then-California Gov. Pete Wilson (R) vetoed a major gay rights bill approved by the state legislature known as Assembly Bill 101, which called for banning employment discrimination based on someone’s sexual orientation. Wilson initially suggested he would sign the legislation, but political observers said he changed his mind at the behest of his party’s religious right faction and other conservatives whose support he needed for his re-election bid.

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JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 41

Stonewall Inn’s owners look back while moving forward LGBTQ landmark continues to evolve 50 years later

By MARIAH COOPER MCOOPER@WASHBLADE.COM

The modern Stonewall Inn is about half the size of the original bar and was last sold in 2006.

Photo by Diana Davies; Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Open the front door to the Stonewall Inn today and you’ll find LGBTQ people from every walk of life. Locals and tourists alike gather for reasons as diverse as they are. Some patrons want to see the worldfamous Stonewall Inn; others pop in for a cocktail and the rest simply want to hang out in a gay bar.

Among the crowd, you may even spot a famous face. Taylor Swift recently performed at Stonewall Inn; Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden came by to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots; and Madonna surprised fans with a New Year’s Eve performance at the historic bar in 2019.

Co-owners Kurt Kelly and Stacy Lentz gave birth to this modern-day Stonewall Inn when they purchased it in 2006.

Kelly, who is gay, felt that the Stonewall Inn had lost its connection with the LGBTQ community. He and a group of investors decided to purchase the property and brought investor Lentz, a lesbian community activist, on board as co-owner.

It was the first bar Kelly and Lentz had

ever owned but they were ready to return the Stonewall Inn to its LGBTQ roots.

The original Stonewall Inn was a Mafiaowned bar located on 51–53 Christopher Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.

“The Mafia bought up a lot of the gay bars because they saw money involved in there. They saw money in those spaces because gay people would go there and spend a lot of money,” Kelly says.

Police raids were common for gay bars during that time and one such routine raid would make history on June 28, 1969 when bar patrons resisted arrest. The Stonewall Riots sparked a movement one year later when the first-ever Pride march was organized to commemorate the event. The march route stretched from the Stonewall Inn to Central Park.

Shortly after the riots, the Stonewall Inn shut down. Over the years, it was converted into a bagel shop, a deli and a shoe store before reopening as a bar at 51 Christopher Street from 1987 before shuttering in 1989. The 53 Christopher

Street location reopened as a bar in 1990 as New Jimmy’s but the name was changed to Stonewall a year later.

Kelly, Lentz and their group of investors purchased the space at 53 Christopher Street making the new Stonewall Inn half the size of the original bar.

Today, the Stonewall Inn is recognized as the catalyst for the modern LGBTQ rights movement. In 2016, President Barack Obama designated the Stonewall National Monument, which includes Stonewall Inn and Christopher Street Park, located across the street from the bar. The Stonewall National Monument became the first national monument marking an LGBTQ designated site.

“I think it was incredible for the entire community, not just the owners of the bar, to have that recognized as telling us the fabric of American LGBTQ history is really important. The Parks Department and the national monument really can do that. We were super, super excited and it was an incredible moment for our entire community,” Lentz says. “It’s just extremely important for the LGBTQ community to have Stonewall, the birthplace, recognized as a national monument. Now it’s as famous as the Statue of Liberty or the Grand Canyon.”

The Stonewall Inn has also become known for its LGBTQ advocacy in recent years.

In 2013, Lentz helped organize 80 nonprofits for a rally outside of the Stonewall Inn in support of marriage rights.

After the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, the outside of the Stonewall Inn became a memorial for the victims. The outside of the bar has also been the site of protests against the Trump administration.

Lentz decided to make Stonewall’s

advocacy work more official in 2017.

She spearheaded the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, a non-profit organization working toward LGBTQ equality in the United States.

“We wanted to focus on places all over the country where equality has been slow to arrive. So a lot of that emphasis is on the 28 states where you can still be fired for being LGBTQ. They like to say you can get married on Friday and fired on a Monday.

Legally, they don’t have the same options that we have and those places also have that daily stigma because of the prejudice of the communities around them,” Lentz says.

As World Pride draws near, Kelly and Lentz say they’re prepping for the momentous occasion.

“We’re planning to keep the doors open. We’re the epicenter. We’re at ground zero. We just have to make sure all the beer is there and the liquor is there for everyone to enjoy,” Kelly says.

The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots has drawn more attention to the iconic bar and Kelly and Lentz hope that people will remember just how instrumental the Stonewall Inn was to the LGBTQ rights movement.

“That’s where Pride began and that’s where Pride lives,” Kelly says.

For Lentz, it’s also a conversation that needs to keep going.

“What happened there in 1969, the brave men and women that started that fight, is not over. We have to honor that and all continue to vow to work and keep going until we have full equality and that’s what we all have to do together,” Lentz says.

For more information on the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, visit stonewallinitiative.org.

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JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 43

One for the history books

Spate of new and vintage titles wrestle with Stonewall’s complicated story

By PHILIP VAN SLOOTEN Fifty years after a police raid on a seedy gay bar resulted in an historic uprising and the start of the modern Pride movement, several new books struggle to teach that history to a new and increasingly multicultural queer generation.

“The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History” by Marc Stein is an encyclopedic work that invites readers to look past legends and examine primary documents for themselves. However, activists of color are not featured prominently despite an acknowledgement that “multiple sources on the riots mention these and other individuals,” arguing instead “many accounts are incomplete.” Still, the scope and scholarly nature of this work make it a must read for students and scholars of LGBT history.

Gayle E. Pitman’s “The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets” is also a comprehensive yet short history written for a YA audience. Its strength is also its exposure of police records, historical photos and contemporaneous news accounts to young readers. Additionally, there are mini-lessons on Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Storme DeLarverie. But depictions such as separating DeLarverie from the “Stonewall Lesbian” could make it a challenge for young readers to understand why they were included other than to subtly dismiss them.

However, Pitman’s engaging language and use of visual artifacts make this work an excellent first foray for young readers, and it can easily be coupled with Harriet Dyer’s “The Queeriodic Table: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Culture” as a quick reference to fill in gaps.

“Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution” by David Carter remains a foundational text and was also the basis for the PBS American Experience documentary “Stonewall Uprising.”

Despite being written nine years ago, its exhaustive research is still cited in many later books and documentaries.

Its depth of focus on the people and places surrounding the bar enable a rich exploration of key figures such as Johnson in a way that may not seem flattering but at least feels three-dimensional and real. This is a benefit from focusing on narratives

over artifacts, which is why each of these texts work together to relay a complex history to an increasingly diverse audience.

“PRIDE: Fifty Years of Parades and Protests” from the photo archives of the New York Times is another interesting addition to any LGBT library.

This is work is a visual history consisting of photos paired with descriptions of major events from each decade since Stonewall.

It currently is a bestseller in Amazon’s lifestyle photography section and editorial reviews note “To take in the breadth of (PRIDE’s) contents ... is to witness the power of visibility firsthand.” The strength of this work is the feeling it gives you of being a witness to history even while living the freedoms and challenges of its legacy.

