Local
Young Democrats of Md. leader comes out
Tells of journey from closeted backer of Prop 8 to gay advocate in P.G. County
Joseph Kitchen, Jr. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
Joseph L. Kitchen Jr., who won election in February as president of the Young Democrats of Maryland, has emerged as an up-and-coming political activist in Prince George’s County, where he lives, and in the state capital in Annapolis.
Kitchen, 26, is an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist Church and an active member of First Baptist Church of Glenarden, Md., one of the largest black churches in the D.C. metropolitan area. He leads a youth worship group at the church.
He works full-time as an assistant principal at a private middle school in D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood. Although he loves politics and is deeply committed to his Christian faith, he says his main passions are issues related to “education equality, crime and justice and economic justice for people of color.”
Among other involvements, Kitchen serves as assistant treasurer for the NAACP’s Prince George’s County chapter, serves on the Executive Committee of the Maryland Democratic Party, and is a member of the board of First Book D.C., a national group that promotes reading skills for underprivileged children.
During the past month Kitchen says he has been systematically informing his colleagues at the statewide Young Democrats organization and members and leaders of many of the organization’s county chapters that he’s gay.
He says his decision to come out marks the culmination of a path that has taken him from the position of voting for California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in 2008, to an active role last year in campaigning for Maryland’s marriage equality law.
Among other things, Kitchen says he helped direct the Young Democrats’ campaign for the same-sex marriage bill when it came before the Maryland General Assembly and when it came before voters in a referendum campaign last November.
“I believe my faith may have played a role in it,” he says in discussing his vote for Prop 8.
He says he cast that vote by absentee ballot in 2008, two years after he moved to Maryland from his hometown of Fresno, Calif., but retained his California residency and voting privileges.
“And the interesting thing about it is I voted for the proposition knowing who I was,” he told the Blade in an exclusive interview. “But I voted for it. And I think that vote… affirmed to me that I could not live that way anymore.”
Added Kitchen, “I could not be publicly who I was saying I was but knowing my private life. And so when I did that – immediately after I did that – of course my position changed. I started to become more comfortable about who I was.”
He says he also became more comfortable in reconciling his religious beliefs with his sexual orientation.
“I had to believe and come to realize, as a person of faith, that I am made in God’s image and he has made me to be who he wants me to be, that God made me this way because this is who I am and I’m made in his image.”
Kitchen says his decision to come out in the spring of 2013 also was based on practical considerations as well as on inspiration from the openly gay people he worked with on the Maryland marriage campaign and through his activities with the Young Democrats organization.
“I grew up in California in a very religious African-American family,” he says. “I went to college. I went to seminary and became an ordained minister. But I’ve always known that I was gay,” he says.
“I’ve always felt like that was my personal life and I would leave it at that and I would continue to be an African-American young man who is a minister in the Baptist Church — in the Southern Baptist Church.
“But I think what I’ve seen over the last few years — the rise of this movement, which has really been impressive to me. Being in the Democratic Party and meeting so many people — I view them as being very inspirational to me by telling their stories and affirming their truth and being very proud of who they are. That has given me the courage to do this as well.”
Kitchen says that since he and his partner moved into a suburban style, single-family house in Cheverly, the exercise of remaining in the closet would likely become impractical and awkward. He and his partner are seen together as a couple.
“And so the fact that I have those types of things eventually I think people would know,” he says. “And I prefer that people know on my terms as opposed to me responding to it on someone else’s terms.”
Since moving to Cheverly from Fresno, Kitchen has become a mover and shaker in the political establishment of a majority black county whose elected representatives in the Maryland General Assembly are considered important in setting the state’s legislative agenda.
In the relatively short time he’s lived in Prince George’s County, Kitchen says he’s observed what he considers a major change in attitudes in favor of LGBT equality in general and support for same-sex marriage in particular.
He says he watched with interest when the marriage equality bill died in the General Assembly the year before it passed.
“One of the things that made the bill die the first time it was presented in the legislature is our delegates balked at the idea,” he says. “Their people were opposed to it so they became opposed to it.”
Many in Prince George’s County opposed the bill, according to Kitchen, because there was little or no outreach to black churches and black constituencies in the county by the LGBT organizations advocating for the bill.
“And in Prince George’s County we had always been told for so long that we are against gay marriage … And that’s all that people have ever known,” he says.
“I think they learned that lesson the second time around,” he says of marriage equality advocates. “Equality Maryland and Gov. O’Malley and his PAC all learned that and they sent organizers in. They made phone calls. They did door knocking,” according to Kitchen.
“And groups like the Young Democrats of Maryland and Prince George’s County Democrats all got there and they knocked on doors and they went into these communities and they went to the community centers and the churches and they talked to ministers,” he says.
“And I don’t think we can give enough credit to President Barack Obama and what his support immediately gave to lifting that ballot measure,” Kitchen says. “I don’t know if it necessarily changes everybody’s mind. But it gave people the permission they needed to do what I think they always felt was right.”
When asked how he thinks his coming out will impact his relationship with the key people in his political, professional and religious life, Kitchen says nearly everyone so far has been accepting and supportive, although he expects some bumps in the road to come his way.
“My hope is to not have this become my life,” he told the Blade. “My life is about a lot of things. And for 26 years it has not been who I love and who I sleep with that defines my life.
“So I want this to be out there and of course I’m going to have to deal with it for a while,” he says. “But then I want to return to the issues that I’ve made the passion of my life, which are education equality, crime and justice and economic justice for people of color. Those are the issues that are important to me.”
He quickly added that at least one more thing is important to him.
“So I’m still an ordained minister. I don’t plan to give that up. I worked very hard for it. I believe in order to become an ordained minister you have to believe you are called to do such work. And I do believe I was called to do such work.”
