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Christian conservatives ‘in driver’s seat’ in Va.
Dems consider lawsuit to force power-sharing as activists fear onslaught of anti-gay bills
Virginia Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling would cast the deciding vote in any tie on bills coming up for a vote, effectively giving Republicans a razor-thin majority in the Senate. (Courtesy photo)
LGBT activists said they were hopeful that the threat of a lawsuit by Democratic members of the Virginia Senate this week would persuade Republicans to share control of the chamber and decrease the chance that it will enact anti-LGBT bills following the GOP gains in last week’s election.
No one disputes the fact that Republicans have gained a one-vote legislative majority in the Virginia Senate after Republican candidates defeated two incumbent Democrats in the 40-member Senate, resulting in a 20-20 split between the two parties.
Under the Virginia Constitution, the lieutenant governor — in this case Republican Bill Bolling — has authority to cast the deciding vote in any tie on bills coming up for a vote, effectively giving Republicans a razor-thin majority in the Senate.
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But Democrats argue that the constitution doesn’t give Bolling authority to vote on non-legislative matters, such as who should be named as chairs of the body’s powerful committees and which party should control the committees. Both sides say the matter could wind up in court if a compromise isn’t reached before the new legislative session begins in the second week of January.
Republicans increased their existing majority in the state’s House of Delegates in the Nov. 8 election. With Republican Robert McDonnell as governor, if Republicans win the dispute over who fully controls the Senate, the conservative-leaning GOP would be in control of all branches of the Virginia government for the first time since the Civil War.
“Virginia is never a place to look for gay-friendly legislation,” said Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political communications at George Mason University and a specialist in Virginia politics. “But what you’re looking at now is a Christian conservative element of the Republican Party that is very much in the driver’s seat going forward.”
Gay Democratic leaders and LGBT activists acknowledge that even if Democrats prevail on the issue of power sharing regarding Senate committees, the Republican majority for votes on legislation means that that the Senate is now far less likely to block anti-gay bills as it did when it was under Democratic control.
“We can certainly expect that there’s going to be a cascade of really unsavory bills flooding over to the Senate from the House as there have been in recent years pertaining to issues of immigration, women’s rights and obviously gay rights, too,” said Nick Benton, editor and publisher of the Falls Church News-Press and board member of LGBT Democrats of Virginia.
“And how many of those bills can be made to die in the Senate at this point becomes a much dicier situation,” Benton said. “There’s no guarantee at all that any of that stuff is going to be beaten back.”
Nearly all news media outlets, including the Washington Post, have reported since last week’s election that Lt. Gov. Bolling’s authority to break a tie vote in the Senate would extend to votes on committee and internal Senate organizational issues as well as votes on bills.
But some Democrats this week said they dispute Republicans’ contention that the lieutenant governor has the power to vote on non-legislative issues.
“Fundamentally, the question is whether under the Virginia Constitution he has the authority to vote on Senate organizational issues as contrasted to legislative matters, substantive matters,” said Claire Gastanaga, legislative counsel and chief lobbyist for Equality Virginia, a statewide LGBT advocacy group.
“I’m not ready to predict exactly what’s going to happen with respect to the issues that we care about,” she said. “We’ll be pursuing Equality Virginia’s agenda as we always have, and once the organizational decisions are made then we’ll know who we needed to be talking to.”
Since committees and their chairs decide which bills reach the Senate floor for a vote, a determination of which party controls the committees will play a key role in deciding which bills are passed, including a bill introduced in past years calling for banning adoptions by gay and lesbian parents.
Democrats note that when there was a similar 20-20 split between the two parties in the Senate in 1996 and 1997, party leaders worked out a power sharing agreement that enabled Republicans and Democrats to chair different committees.
Newly elected Va. State Sen. Adam Ebbin said he plans to introduce a bill to bar employment discrimination against state employees based on sexual orientation and gender identity. (Photo courtesy Adam Ebbin)
House of Delegates member Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria), the Virginia Legislature’s only openly gay member, won his race last week for a seat in the Virginia Senate, becoming the first out gay in that body.