The popular series WhoHQ series, which features “Who Was?,” “What Was?” and “Where Is” books in its series, takes on Stonewall with a new release “What Was Stonewall?” You’ve probably seen the series — They’re small paperbacks featuring vivid, full-color caricatures of their subjects on the covers. This 107-page book by Nico Medina and lavishly illustrated with line drawings by Jake Murray, is a YA book that gives a nice, easy-to-digest account of the riots, what led up to them and what came after. It’s just $5.99. More info at whohq.com.

“Pride: Photographs After Stonewall” features vintage photos from The Village Voice’s first photo editor and staff photographer Fred W. McDarrah. A reissue of a 1994 release timed to Stonewall’s 25th anniversary, it features black-and-white vintage photos taken in the immediate aftermath of the riots showing smashed jukeboxes, graffiti-scrawled windows, participants and more.

“Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet Into the Stonewall Era” features photos by Kay Tobin Lahusen (Barbara Gittings’ partner) and Diana Davies that are also featured in a current exhibit at the New York Public Library that runs through July 13.

Together these works represent and depict not only LGBT history, but the complex social realities of American history as well.

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JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 45

QUEERY Gina Nicole Brown Washington Blade photo by Michael Key

QUEERY: Gina Nicole Brown The author/performance artist answers 20 queer questions

By JOEY DIGUGLIELMO JOEYD@WASHBLADE.COM Though she’s been doing standup longer than she’s been putting out books, Gina Nicole Brown considers herself a writer first, then a performer.

“I don’t really describe myself as a standup comic, but rather somebody who does standup comedy,” says the 52-yearold bi, Rochester, N.Y., native.

She’s been doing comedy off and on for six years.

“People have always said I was funny so I honestly just decided to do it one day,” she says. “I wanted to see if my written thoughts got a pop in front of an audience.”

They did, so she hasn’t stopped.

She took a standup class but says, like any craft, you “have to keep doing it to improve. It’s not something you study for and take a test.”

Her book “Teeth Should Not Be Optional: Random Thoughts from an Insomniac” came out last fall after a decision she made to more fully commit to her passion projects.

Brown will be one of the guests at “The Ask Rayceen Show” July edition on Wednesday,

July 3 at 6 p.m. at the HRC Equality Center (1640 Rhode Island Ave., N.W.). It’s free.

The program will include the annual #AskRayceenPoetrySlam and a discussion of authors who will be at the OutWrite Book Festival Aug. 2-4. Details at askrayceen.com.

Brown is having a very Rayceenalicious summer. She did standup at the June show, is on the panel for July and will be honored for her volunteer work at the August edition. Rayceen is always the first Wednesday of the month. Brown achieved Internet fame earlier this month when she won BuzzFeed’s “Black Moms Try Other Black Moms’ Soul Food” contest with her fried chicken and mac ’n cheese.

She’s devoted her life to creative projects after 30 years in the corporate world and is working on a one-woman show now.

Brown is divorced and has two children, Gabrielle and Dominique. She came to Washington in 1985 for college. She lives in Chevy Chase and enjoys writing, theater and live music in her free time. She’s on all major social media under her full name.

How long have you been out and who was the hardest person to tell?

I’ve been out since the early ‘90s, but I don’t really have a dramatic story around it. I remember telling my mom, “Hey, I have a girlfriend so I think I might be a lesbian.” She was like, “Oh, OK.” If you want to talk to somebody, you can talk to X (referring to a family friend who was out). Then it never really came up again. And since I went back and forth between men and women, it was just a thing. I never really made a big deal about it and neither did anybody around me.

Who’s your LGBTQ hero?

Ellen What LGBTQ stereotype most annoys you?

As a bisexual, it’s assumed we’re all polyamorous or we’re open to threesomes, foursomes or manysomes. There is nothing wrong with being poly or loving group activity, but I’m not into either and neither are all bisexuals.

What’s your proudest professional achievement?

My book. I self-published (quelle horreur to traditionalists), and while it isn’t a literary masterpiece (it’s a book of quips), I did it myself through trial and error with Amazon’s publishing site.

What terrifies you?

Not following my passion, but also following my passion. I don’t want to leave this life never having made all attempts to pursue the life I envisioned for myself.

What’s something trashy or vapid you love?

Watching “Claws.” Let’s be honest, the show is ridiculous and nothing about it is in any way realistic, but I dig it. I can’t lie.

What’s your greatest domestic skill?

Cooking is my best and possibly only good domestic skill. And I clean up after myself. I like a clean kitchen.

What’s your favorite LGBTQ movie or show?

“The L Word.” I wipe a daily tear from my cheek because the show isn’t on anymore and nothing since has come close (there may be a pun in there, but I’m not sure). And “Pose,” because duh.

What’s your social media pet peeve?

“I’m so tired.” That empty post. What am I supposed to do with that? Do I like it? Do I sad face it? We come out of the womb tired. Stop that nonsense.

Or posting an article without a caption – so, you want me to weigh in on my thoughts for this controversial topic, but you have no opinion? If you post something, have a perspective.

What would the end of the LGBTQ movement look like to you?

A beautiful, fluid society where any being could live and love as they so choose.

What’s the most overrated social custom?

Taking somebody else’s last name.

Or naming children Junior or the second or the third. I’m very big on being an individual and I’m not any less a part of you if our names aren’t the same.

What was your religion, if any, as a child and what is it today?

I was raised (and confirmed) Episcopalian (ya know, Catholic without any of the rules). I guess I would say I’m still an Episcopalian, but I don’t attend any sort of church. I find church walls very claustrophobic and I’m troubled by many extreme evangelicals’ thoughts on love. They say God is love, but as my mother would say, actions speak a whole lot louder than words.

What’s D.C.’s best hidden gem?

The original Thai X-ing on Florida Avenue (not the one on 9th). I’m not sure it’s hidden, but it’s a gem for sure.

No menu. You have to be open to eating what’s put before you. It’s like

4 6 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

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What’s been the most memorable pop culture moment of your lifetime?

Laverne’s L, Janet’s nip slip.

What celebrity death hit you hardest?

Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston and Prince. I don’t think Luther and Whitney could ever live as their true selves and that makes me sad. Prince was such an unparalleled talent that I miss all of what he brought to the music industry.

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If you could redo one moment from your past, what would it be?

I spent three years with a domestic abuser.

If I could remove that relationship and its associated PTSD, I would.

What are your obsessions?

The Oxford comma. Verb and subject agreement. My purse (don’t ever touch it). My boots (all of them).

Finish this sentence — It’s about damn time: … we bring civility and decorum back to the White House.

What do you wish you’d known at 18?

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Counterclockwise from left: Soap stud VAN HANSIS Photo courtesy Hansis, RAYCEEN PENDARVIS, who’ll be at the Story District event July 6 Photo courtesy Ask Rayceen and BETTY BUCKLEY in ‘Hello Dolly!’ Photo by Julieta

Cervantes; courtesy Kennedy Center)

D.C. 4th of July events Flashy Sundays, host of LGBTQfriendly Sunday events at Flash (645 Florida Ave., N.W.), will set off its 4th of July event on Wednesday, July 3 from 10 p.m.5 a.m. DJ TWiN and DJ Sean Morris will serve up the latest house music. For more information, visit flashdc.com.

