National
Victory Fund urged lawmaker to remain in closet: report
Critic claims gay group wanted Sims, not Fleck, to be first out Pa. official
Rep. Mike Fleck came out last year but said the Victory Fund advised him to stay in the closet, even after winning re-election. (Photo public domain)
A gay Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives created a stir last week when he told the Philadelphia Gay News in an interview that the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund urged him to delay coming out until after the November 2012 election and possibly later.
Denis Dison, the Victory Fund’s senior vice president for programs, disputed claims by critics that the group pushed for Rep. Mike Fleck’s delay in coming out because it wanted another candidate it endorsed to become the state’s first openly gay state lawmaker.
Fleck, who won election in 2006 in the state’s rural, conservative 81st District, told PGN he was ready to come out as gay in the spring of 2012. At the time he had secured the Republican Party nomination for re-election and learned that no Democrat planned to run against him in the November general election.
“I was running unopposed so I didn’t see what the fallout would be,” PGN quoted him as saying. “But Victory Fund frowned upon that and said, ‘No, no, you’ve got a lot of people in tough races, your colleagues, and this isn’t an issue in their race. You can’t come out and put them like a deer in headlights, have them asked things like, ‘Your best friend just came out, where are you on equality legislation?’”
PGN reported that Fleck said when the election came and went the Victory Fund continued to urge him to delay coming out. But this time he ignored the advice and arranged for his hometown newspaper, the Huntington Daily News, to do a story reporting his coming out in its Dec. 1, 2012 edition.
The story of his coming out was picked up by other media outlets in the U.S. and even abroad and quickly went viral.
Fleck’s comments to PGN prompted lesbian commentator Faith Elmes to write a column for the Pennsylvania blog Keystone Student Voice questioning the Victory Fund’s motives in reportedly urging Fleck to postpone coming out. Elmes accused the Victory Fund of pushing for Fleck to stay in the closet long enough so that gay activist and attorney Brian Sims, a Democrat, would emerge as the state’s first openly gay member of the Pennsylvania House in his bid for a seat in a liberal, Democratic district that includes part of Philadelphia.
The Victory Fund endorsed Sims’ election bid and promoted him to potential campaign donors as being poised to become the first openly gay member of the state legislature. Sims defeated a pro-gay incumbent in the Democratic primary and ran unopposed in the November 2012 general election in what observers say is a safe Democratic district.
Elmes noted that Sims served on the Victory Fund’s campaign board that decides which candidates the group should endorse in its role as the nation’s leading advocate for the election of openly LGBT candidates for public office.
“If Mr. Sims secured the full title of ‘first openly gay legislator in PA,’ the organization would have amplified media presence after ‘their guy’ won,” Elmes wrote. “The Victory Fund could claim credit for prevailing in what they call on their website a ‘Horizon State’ [in which no out LGBT person held elective office to the state legislature].”
Sims, who takes strong exception to Elmes’ assertions, said he resigned from the Victory Fund’s board before he announced his candidacy for the 182nd House district, as is required under Victory Fund rules for all board members seeking to run for public office.
Dison, citing strict confidentiality rules in the Victory Fund’s role in advising closeted elected officials on how best to come out, declined to comment on what the group said to Fleck during the time he deliberated over whether to come out.
However, in a written statement to the Blade, he disputed claims that the Victory Fund’s endorsement of Sims played any role in its advice to Fleck.
“What’s important to us isn’t who was the first, but that the LGBT community finally gained not one but two authentic voices in the state legislature in the same year,” Dison said in his statement. “Our work assisting closeted officials who want to come out is aimed at increasing the likelihood they can remain public servants,” he said.
“That was our only consideration when we advised Rep. Mike Fleck last year,” said Dison. “Other theories are false.”
Some media outlets reported that Fleck became the state’s first openly gay state representative by way of coming out in the Dec. 1, 2012 newspaper story. These reports note that Sims didn’t take office until Jan. 1, when he took the oath of office at the state capital in Harrisburg.
But others, including Sims, point to the state constitution, which declares that the legislative session officially begins on the first day of December following the November election.
“For all of the things that are sort of gray and up in the air – this is not,” Sims told the Blade in a phone interview on Tuesday. “Article 2, Section 2 of our state constitution is two lines, and it’s very clear. My term began on the first day of December. My ceremonial swearing in was just that, a ceremonial swearing in on Jan. 1.”