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Ebbin said this week that he, too, is uncertain about the outcome of the dispute over whether Republicans will gain full control over the Senate committees or whether a power-sharing agreement will be reached. In either case, Ebbin said he plans to introduce a bill calling for banning employment discrimination against state employees based on sexual orientation and gender identity similar to the bill he introduced earlier this year.
The bill passed in the then Democratic-controlled Senate but died in committee in the GOP-controlled House.
Ebbin said he and LGBT allies in the Senate and House will do all they can to block anti-gay bills in the 2012 legislative session. But similar to Benton, Ebbin said the ability to block hostile bills will be more difficult under a GOP-controlled Senate.
“In the past, we’ve been able to count on the Senate to thwart anti-gay legislation passed by the House,” he said. “We can’t count on the Senate to do that in the next legislative session. I’m not saying that things won’t get killed in the Senate. It’s just that we can’t absolutely count on it.”
Ebbin said that in addition to a possible bill to ban gay adoptions, conservative GOP lawmakers could bring up other hostile bills that either surfaced or had been proposed in past years but died in committee. Among them were calls for banning Gay-Straight Alliance clubs in the state’s public schools and a call for banning colleges in the state from adopting non-discrimination polices related to sexual orientation and gender identity.
Ebbin said that although it would be unlikely, anti-gay groups might also attempt to persuade the legislature to repeal the only pro-gay bills it has ever passed – separate measures in 2005 and 2010 that removed an arcane state law that prohibited private insurance companies from selling health and life insurance policies to same-sex couples.
Farnsworth, the George Mason University professor, noted that virtually all Republican candidates in Virginia this year stressed economic and jobs-related issues along with their disagreements with the Obama administration over the economy. He said few if any of the GOP candidates raised social issues, such as gay rights, during their campaigns.
“It will be interesting to see just how the Republican unified government system operates in Virginia,” he said. “The lessons that Republicans have learned from the experiences in Wisconsin and Ohio and other places is that overreaching, offering up polarizing messages can be counterproductive.”
He added, “Careful Republicans with their eyes on the future may be hesitant to go too far in the conservative direction and risk a backlash.”
Are moderate Republicans the answer?
LGBT activists were hopeful that more moderate Republicans would join Sen. Tommy Norment (R-Williamsburg), the current minority leader who’s in line to become Republican majority leader. Norment was the only Republican in the Senate to vote for the state employment non-discrimination bill earlier this year when the Democratic-controlled Senate passed the measure.
Tiffany Joslyn, president of LGBT Democrats of Virginia, said she doubts that very many Republican lawmakers in the state would join Norment in backing LGBT supportive bills.
“I have no doubt they will do the same thing that they always do,” she said. “They preach moderation, they preach jobs, and then they get into office and they govern from the far right and to their far-right base.”
Joslyn called on Log Cabin Republicans of Virginia to join her group and Equality Virginia in urging more GOP lawmakers to support legislation seeking to bar LGBT discrimination in the workplace and in other areas.
Log Cabin Republicans of Virginia President David Lampo couldn’t be immediately reached this week. Christian Berle, deputy executive director of the national Log Cabin Republicans organization, said both the national and Virginia group would continue their ongoing efforts to encourage Republican lawmakers to support LGBT equality in all levels of government.
Berle also disputed predictions by gay Democrats that a GOP-controlled Virginia Legislature would result in the passage of anti-gay bills.
“They said the same thing would happen with Gov. McDonnell, that all kinds of bad things would happen,” said Berle. “It didn’t happen.”
He criticized Equality Virginia for taking the position that “only Democrats” could be counted on to support LGBT equality in the state and expressed concern that more LGBT advocates didn’t support gay Republican candidate Patrick Forrest’s race for a state Senate seat in the Northern Virginia city of Reston in this year’s election.