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (2700 F st. NW) will host “Celebrate America: A Tribute to Our Veterans” on Wednesday, July 3 at 8 p.m. Entertainment includes performances by gospel singer Sandi Patty and the Bellevue Baptist Church Choir and Orchestra conducted

by Mark Blair. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at kennedy-center.org.

A League of Her Own (2319 18th St. NW) will hold Wine Down Wednesdays on Wednesday, July 3 from 6-8 p.m. Center

Women and Fabulous Lesbians over 40 (FABS 40+) invite area queer women to start Independence Day off with a night of mingling with fellow FABS and a favorite adult beverage. For more information about FABS 40+ events, check out their group on MeetUp.com.

The D.C. July 4 fireworks show begins at 9:07 p.m. and is expected to run for 20 minutes. The National Mall is a popular viewing spot, so visitors are encouraged to stake out a place early and learn about the latest security restrictions, public access points, road closures and prohibited items from the National Park Service at nps.gov.

Two other free Independence Day events taking place on the National Mall include A Capitol Fourth concert at the U.S. Capitol’s West Lawn and Salute to America at the Lincoln Memorial. For more info, visit nps.gov.

“ERUPT! 4th of July-Eve” is Wednesday, July 3 from 10 p.m.-4 a.m. at The D.C. Eagle (3701 Benning Rd., N.E.).

Tickets are $5 on Eventbrite.

The NoMa 4th of July Bash is today from noon-3 p.m. on the lot on First and Pierce (1150 First St., N.E.). As If, a ‘90s cover band, will perform. There will be double dutch jump roping tutorials, face painting, a moon bounce, free hot dogs, hamburgers, chips and drinks. Look for the event on Facebook for details.

“Red, White and BBQ” is today at 5:30 p.m. at Fairmont Washington (2401 M St., N.W.) with an all-you-can-eat all-American barbecue from 5:30-8 p.m. and 9:30-11 p.m. Burgers, jumbo shrimp, corn on the cob, cole slaw and more will be served.

Look for the event on Facebook for details.

Gaysians/ Latinos unite

United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Lambda D.C. will host a Gaysian and Latinx Fundraiser on Saturday, July 6 from 9 p.m.-1 a.m. at the D.C. Eagle (3701 Benning Rd., N.E.). The party will raise money for their respective organizations.

AQUADC is a volunteer-based organization promoting positive identity and general welfare of the gay, bisexual, transgender and other queer maleidentified members of the Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the D.C. area through advocacy, coalition building, education, networking, outreach and support. The mission of their event partner, LULAC Lambda D.C., is to mobilize and strengthen D.C. area LGBTQ and Latino communities through community and civic engagement.

Look for the event on Facebook for details.

Asian & Pacific Islander Queers United for Action (AQUA D.C.) and the League of

4 8 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

TODAY

Story District returns Story District’s Out/Spoken Pride show with host Rayceen Pendarvis returns to the 9:30 Club (815 V St., N.W.) on Saturday, July 6. Doors open at 8 p.m. and the show starts at 9. Parking is $20 and general admission tickets are $25. Both are available on ticketfly.com.

This year marks the ninth anniversary of this collection of humorous and heartfelt true stories that amplifying LGBTQ voices in celebration of D.C. Pride. Featured performers include Charles W. McCaffrey, Beverly White, Tamar Gasko, Shannon England and Charlotte Clymer. Music is by DJ Heat.

Out/Spoken director Phil Branch is a storyteller in multiple genres and his film “Searching for Shaniqua” is an HBO documentary about the impact names have. Branch also teaches writing at Howard University and is in Story District’s 2019 solo show development lab. For details, visit storydistrict.org.

Final week for ‘Dolly!’

Tony award-winning Broadway actress Betty Buckley stars in the revival of “Hello, Dolly!” at the Kennedy Center (2700 F st.

NW). The show runs through Sunday, July 7 and tickets start at $49.

Winner of four Tony awards including Best Musical Revival, this production has been breaking box office records week after week according to kennedy-center. org. Director Jerry Zaks’ production pays tribute to the original work of legendary director/choreographer Gower Champion and Rolling Stone calls it “a must-see event …If you’re lucky enough to score a ticket, you’ll be seeing something historic.”

For more information, visit kennedycenter.org.

JU N E 28, 2019

The Kennedy Center and the National Symphony Orchestra present “50 Years Over the Rainbow: A Judy Garland Celebration” tonight from 8-10 p.m. The NSO and Tony nominee Laura Osnes, Broadway performer Capathia Jenkins and Pink Martini’s Jimmie Herrod will recreate the 1961 concert “Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall.” Tickets start at $24. For more information visit kennedy-center.org.

Annapolis Pride invites the public to come commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising at the Brass Tap (2002 Annapolis Mall road, Annapolis, Md.) tonight from 6-11 p.m. The venue offers over 300 craft beers, daily specials and live music. Tickets are $10 on eventbrite.com.

GAMMA, a peer support group for gay or bi men who are now or have been in relationships with women, meets in D.C. tonight and on all second and fourth Fridays at Luther Place Memorial Church (1226 Vermont Ave., N.W.) from 7:30-9:30 p.m. Meetings are also held in Vienna, Va., and in Frederick, Md. For more info, visit gammaindc.org.

Saturday, June 29 Daytime Pride 2019 is today from 10 a.m.9 p.m. at HRC (1640 Rhode Island Ave., N.W.).

Tickets start at $125. Daytime Pride is an event celebrating and honoring LGBTQ characters in daytime television. The day event includes autographs, photo ops, panel Q&A and a meet-and-greet hour. The VIP Dinner event (6:30-9 p.m.), held at The Mayflower Hotel (1127 Connecticut Ave., N.W.), gives attendees a chance to sit and have a meal with one of their favorite actors. Proceeds will be donated to True Colors United, a program supporting LGBTQ homeless youth. For tickets and information, visit daytimepride23.simpletix.com.

The Washington Mystics will host its annual Pride celebration today starting at 2 p.m. in a game against the Connecticut Sun that will be televised on ESPN. Proceeds will benefit the HRC Foundation. Tickets start at $12 and can be purchased at washingtonmystics.com.

Slash Run’s (201 Upshur St., N.W.) brunch and drag show, hosted by Desiree Dik, kicks off noon today. Admission is $31 and includes bottomless mimosas, food item of choice and a rotating cast of drag performers from the region. Look for the event on Facebook for details.

The Annapolis Pride inaugural parade and festival is today from noon-5 p.m. The parade runs noon-12:45 p.m. from Amos Garrett to Calvert street and the festival is from noon to 5 p.m. between Calvert and Church Circle. The public is invited to this free family-friendly event filled with vendors, face painting and local entertainment. Visit annapolispride.org for more information.