District of Columbia
Gay priest credited with boosting church support for LGBTQ Catholics
Fr. Tom Oddo’s biographer speaks at Dignity Washington event
The author of a biography of a U.S. Catholic priest said to have advocated for support by the Catholic Church of gay Catholics in the early 1970s has called Father Thomas ‘Tom’ Oddo a little known but important figure in the LGBTQ rights movement.
Tyler Bieber, author of the recently published book “Against The Current: Father Tom Oddo And the New American Catholic,” told of Oddo’s life and work on behalf of LGBTQ rights at a March 22 talk before the local LGBTQ Catholic group Dignity Washington.
Among Oddo’s important accomplishments, Bieber said, was his role as a co-founder of the national LGBTQ Catholic group Dignity U.S.A. in 1973 at the age of 29.
But as reported in the prologue of his book, Bieber presented details of the sad news that Oddo died in a fatal car crash in 1989 at the age of 45 in Portland, Ore., where he was serving as the highly acclaimed president of the University of Portland, a Catholic institution.
“He was a major figure in the gay rights movement in the 1970s, an unsung hero of that movement,” Bieber told Dignity Washington members, who assembled for his talk in a meeting room at St. Margaret Episcopal Church near Dupont Circle, where they attend their weekly Catholic mass on Sundays.
“And Dignity U.S.A. saw intense growth in membership and visibility” during its early years under Oddo’s leadership, Bieber said. “The story of Father Tom and his contemporaries is a story largely untold in the history of the gay rights movement, but one worth knowing and considering,” he said.
As stated in his book, Bieber told the Dignity Washington gathering Oddo was born and raised in a Catholic family on Long Island, N.Y., and attended a Catholic high school in Flushing Queens. It was at that time when he developed an interest in becoming a priest, according to Bieber.
After studying at the University of Notre Dame and completing his religious studies he was ordained as a priest in 1970 and began his work as a priest in the Boston area, Bieber said. It was around that time, Bieber told the Dignity Washington audience, that gay Catholics approached Oddo to seek advice on how they should interact with the Catholic Church. It was also around that time that Oddo became involved in a group supportive of then gay Catholics that later became a Dignity chapter in Boston.
In a development considered unusual for a Catholic priest, Bieber said Oddo in 1973 testified in support of gay rights bill before a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature and collaborated with then Massachusetts gay and lesbian rights advocate Elaine Noble.
In 1982, at the age of 39, Oddo was selected as president of the University of Portland following several years as a college teacher in the Boston area, Bieber’s book states. It says he was seen as a “vibrant and capable administrator who delivered real results to his campus,” adding, “His magnetism was obvious. One student described him as ‘John Kennedyesque’ to the university’s student newspaper.”
Bieber said that although Oddo was less active with Dignity U.S.A. during his tenure as UP president, he continued his support for gay Catholics and what is now referred to as LGBTQ rights.
“For those that knew him prior to his term at UP, though, he represented something greater than an accomplished university administrator and educator,” Bieber’s book states. “He was a new kind of priest, a gay man living and ministering in a world set loose from tradition by the Second Vatican Council,” the book says.
It was referring to the Vatican gathering of worldwide Catholic leaders from 1962 to 1965 concluding under Pope Paul VI that church observers say modernized church practices to allow far greater participation by the laity and opened the way for sympathetic consideration of gay Catholics.
District of Columbia
HRC to host National Rainbow Seder
Bet Mishpachah among annual event’s organizers
The 18th National Rainbow Seder will take place at the Human Rights Campaign on Sunday.
The sold out event is the country’s largest Passover Seder for the Jewish LGBTQ community.
Organizations behind the event include Bet Mishpachah, a local D.C. LGBTQ synagogue that Rabbi Jake Singer-Beilin leads, and GLOE, an Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center program that sponsors events for the queer Jewish community. The theme for this year’s Seder is “Liberation For All Who Journey: Remembering, Resisting, Rebuilding.” Rabbis Atara Cohen, Koach Frazier, and Avigayil Halpern will lead it.
The Seder will honor the late GLOE co-chair Michael Singer. Singer also served on the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center’s board.
“This Seder is both a celebration of how far we have come and a call to continue building a more just and inclusive world.” Bet Mishpachah Executive Director Joshua Maxey told the Washington Blade.
A gay man was murdered in Petersburg, Va., on March 13.
Shyyell Diamond Sanchez-McCray, who was also known as Saamel and Mable, was a drag queen who won the Miss Mayflower EOY pageant in 2015. Reports also indicate Sanchez-McCray, 42, was a well-known community activist in Virginia and in North Carolina.
Local media reports indicate police officers found Sanchez-McCray shot to death inside a home in Petersburg.
Sanchez-McCray’s brother, Jamal Mitchell Diamond, in a public statement the Washington Blade received from Equality Virginia and GLAAD, said Sanchez-McCray was not transgender as initial reports indicated.
“Our family has always embraced the fullness of who he was. He used the names Saamel, Shyyell, and Mable interchangeably, and we honor all of them. There is no division within our family regarding how he is being represented — only a shared commitment to preserving his truth with love and respect,” said Diamond.
“He was also deeply committed to community work through Nationz Foundation, where he worked and completed multiple state-certified programs to support marginalized communities,” added Diamond. “That work meant a great deal to him.”
Authorities have not made any arrests.
The Petersburg Bureau of Police has asked anyone with information about Sanchez-McCray’s murder to call Petersburg-Dinwiddie Crime Solvers at 804-861-1212.
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Gay priest credited with boosting church support for LGBTQ Catholics
HRC to host National Rainbow Seder
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