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Gay Democrats said most LGBT activists didn’t support Forrest because he ran against incumbent Sen. Janet Howell, one of the LGBT community’s strongest allies in the Virginia Legislature.
District of Columbia
Gay ANC commissioner sues D.C. over police ‘failure’ to pay reward money
Lawsuit says information led to conviction in murder, armed robbery cases
Gay D.C. Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Tom Donohue on Aug. 11 filed a lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court charging that D.C. police acted improperly and violated a local law by not paying him $30,000 in reward money for his role in helping police identify and arrest — and obtain the subsequent conviction — of one man charged with murder and another man charged with armed robbery in separate cases.
Although the lawsuit alleges improper action by D.C. police in carrying out the city’s Crime Solvers reward program, it names as defendants the District of Columbia and the Office of the Attorney General for D.C., which, among other things, defends the city against lawsuits.
Donohue, who is a member of the city’s ANC Rainbow Caucus consisting of LGBTQ elected ANC members, held a news conference outside the D.C. Superior Court building on Aug. 11 to talk about the lawsuit before entering the courthouse to officially file it.
The lawsuit states that Donohue “provided key video evidence that led to the arrest and conviction” of a man initially charged with first degree murder for allegedly running over a bicyclist with his car after the two got into an argument.
The lawsuit states that police had offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the defendant in that case, but police “arbitrarily slashed the payment to $5,000 without prior notice or policy justification.”
Court records show that D.C. resident Eric Beasley was charged with first degree murder for killing David Farewell, 45, by hitting him with his car on Sept. 4, 2020, on the 2100 block of Young Street, S.E. The records show the evidence for the case was based in large part on video camera footage of the incident obtained by police. Donohoe has said he provided that video camera evidence.
The records show that during Beasley’s October 2023 trial a jury was unable to reach the required unanimous verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial.
According to the records, Beasley later agreed to an offer by prosecutors to plead guilty to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced in September 2024 to eight years in prison, a development that angered the victim’s family members who called it a “slap on the wrist,” according to a Fox 5 News report.
Donohue’s lawsuit says the second case in which he provided police with pivotal information involved a series of armed robberies known as the Fairlawn Serial Armed Robbery Spree that occurred in the Fairlawn neighborhood in Southeast D.C. in 2023 near where Donohue lives.
The lawsuit says evidence consisting of video surveillance footage provided by Donohue to police enabled police to determine they initially wrongfully arrested an 18-year-old male for the robberies. “Using Plaintiff’s security video, MPD identified, arrested, and convicted the actual robber, David Crocker, who was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison,” the lawsuit states.
It says one of the detectives investigating the case recommended a $10,000 reward for Donohue’s help in the case based on the police Crime Solvers reward program. The detective’s recommendation was approved by then-Assistant D.C. Police Chief Kyle Ramey on Aug. 4, 2025, according to the lawsuit.
But it adds, “Nevertheless, MPD improperly withheld payment.”
When contacted by the Washington Blade for comment on Donohue’s lawsuit allegations, a D.C. police spokesperson said “MPD does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”
Gabriel Shoglow-Rubenstein, who serves as press secretary for the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, which will be defending the city against the Donohue lawsuit, said he would look into obtaining a possible comment but said the office has a similar longstanding policy of not commenting on pending litigation.
“This action arises from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department’s arbitrary, bad-faith, and legally unsupportable failure to honor its public reward promises and administrative obligations to Plaintiff,” the lawsuit states.
It says the MPD violated the city’s Freedom of Information Act or FOIA law by not responding to Donohue’s request for information and documents related to the decision not to pay him the full reward money.
“MPD’s reduction of Plaintiff’s homicide reward from $25,000 to $5,000, and its withholding of his approved $10,00 robbery reward, were undertaken completely devoid of written standards, making such decisions inherently arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of administrative discretion,” it says.