“Tendancies,”an interactive gay-themed family play by gay playwright Steve Langley, will have a free staged reading today at 4 p.m.

• WA SHINGTONBLA DE.COM • 49

at THE ARC theater (1901 Mississippi Ave., S.E.). Directed by Gregory Ford, the reading is part of the D.C. Theater & Arts Festival. The play tells the story of a conflicted family whose members have trouble communicating but find common ground in a sex club. For free tickets, visit eventbrite.com.

MoCo Pride Party 2019 is tonight at the Rockville Town Square (200 E. Middle Ln., Rockville, Md.) from 6:30-10:30 p.m. and features “RuPaul’s Drag Race” superstar Peppermint. This event includes live performances by DJ Confetti the First, BOOMscat, Malijra Belly Dance, Pretty Boi Drag and more. The public is invited out for food and drink vendors, live entertainment and a community atmosphere. Tickets start at $7.50 and are available on Eventbrite. #TeamHusband presents Best of GAY D.C. Drag Show at the Dew Drop Inn (2801 8th St., N.E.) tonight at 7 p.m. This show features local drag kings and queens performing a fake award show highlighting the rest of the D.C. queer scene. Includes performances by Mo Lasses, Majic Dyke, Blaq Dinamyte, Xemi the Two-Spirit and many more. Jorge Escobar hosts. For tickets and information visit eventbrite.com.

THE ARC theater (1901 Mississippi Ave., S.E.) hosts “The Belle & The Bulldagger” tonight at 7 p.m. This is the story of Belle and Di, a sophisticated femme lesbian and a dapper butch who have now matured and recall scandalous accounts of living and loving freely during the civil rights movement. Audiences will explore their journey from the bigoted South to the nation’s capital. Tickets are $15. Look for the event on Facebook for details.

Eastern Panhandle Pride in West Virginia is hosting the “Be PROUD” drag show and dance party tonight from 8 p.m.-2 a.m. at the War Memorial Building (102 East German St., Shepherdstown, W.Va.). Performers include Chastity Vain, the current Miss Gay Maryland America and Miss Hagerstown Pride; Butch Kelly, Hagerstown’s current and first King of Pride; Siren, a Britney Spears impersonator; and more. Entertainment also includes a rap performance by Ryan Banks and dance music by DJ Andre. Tickets start at $10 and are available on Eventbrite.

The QWERTY dance party and drag show are tonight at Trade (1410 14th St., N.W.) from 10 p.m.-2:45 a.m. The show features music by DJ Dvonne and burlesque by drag king performer, Blaq Milk. Performances also by Adam Koussari and Jeff Prior. Visit Facebook events for more information.

Sunday, June 30 The Newseum’s “Rise Up: Stonewall and the LGBTQ Rights Movement” continues its run through December 31.

The Newseum is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and today from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Visit newseum.org for

tickets and information.

Monday, July 1 Actor/singer Hugh Jackman, who’s balanced his “Wolverine”-heavy movie career with an equally acclaimed Broadway career, plays an exceedingly rare local date with “Hugh Jackman: The Man. The Music.

The Show” tonight at Capital One Arena (601 F St., N.W.) at 7 p.m. He’s straight but an unabashed ally and show tunes lover. He played gay as Peter Allen in “The Boy from Oz.” Tickets start at $25.50 at Ticketmaster.

A “Jaws” movie party is tonight at 7:45 p.m. at Alamo Drafthouse (15200 Potomac Town Pl., suite 100, Woodbride, Va.). The screening will feature interactive props and surprises. The 1975 Spielberg classic is a summer thriller favorite. Details at drafthouse.com.

Tuesday, July 2 The “Pose” viewing party continues tonight from 10-11 p.m. at the D.C. Eagle (3701 Benning Rd., N.E.). Every week the D.C. Eagle invites the public to come watch “Pose” and enjoy their spacious venue with two large screens. Register at eventbrite.com.

Wednesday, July 3 A League of Her Own (2319 18th St., N.W.) will hold Wine Down Wednesdays tonight from 6-8 p.m. Center Women and Fabulous Lesbians over 40 (FABS 40+) invite area queer women to a night of mingling with a favorite adult beverage. For more information check out their group on meetup.com.

Bookmen D.C., an informal men’s gay literature group, discusses Craig M. Loftin’s “Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America” tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Park Library (3310 Connecticut Ave., N.W.). This is a free event and all are welcome to attend. For more information, visit bookmendc.blogspot.com.

Thursday, July 4 Venus Valhalla hosts Thirst Trap Thursdays, a weekly drag show, at Pitchers D.C. (2317 18th St., N.W.) tonight at 11 p.m.

Look for the event on Facebook for details.

The Trump is a Big Baby Festival, featuring the D.C. premiere of the giant Baby Trump blimp, is today at 2 p.m. on the west side base of the Washington Monument. Prize will be awarded for the best Trump impersonator present and a men’s swimsuit contest will be held. Comedian Lee Camp will perform. The Alien Rock Band will perform. Look for the event on Facebook for details.

This Week in the Arts provided by CultureCapital.com

MUSIC

NSO Pops: 50 Years Over the Rainbow: A Judy Garland Celebration Jun 28-29. Kennedy Center. kennedy-center.org.

Marking half a century to the week since the entertainment world lost one of its greatest treasures, the NSO and a trio of exceptional singers remember the immortal music and extraordinary cultural impact of Judy Garland—star of The Wizard of Oz, Easter Parade, Meet Me in St. Louis, A Star Is Born, and countless more.

Sisterfire Showcase Jun 29. Kennedy Center. kennedy-center.org.

Roadwork brings the social power of music to the Millennium Stage through the spirit of its Sisterfire Festival, an intergenerational, multiracial, post-genre hour of womensound featuring Ysaye Barnwell, Be Steadwell , Ariel Horowitz and Yasmin Williams.

Pointless Theatre: Forest Treás Thru Jun 29. Pointless Theatre at Dance Loft. pointlesstheatre.com.

Forest Treàs examines the unforeseen effects of the Information Age on a community in violent crisis. The ongoing Beltway Sniper crisis looms over the residents of Forest Treàs, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Washington, DC. As the Neighborhood Association struggles to maintain a sense of calm and security, a documentary filmmaker proposes a radical solution: put cameras everywhere and live-stream their neighborhood. What could go wrong?

Showcasing 30 Years from the DCAC Archives Jun 28-Jul 21. DC Arts Center. dcartscenter.org.

Through a unique collaboration with the Special Collections department of the Washington, DC Public Library, this exhibition highlights this history using materials pulled from the dark recesses of the DCAC archives and places them into broader themes.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE KENNEDY CENTER

THEATRE A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath. Thru Jun 30. Round House. roundhousetheatre.org.

A Misanthrope. Thru Jun 30. Avant Bard at Gunston. wscavantbard.org.

Betty Buckley in Hello Dolly! Thru Jul 7.

Byhalia, Mississippi. Thru Jun 30. Second City. Thru Aug 11. Kennedy Center. kennedy-center.org.

Blackbeard. Thru Jul 7. Signature Theatre. sigtheatre.org.

Boardwalk Brothers. Jun 28-Jun 30. Arts Barn. gaithersburgmd.gov.

Ripcord. Thru Jul 6. Keegan Theatre. keegantheatre.com.

Signature Theatre Cabaret. Jun 29. ACA at Lubber Run. arlingtonarts.org.

Merlin’s Island and The Emperor of Atlantis. Thru Jun 30. Wolf Trap at The Barns. wolftrap.org.

Twisted Melodies. Thru Jul 21. Mosaic Theater Company at Atlas. mosaictheater.org.

DANCE Art Omi: Dance Alumni. Jun 29-Jun 30.

Dance Place. danceplace.org.

A Capital Fourth Concert & Fireworks.

Jul 4. Dress Rehearsal. Jul 3. West Lawn US Capitol.

A Second of July Celebration. Jul 2.

Anderson House. societyofthecincinnati. org.

Big Head Todd and the Monsters with Toad the Wet Sprocket. Jun 30. Dispatch with Anderson East. Jun 29. Earth, Wind & Fire. Jul 2. Jackson Browne. Jul 3. Rain.

Jun 28. Wolf Trap. wolftrap.org.

Cissa Paz Band. Jun 28. Washington Performing Arts at Franklin Square. washingtonperformingarts.org.

Conversation Concert.

Jun 30.

ChorSymphonica at St. Jane Church. chorsymphonica.org.

Dom Flemons, the American Songster.

Jun 30. Hill Center. hillcenterdc.org.

MUSEUMS AU Museum at the Katzen. Squire Broel, Forward Press: 21st Century Printmaking, Being Here as ME, DMV Printmaking, Maia Cruz Palileo, Passages: Keith Morrison, 1999-2019. Thru Aug 11. american.edu.

Anderson House.

Revolutionary Reflections: French Memories of the War for America. Thru Oct 27. societyofthecincinnati.org.

Dumbarton Oaks. Written in Knots, Beyond Knotting: Wari and Inka Tunics from the Collection. Thru Aug 18. doaks.org.

Folger Shakespeare Library. Miniature Shakespeare Books from the Harner Collection. Thru Dec 31. The Architecture of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Thru Jan 5. folger.edu.

Former Residence of the Ambassadors of Spain. La Cascada by Luzinterruptus.

Thru Sep 27. Water: The Mirror of Life. Thru Sep 27. spainculture.us.

Library of Congress. 50 Years of Stonewall: LGBTQ+ Activism in the U.S..

Thru Jul 11. Art in Action: Herblock and Fellow Artists Respond to Their Times.

Thru Aug 17. Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote. Thru Sep 1. loc.gov.

National Archives. Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote. Thru Jan 3. archivesfoundation.org.

National Gallery of Art. The Life of Animals in Japanese Art. Thru Jul 28. nga.gov.

National Geographic. Queens of Egypt.

Thru Sep 2. nationalgeographic.org.

National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Ursula von Rydingsvard: The Contour of Feeling. Thru Jul 28. More is More: Multiples. Thru Sep 15. New York Ave Sculpture Project. Thru Sep 20. nmwa.org.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian.

Eye to I: Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today.

Thru Aug 18. Portraits of the World: Korea Exhibition. Thru Nov 17. Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence. Thru Jan 5. In MidSentence. Thru Mar 29. One Life: Marian Anderson. Jun 28-May 17. npg.si.edu.

Postal Museum. John Lennon: The Green Album. Thru Jul 7. postalmuseum.si.edu.

The Kreeger Museum. Charles Hinman: Structures, 1965–2014. Thru Jul 31. kreegermuseum.org.

GALLERIES Atlas. Art Connection in the Capital Region Presents: Moving Walls. Thru Jul 31. atlasarts.org.

BlackRock.

Mid-Atlantic Regional Watercolor Exhibition. Thru Jul 13. blackrockcenter.org.

CHAW. Winners’ Circle Exhibit. Thru Aug 17. chaw.org.

DC Arts Center (DCAC). Richard Siegman New Work. Thru Aug 18. dcartscenter.org.

Del Ray Artisans. Art in Meditation – the Chakras Art Exhibit. Thru Jun 30. delrayartisans.org.

Former Residence of the Ambassadors of Spain. Fair Water: The Water Office.

Thru Jun 30. spainculture.us.

Glen Echo Park. The Sound of Colors: Carl Eugi Hall. Thru Jun 29. Visions & Voices 2019. Thru Jun 30. Life Cycles: Water Media Abstracts. Thru Jun 30. glenechopark.org.

The Art League. Tabletop: Ceramics, Textiles, Metalwork and Glasswares. Thru Jun 30. theartleague.org.

Waverly Street Gallery.

Change/ Transformation - Women’s Caucus for Art of Greater Washington. Thru Jul 6. waverlystreetgallery.com.

Zenith Gallery. Navigating Eternity. Thru Jul 6. Organic. Thru Aug 17. Play - Protection - Peril. Thru Aug 25. zenithgallery.com.

AND MORE...

Korean Cultural Center DC. Fabricated City. Jun 28. koreaculturedc.org.

National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Fresh Talk: Accessory to Action—Adorning Wakanda. Jun 30. nmwa.org.

Old Greenbelt Theatre. The Lady Eve. Jul 1. At Greenbelt Community Center. greenbelttheatre.org.

Woodlawn and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House. Twilight & Tipple Tours. Thru Oct 22. woodlawnpopeleighey.org.

5 0 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

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Celebrate the birthday of America Celebrate the birthday of America and Ginkgo Gardens and18 19years yearsofof Ginkgo Gardens June27th 22nd through July 4th June through July 9th

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MICHAEL J. BOBBITT, a native Washingtonian, is leaving for a new job in the Boston area.

Photo by DJ Corey

Bye bye Bobbitt

Adventure Theatre MTC visionary leaving region

By PATRICK FOLLIARD After 12 remarkably productive years as artistic director of Adventure Theatre MTC, Michael J. Bobbitt is moving on.

He’s leaving the Glen Echo Park theater for young audiences that grew enormously during his tenure to be the new artistic director of New Repertory Theatre, a regional repertory, in Watertown, Mass., just outside Boston.

Headhunters had been interested for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently that Bobbitt began taking their calls. With his son Sang heading off to college in Florida in the fall and his fiancé Steve engaged in flexible marketing work, it seemed like a good time for a change.

“I look at theater as being involved in the community so leaving isn’t simple,” Bobbitt

says over lunch at a build-your-own Asian salad place in Bethesda. “There’s sadness because I’m leaving a theater and people that I love. But there’s joy too. I’m really happy about what I accomplished at Adventure.”

Still, it wasn’t a decision Bobbitt made easily.

“Also, a lot of what I’m feeling is fear.

I learned children’s theater on the job.

And now I’m leaving that genre and style and moving to contemporary American theater at First Rep. That’s challenging, but exciting too — it gives me the opportunity to explore plays that I’ve dreamed about doing like ‘The Color Purple,’ Josh Harmon’s ‘Admissions’ and works by August Wilson.”