It calls for Donohue to be awarded $30,000 in compensatory damages consisting of the $20,000 “unpaid balance” for the homicide case reward and $10,000 for the robbery case reward. It also calls for reimbursement for “reasonable” litigation costs and attorney’s fees. Donohue told the Washington Blade that at this time he is representing himself without an attorney.
Donohue told the Blade that the refusal by D.C. police to pay him the full reward money also limited his plans to donate some of that money to the family of murder victim David Farewell to help pay for a burial stone. He said that due to the family’s limited resources Farewell is buried in an unmarked grave
Delaware
New LGBTQ visitor center slated for Wilmington, Del.
The Collective to feature gift shop, queer museum, more
During Pride month this year, the Delaware Sexuality and Gender Collective (DSGC) announced plans for The Collective, which will become Delaware’s first LGBTQIA+ visitor center and Wilmington’s first dedicated LGBTQIA+ space in nearly 40 years.
“We’ve been talking about the concept of a brick-and-mortar space for a long time,” said Noah Duckett, co-founder of DSGC.
A licensed clinical social worker, Duckett co-founded DSGC with his mother, Julissa Coriano, in 2018. DSGC is an independent nonprofit organization that provides vital clinical and educational support, social programming and direct-need support to the LGBTQIA+ community.
Some of the programs DSGC offers include a free clothing closet for the trans community, meal support for people recovering from gender-affirming surgery, connections to pro bono legal services, a biannual Pride Market featuring over 100 LGBTQIA+-owned small businesses, and more.
“Our vision for The Collective is a place where our community can come to learn, create, work and be inspired,” said Coriano.
The Collective will feature a visitor center and gift shop highlighting LGBTQIA+-owned businesses in Delaware.
“I think that this is something that’s going to benefit our community so much,” said Duckett.
Some of the LGBTQIA+-owned businesses that DSGC has already partnered with include Stress Induced Art Attack, Moonbeam Art Collaborative, Voce Coffee, Groovy Gemini Co., Scout Cafe, Macaron Social and Huxley and Hiro.
“Specifically in Wilmington, we haven’t had an LGBTQIA+-dedicated space in almost 40 years,” said Duckett.
The Griffin Community Center, which operated from 1986 to 1990, was Delaware’s first LGBTQ+ community center. The Griffin was founded by Ivo Dominguez Jr. and James C. Welch and provided a range of community services during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, including AIDS hotlines, organizational offices and meeting space. The center ultimately closed because of a lack of financial support.
Duckett said DSGC hopes The Collective will carry on The Griffin’s legacy while building a sustainable space for the LGBTQIA+ community.
“I think now more than ever, there’s more and more spaces closing their doors. More and more spaces are losing funding, seeing reduced funding and reduced access, especially LGBTQ+ organizations and communities,” said Duckett.
The Collective will also feature Delaware’s first LGBTQ+ history museum, curated by LGBTQ+ historian Carolanne Deal.
“We don’t have any permanent displays in the state about Delaware’s queer history, and we want people to be able to access that history any day of the year, not just during Pride Month,” said Deal.
With a master’s degree in art history for museum professionals, Deal has more than seven years of experience in curatorial work and hands-on collections care.
“It’s mainly going to be a graphic display with photographs, articles and accessible text that draws people in and creates a story for the community,” said Deal.
Although the museum will not initially have an object collection, Deal said she hopes to add physical archival pieces in the future.
“Delaware has been at the forefront of a lot of queer civil rights, and it’ll be really amazing to have that enshrined in a permanent display that’s not only up for Pride Month,” said Deal.
Duckett said DSGC is currently raising funds with the goal of beginning construction this summer and opening by the end of the year.
Duckett told the Blade that fundraising efforts have reached just under $29,000 and that the organization is awaiting several major donations from community partner organizations.
However, he said DSGC continues to be denied many grants tied to federal or state funding because of restrictions on those funds being used for LGBTQ+-serving organizations.
“Private and corporate donations are absolutely vital,” said Duckett.