Bobbitt likes Boston and New Rep’s mission to produce plays that speak powerfully to the vital ideas of the time.

He’s been onboarding for several months and had a hand in programming the upcoming six production season which includes “Nixon’s Nixon,” “Hair” and Wilson’s “Fences.” Bobbitt will direct the musical “Oliver!” in December.

“Why not make a big splash with what I’m comfortable with — a children’s musical? New Rep does a holiday, familyfriendly show so I’ll still be cultivating that audience. It’s a strong skill set of mine so maybe in the future we’ll add more theater for young audiences. Who knows?”

At the end of July, Bobbitt moves to a new apartment in diverse Cambridge, a short drive from New Rep. He leaves behind a local professional network 23 years in the making. Born and raised in Washington, he left to earn a music degree at Susquehanna University in central Pennsylvania, study. He returned in 1996 to freelance choreograph and direct, mostly musicals.

After starting at Adventure in July 2007, he quickly set about creating a buzz by premiering shows like “Three Little Birds” and “Tiny Tim’s Christmas Carol,” and bringing in well-known local actors including Holly Twyford who played a tap-dancing pig in “If You Give a Pig a Pancake” and Deidra LaWan Starnes as the title arachnid in “Charlotte’s Web.” In about three years, Bobbitt grew the little theater to capacity. Under his guidance, Adventure partnered and later merged with MTC (Musical Theatre Center) in 2012, successfully increasing overall budget, staff and patronage, and adding a vast education program serving 1,600 students.

Being a very visible, mainstream African-American artistic director hasn’t been particularly easy, he says.

“Dealing with microaggressions is never fun. People express surprise that

I was articulate, smart or organized. But I have a way of turning a negative into a positive. I’ve never shied away from using the race, gay or dad card to my advantage.

And it’s helped.”

Race equity is important to Bobbitt.

At Adventure that includes policies, procedures, staffing, how they build their board and artists. Half the artists are people of color and that’s been intentional.

“I subscribe to diversity from a social justice and transactional point of view,” Bobbitt says. “Part of what I can do for New Rep is to use what I learned at Adventure in the race equity world apply it to this adult regional theater. I think some other regional theaters will pay attention and model some of these practices.”

After a long period of focusing intensely on improving Adventure MTC, about three-and-a-half years ago after the demise of a 19-year-long relationship, Bobbitt dove deeply into self-care in an all-encompassing exploration of body, mind and spirituality guided by various practitioners and specialists. The results have been astonishing. Now fit and healthy, he’s made working out, meditation and a plant-based diet part of everyday life.

Bobbitt changed the way he looked and felt physically, but mostly it was a conscious decision to be happy, he says.

His longing for happiness and an interest in work/life balance resulted in better benefits for Adventure employees. He hopes to share these values at New Rep. And if his summer weren’t busy enough, he’s planned a family trip to Vietnam in July where his son will probably meet his birth mother.

“I’ve always promised Sang that we’d make this trip when he’s ready, so we’re doing it. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between young person uncommunicativeness and deeper feelings. But I’ve let him know that if any time during the trip, he’d like to call off the meeting, that’s definitely OK.” After Vietnam, it’s on to Boston. But first, Adventure MTC is celebrating Bobbitt with a surprise-filled carnival style, evening send-off at Glen Echo on July 1. It’s free and open to the public but donations to help fund the Michael Bobbitt Minority Scholarship are appreciated.

What closed the deal with New Rep? “Genuineness of wanting me and the things I had to offer,” he says. “Artists love to be wanted. Also, I love New Rep’s desire to educate, fix the world and solve problems through theater. I totally believe in that. I want to innovate in how we break down that fourth wall and super engage our audience.”

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MICHAEL RADKOWSKY

Support system or doormat?

Woman wonders how much help she can give anxious, depressed girlfriend MICHAEL, I have been dating Megan for about six months. She is kind, sweet, communicative and we have a lot in common. Everything is going great and I can genuinely see myself being with her long-term except for one thing: She suffers from anxiety and depression.

Megan has just recently started seeing a therapist and talking to a doctor about medication, mostly at my urging.

I do my best to be a supportive girlfriend.

I listen to Megan, try to offer comfort and support and have explored how I can be there for her. But while I want to be supportive, this situation is really starting to wear on me.

Megan frequently has anxiety attacks when we are together. She needs my presence to get through them and I am starting to feel less like a romantic partner and more like an emotional support pillar or caretaker. And when I am stressed, I am not able to lean on her for support because so much of her energy is spent just getting herself through the day.

Talking about this only adds to Megan’s anxiety: Her next attack is centered around her fear of hurting me or she spends our next day together focusing so much on not having an anxiety attack so she won’t “upset me” that she winds up having an attack.

I genuinely care about Megan and really do like her, but I am just not sure I can be her girlfriend while she is fighting through this. Add to that my own lack of experience breaking up with someone and I am feeling stuck.

I know all relationships take work, so is that what this is? Just something that I must work through?

If not, how can I work up the nerve to call off the relationship, knowing that doing so will hurt Megan, prove some of her anxiety right and make me feel awful?

MICHAEL REPLIES: You write that Megan is only recently seeing a therapist and considering medication, mostly at your urging. What do you make of this?

My hypothesis: Megan wants to be rescued rather than figuring out how to do the hard work of taking care of herself.

You were the main driver behind her seeking treatment, she depends on you for soothing and drama ensues when you let her know you aren’t happy with being

her nonstop emotional support pillar.

This way of operating has some huge drawbacks.

First, Megan is making herself extremely vulnerable: If she believes that she “needs” your presence to get through her panic attacks, she will see herself as helpless when you’re not around.

Second, when you look to someone else to do your job, as Megan is likely doing with you, that person is bound to wind up being resentful. And sure enough, you’re getting sick of playing the caretaker role in your relationship with Megan.

Of course people can look to their romantic partners for emotional support when they’re stressed. But this should be done sparingly to avoid weighing down the relationship, not ongoing as you describe.

And if the emotional support does not go both ways, the relationship will be out of balance, just as is happening with the two of you.

You can’t make Megan want to work on becoming a stronger person who does her best to manage her own anxiety and depression, including taking responsibility for seeking treatment. Neither can you train her to be there for you when you’re stressed either.

But you can step out of the rescuer role.

Doing so will not be easy for you.

You’re likely to get more pushback from Megan, as you already do when you ask for support. In addition, your make clear that you are in some ways very comfortable playing the role you’re playing.

All relationships do take work at times, but that doesn’t mean that you have to stay in a relationship that takes a lot of work, ongoing.

Especially when the relationship is a new one.

You now have to decide whether you want to continue putting yourself aside in order to avoid disappointing others, or instead learn to set boundaries to take care of yourself, even when this means letting others down. I understand that Megan is vulnerable, but relying on you to keep her afloat is not sustainable.

The way in which you and Megan have gotten stuck is creating opportunities for each of you to grow. If you do decide to take yourself on, and Megan decides to take herself on, perhaps the two of you will transform this relationship and you will wholeheartedly want to stay.

JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA DE.COM • 53

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From top: The Lyons family in ‘Years and Years.’ Photo by Matt Squire for HBO; MAXIM BALDRY (left) and RUSSELL TOVEY in ‘Years and Years.’ Photo by Matt Squire for HBO

Lyons share

Futuristic new Brit drama is another winner from ‘Queer as Folk’ creator

By BRIAN T. CARNEY

With the premiere of the groundbreaking “Queer as Folk” (the British version) in 1999, writer Russell T. Davies changed the television landscape. With the arrival of “Years and Years,” he does it again.

Now showing on HBO, the six-part limited series focuses on the Lyons family of Manchester, England, as Britain is rocked by a period of rapid technological, political and economic changes. The action starts in 2019 and follows the family and the nation for the next 15 years.

The matriarch of the tight-knit Lyons clan is the fierce but occasionally befuddled Muriel Deacon, called Gran (Anne Reid). The eldest grandson is Stephen (Rory Kinnear of “The Imitation Game”), a financial advisor who’s married to Celeste Bisme-Lyons (T’Nia Miller). They have two daughters: Bethany (Lydia West) and Ruby (Jaye Alleyne).

The younger grandson, Daniel, is played by out actor Russell Tovey (HBO’s “Looking” and the London/Broadway revival of “Angels in America”). As the series opens, he’s dating Ralph (Dino Fetscher), but their relationship is threatened when Daniel meets Viktor (Maxim Baldry), a Ukrainian living in the refugee center Daniel manages for the local council.

Eldest granddaughter Edith (Jessica Hynes) is missing in action. She’s a globe-trotting social activist whose communications with the rest of the family is sporadic at best.

Rosie (Ruth Madeley) is the baby of the family. She was born with a congenital spinal condition and uses a wheelchair; she’s racked with guilt because she thinks her father abandoned the family because he couldn’t deal with her disability. She has two young sons and acquires a charming boyfriend named Jonjo Aleef (George Bukhari).

Finally, there’s Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), a maverick politician whose extreme positions (like requiring an IQ test for voters), unstoppable ambition and wily stratagems will change the course of history for the family, the nation and the world.

All these characters are efficiently and effortlessly introduced in the opening scenes of the first episode where the Lyons celebrate the birth of Lincoln and Viv Rook gains national attention by swearing during a live news show. A clever montage quickly moves the story to 2024; the rest of the time shifts are more gradual, generally marked by New Year’s celebrations and Gran’s birthday parties.

Craftily extrapolating from current events, Davies creates a fascinating future that serves as a vibrant backdrop for the compelling family saga.

On the political front, newscasters provide updates on the latest developments; there’s almost always a television or other screen playing. Right wing parties win elections across Europe and impose harsh policies that exacerbate the global refugee crisis. A rogue nation drops a nuclear bomb.

On the economic front, the collapse of the British banking system devastates the family.

On the environmental front, there are casual background references to the terrible impacts of climate change. Gran remembers when there were butterflies and when she could buy chocolate. Other characters mention that the North Pole has melted.

But it’s the changes on the technological front that most fascinate Davies and his characters. He introduces new hightech gadgets with subtlety. For example, although Stephen worries that things are getting “hotter and faster,” the family is brought closer by the “links” set up by the ubiquitous “Signor,” a descendant of Alexa.

Davies explores the possibilities and perils of new technology most vividly through the character of the socially awkward Bethany. In an early scene, despite her mother’s pleas to remove the mask, she hides behind a real-life 3-D facial filter.

Then, she announces that she’s trans.

Her parents embrace the change until she clarifies that she means “transhuman.” She wants to have her consciousness uploaded and dispose of her physical body. Her distraught mother stomps out of the room.

Then, she has dermal skinplants to turn her hand into a telephone; her father wryly notes that hand calls cost twice as much as cell phone calls.

But in the midst of all the emotional chaos and all of the fascinating scientific developments, some rituals remain. Gran still brews a pit of tea to calm her frazzled family.

As fans of “Torchwood” and “Doctor Who” (2005-2010) can attest, Davies is a master world builder. The future he envisions is a logical extension of the world we live in now that still manages to surprise, shock and delight, but the focus always stays on the way the changing world affects the members of the Lyons family.

His writing is sharp and smart. The direction by Simon Cellan Jones and Lisa Mulcahy is excellent, well-paced and cleanly edited.

The acting is superb. The amazing ensemble cast creates palpable bonds between the family members that feel lived in. Emma Thompson is brilliant as the wily Vivienne Rook, a sly warrior who deftly creates a disarming political persona.

Davies’ casting is also pitch perfect and deeply committed to diversity. There are actors of color and actors with disabilities in roles both large and small.

And it’s wonderful to see how openly gay creator/writer Davies seamlessly weaves issues of sexuality into the series in several ways. Most notably, the family has no issues with Daniel being gay, but his relationship with Viktor put them both in mortal danger.

With a phenomenal script and stellar acting, “Years and Years” is a monumental achievement. The gripping family saga is deeply moving and thought-provoking.

Queer genius Russell T. Davies has changed the television landscape again.

5 4 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

NHL expands engagement efforts Hockey is for Everyone campaign includes Pride participation

By KEVIN MAJOROS

Ally BRADEN HOLTBY at the Capital Pride parade June 8.

Washington Blade photo by Kevin Majoros

Hockey is for Everyone, the National Hockey League’s (NHL) cultural campaign, has evolved in a significant way over the past year. Originally an annual one-month campaign in February, the NHL shifted their strategy to a year-round community program for long-term engagement.

Hockey is for Everyone uses the game of hockey and the League’s global influence to drive positive social change and foster more inclusive communities. NHL stakeholders guide the conversation at the league level and the campaign amplifies what NHL teams are already doing.

A few examples of targeted campaigns are Black Hockey History in February, Girls and Women in Hockey in March and Pride in June.

“The evolved cultural campaign is providing a consistent drumbeat of inclusion that doesn’t feel transactional,” says Jessica Berman, NHL vice president of community development. “We needed to go deeper and the intended impact is to inspire others to think about how they show up for historically marginalized groups.”

In celebration of Pride Month this year, all 31 NHL teams participated in events including parades and festivals across North America and the League is continuing its partnership with You Can Play, an advocacy organization that fights homophobia in sports.

The representation from the NHL teams this month at Pride Parades has been a mix of staffers, general managers and active players.

Minnesota Wild’s J.T. Brown, Nashville Predator’s Roman Josi, Toronto Maple Leaf’s Morgan Rielly, New Jersey Devils’ Kurtis Gabriel and Washington Capitals Braden Holtby all marched in their respective city’s parades this month.

Holtby was once again joined by his wife Brandi and it marked his third time marching in the Capital Pride Parade. He missed last year’s celebration due to the Caps final game in their Stanley Cup win happening just two days before the parade.

As part of the new cultural campaign, the NHL has begun sharing stories and videos of people whose stories represent a cross-section of the community.

“It was important for us to become more intentional about the stories we are sharing to educate the hockey stakeholders on the intersection and commonality in the hockey communities,” Berman says.