Anyone interested in supporting the construction and renovation of The Collective can donate online or contact [email protected] for more information.ose funds being used for LGBTQ-serving organizations.
“Private and corporate donations are absolutely vital,” said Duckett.
Anyone interested in supporting the construction of The Collective can donate online or contact [email protected] for more information.
Rehoboth Beach
HISTORIC: Susan Stewart elected Rehoboth’s first out mayor
Thanks LGBTQ supporters and vows to protect city’s small town charm
Residents of Rehoboth Beach elected City Commissioner Susan Stewart with 61% of the vote on Aug. 8, making her the city’s first openly gay mayor.
Stewart beat fellow commissioners Craig Their and Suzanne Goode in the race, as well as newcomer Jake Raak.
The final mayoral vote results were:
- Susan Stewart: 632
- Craig Their: 203
- Suzanne Goode: 177
- William “Jake” Raak: 23
“I’m very grateful because the LGBTQ+ community not only voted for me, but also supported me,” said Stewart.
Stewart said that she is particularly grateful for the support she received on social media from members of the LGBTQ+ community.
“I’ve had incredible support,” said Stewart.
Stewart said that her campaign showed her just how much residents of Rehoboth are engaged and care about the city.
“They really want to see what’s best for the community,” said Stewart.
Stewart spoke about the master planning initiative she has been working on as a commissioner, which she plans to continue as mayor.
“We’ve undertaken rewriting the commercial zoning code, and that’s foundational to the next step of the initiative,” said Stewart.
She said that she was proud of the results of charette week that was held last month where residents and business owners had the opportunity to speak with hired urban planners to give feedback for a zoning code update.
Stewart said that Rehoboth is at a tipping point as the city must find a way to balance the growth of the commercial district while improving the quality of life for residents.
“I don’t believe there needs to be tension between the business community and the residential experience,” said Stewart.
“I’m excited about a new master plan because we have a couple hotels coming, and we also have Clear Space Theatre looking for a new home, and we’re working with them,” said Stewart. “We want businesses to stay here.”
Stewart also said that she aims to embrace the concept of a ‘15-minute city,’ making the city much more accessible in terms of transportation in the downtown area for residents.
“The goal is to protect the small town charm and natural beauty of Rehoboth,” said Stewart. “I want to keep the momentum going.”
The Blade asked Stewart about any concerns she might have working with Commissioner Goode, whom she has criticized for sending inappropriate and offensive emails to city staff. Goode finished a distant third in the mayoral race and her husband fell short in his bid for a Commissioner’s seat. In that race, Jeffrey Goode received 239 votes; Patrick Gossett, who’s gay, received 813 votes and Mark Saunders 852. Saunders and Gossett will be sworn in next month.
“I’m really eager to move past this issue with Commissioner Goode,” said Stewart.
She said that she’s heard ‘loud and clear’ from the city that they want to move past this situation as best as they can while Goode remains in her seat as commissioner.
“There are no mechanisms for us to remove a sitting commissioner. Our laws don’t allow it,” said Stewart.
Stewart clarified that she has always focused on Goode’s behavior toward city staff.
“One thing I feel really passionate about is that the city employees have to know that they are heard. They are real people with real jobs, real professional reputations, and they’ve been harmed,” said Stewart.
The Blade also asked if Stewart had made a final decision on whom she plans to nominate to fill her Commissioner seat.
“I’m considering who to appoint and I have not made any final decisions,” said Stewart.
She noted that, as mayor, she only has the power to nominate a candidate and that the board of commissioners will have the final vote on whom to appoint to the board.
Stewart shared that she has received interest from a number of people and finds that to be a good sign.
“I think that’s a great sign because people want to serve. I’m eager to have someone in that seat who’s smart and has the best interests of the city,” said Stewart.
Stewart will be sworn in during the Board of Commissioners meeting on Sept. 18.
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PHOTOS: Daddy Issues at Kiki