“We want to give these individuals the opportunity to go deeper and talk about their challenges and barriers.”

Included in the Pride stories was New Jersey Devils’ Kurtis Gabriel who wrapped his hockey stick in Pride Tape in February as an act of LGBTQ solidarity. He decided to leave the tape on his stick for the remainder of the season.

As Gabriel says in the video, “The outpouring of support from people was unbelievable and immediate. … It shows how such a small thing can go a long way. … I was raised by my mom to treat people the way you want to be treated. … It’s just common human empathy to be able to do this.”

Berman points to You Can Play as a critical partner in using the correct language and establishing best practices for engaging LGBTQ people.

“The NHL teams have been progressive in their thinking and have embraced the LGBTQ initiative,” Berman says. “It’s important for the teams to show up in LGBTQ spaces instead of expecting the opposite and we will continue to grow these relationships.”

JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA DE.COM • 55

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LGBTCongressional staff happy hour

The Washington Blade sponsored a happy hour with the LGBT Congressional Staff Association at Santa Rosa Taqueria on Tuesday.

Washington Blade photos by Drew Brown

5 6 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

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Stonewalling equality Discrimination in housing isn’t new

By VALERIE M. BLAKE It was 1969 and I was living with my family in a white ranch house in Grosse Pointe Shores, a tony suburb of Detroit. It had been a year since the Detroit riots had taken place following the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and there was not much left of the city proper.

A gallon of gas cost 19 cents at the cash-only gas station where I filled up my mother’s VW Bug. A first-class stamp was 6 cents, the minimum wage was $1.60, and the average annual salary was $6,500. The median price of a house was $25,600 and the median monthly rent for an apartment was $108.

Judy Garland went over the rainbow and “Star Trek” was ending its five-year mission to “boldly go where no man has gone before” after only three years.

Instead, men and women went boldly to Woodstock for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

Simon and Garfunkel built a “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and Neil Diamond sang about “Sweet Caroline,” a woman who would haunt us in every karaoke bar for the next 50 years.

That summer, while I was innocently making the transition from high school sophomore to junior, the Stonewall riots were taking place more than 600 miles away in Greenwich Village. Later that year, the Washington Blade (as the Gay Blade) began publication.

I was a bit too young then to have formed political opinions, but in 1971, when the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was introduced by U.S. Rep. Martha Griffiths (D-Mich.), I joined the National Organization for Women (NOW) and wrote poetry about Betty Friedan.

The Amendment read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by

Rep. BELLA ABZUG introduced the original Equality Act on May 14, 1974.

any State on account of sex.” It seems an innocuous statement, but it sparked a national debate, with one faction arguing that its passing would result in men and women having to share bathrooms (sound familiar?). Forty-seven years later, it has not been ratified.

The Equality Act of 1974 was introduced by U.S. Reps. Bella Abzug and Edward Koch (D-N.Y.) and was the first federal legislation that would have added sexual orientation to the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, making it illegal to discriminate against gays and lesbians. It never passed.

The history of discrimination in

JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA DE.COM • 59

housing isn’t new. Even in D.C., which we think of as progressive, there were deed restrictions and racial covenants during the first half of the 20th century that prevented homeowners from selling to African Americans in such areas as Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights, Petworth, Park View, and Bloomingdale.

We saw steering — the process of guiding a buyer to or away from certain areas based on the racial makeup of those areas — and redlining, where lenders would either charge more for mortgage loans or not make them at all in portions of the city that they outlined in red on a map. Forty

years after being banned, I believe redlining played a role in the housing crisis of 2008.

Blockbusting was a practice used by unscrupulous real estate agents and developers to encourage white residents to sell their homes at below market prices because “they” (certain races, religions, nationalities, etc.) were invading the border neighborhood. The houses were then resold at a substantial profit to minorities looking to escape inner city blight.

When I first started selling real estate in 1998, you could follow the progression of rainbow flags from a Dupont Circle condominium to a Capitol Hill rowhouse, to a detached American Foursquare in 16th Street Heights. Now, when a potential client asks where the Gayborhood is, I can pull out a map of the District (yes, I still have one) and say, “Close your eyes and point.”

The Equality Act, recently introduced as H.R. 5 in the 116th Congress, would again seek to amend the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It has moved quick as a bunny through the House, only to have the Senate be slow as a turtle to consider it, while state and local governments work actively to promote the very discrimination the Equality Act is designed to prevent.

Nevertheless, the real estate agents whom I respect and admire will celebrate the spirit and the accomplishments of those who began their fight for recognition and equal rights 50 years ago at the Stonewall Inn. Heck, I’ll even bake a cake for the occasion.

Valerie M. Blake

is a licensed Associate Broker in D.C., Maryland and Virginia and Director of Education & Mentorship at RLAH Real Estate. Call or text her at 202-246-8602, email her at DCHomeQuest.com, or follow her on Facebook at TheRealst8ofAffairs.

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MOVERS AROUND TOWN MOVERS. Professional Moving & Storage. Let Our Movers Do The Heavy Lifting.

Mention the ‘Blade’ for 5% off of our regular rates. Call today 202.734.3080. www. aroundtownmovers.com.

• WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 61

RENT / DC Playmates and soul mates...

DUPONT CIRCLE APT. Furnished 1 BR English basement. $2,100.

Avail. June 30. 12 month lease.

Kitchen, laundry, shared patio.

Near metro, Georgetown, restaurants, park, museums. alisonadkins@verizon.net.

SALE / WV

HISTORIC FRENCH PROVINCIAL- 4000 SF, 4 BR, 2.5 BATH, 3 Marble Fireplaces, 60 miles from DC, AirBnB Gold Medal, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3yvYHUUdu-s, CALL Carolyn Young 540.454.1600.

BODYWORK THE MAGIC TOUCH: Swedish, Massage or Deep Tissue.

Appts 202-486-6183, Low Rates, 24/7, In-Calls.

Washington:

202-448-0824

18+ MegaMates.com

6 2 • WAS H IN GTO N B LAD E.CO M • J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 9

ast, the Fe ht at r e t f A ! he Nig Stay t ingbird Inn m Hum

6 uniquely furnished guest rooms w/ baths Includes 3-course gourmet breakfast with your choice of entrée.

Gay-owned & operated, welcoming the LGBTQ Community, Friends, and Family.

www.HummingbirdInnEaston.com info@hummingbirdInneaston.com

The Trippe Gallery

Architecture: Visual Harmony

shopmarcrandall.com 3 East Dover Street Historic Downtown Easton, MD 21601 410.820.4077

JU N E 28, 2019 • WA SHINGTONBLA D E.COM • 63

23 N. Harrison Street Easton, Maryland

410!310!8727 www.thetrippegallery.com

Dog-friendly with on-site dog sitting available Special Event Space Available

AHF Healthcare Centers 2141 K St NW, Ste 707 Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri 8:30am - 5:30pm Wed 10am - 7pm

1647 Benning Rd NE, Ste 300 Mon 9am - 6pm Tues - Fri 8:30am - 5pm