Assuming Sims’ interpretation of the state constitution is correct, he and Fleck became “openly gay” lawmakers on the same day.
Fleck couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Sims said he did not know that Fleck planned to come out until a day or two before the newspaper story reporting his status as a gay man was published last December. He said he and Fleck are on good terms. Sims said a few days after Fleck came out he wrote a column in the Huffington Post welcoming Fleck.
“I was really frustrated that there were people who felt like Mike was trying to steal the spotlight or trying to race me somehow to this mythical title of first gay whatever,” Sims said. “That wasn’t the case.”
The White House
EXCLUSIVE: Garcia, Markey reintroduce bill to require US promotes LGBTQ rights abroad
International Human Rights Defense Act also calls for permanent special envoy
Two lawmakers on Monday have reintroduced a bill that would require the State Department to promote LGBTQ rights abroad.
A press release notes the International Human Rights Defense Act that U.S. Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) introduced would “direct” the State Department “to monitor and respond to violence against LGBTQ+ people worldwide, while creating a comprehensive plan to combat discrimination, criminalization, and hate-motivated attacks against LGBTQ+ communities” and “formally establish a special envoy to coordinate LGBTQ+ policies across the State Department.”
“LGBTQ+ people here at home and around the world continue to face escalating violence, discrimination, and rollbacks of their rights, and we must act now,” said Garcia in the press release. “This bill will stand up for LGBTQ+ communities at home and abroad, and show the world that our nation can be a leader when it comes to protecting dignity and human rights once again.”
Markey, Garcia, and U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) in 2023 introduced the International Human Rights Defense Act. Markey and former California Congressman Alan Lowenthal in 2019 sponsored the same bill.
The promotion of LGBTQ and intersex rights was a cornerstone of the Biden-Harris administration’s overall foreign policy.
The global LGBTQ and intersex rights movement since the Trump-Vance administration froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid has lost more than an estimated $50 million in funding.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded dozens of advocacy groups around the world, officially shut down on July 1. Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this year said the State Department would administer the remaining 17 percent of USAID contracts that had not been cancelled.
Then-President Joe Biden in 2021 named Jessica Stern — the former executive director of Outright International — as his administration’s special U.S. envoy for the promotion of LGBTQ and intersex rights.
The Trump-Vance White House has not named anyone to the position.
Stern, who co-founded the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice after she left the government, is among those who sharply criticized the removal of LGBTQ- and intersex-specific references from the State Department’s 2024 human rights report.
“It is deliberate erasure,” said Stern in August after the State Department released the report.
The Congressional Equality Caucus in a Sept. 9 letter to Rubio urged the State Department to once again include LGBTQ and intersex people in their annual human rights reports. Garcia, U.S. Reps. Julie Johnson (D-Texas), and Sarah McBride (D-Del.), who chair the group’s International LGBTQI+ Rights Task Force, spearheaded the letter.
“We must recommit the United States to the defense of human rights and the promotion of equality and justice around the world,” said Markey in response to the International Human Rights Defense Act that he and Garcia introduced. “It is as important as ever that we stand up and protect LGBTQ+ individuals from the Trump administration’s cruel attempts to further marginalize this community. I will continue to fight alongside LGBTQ+ individuals for a world that recognizes that LGBTQ+ rights are human rights.”
National
US bishops ban gender-affirming care at Catholic hospitals
Directive adopted during meeting in Baltimore.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops this week adopted a directive that bans Catholic hospitals from offering gender-affirming care to their patients.
Since ‘creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift,’ we have a duty ‘to protect our humanity,’ which means first of all, ‘accepting it and respecting it as it was created,’” reads the directive the USCCB adopted during their meeting that is taking place this week in Baltimore.
The Washington Blade obtained a copy of it on Thursday.
“In order to respect the nature of the human person as a unity of body and soul, Catholic health care services must not provide or permit medical interventions, whether surgical, hormonal, or genetic, that aim not to restore but rather to alter the fundamental order of the human body in its form or function,” reads the directive. “This includes, for example, some forms of genetic engineering whose purpose is not medical treatment, as well as interventions that aim to transform sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex (or to nullify sexual characteristics of a human body.)”
“In accord with the mission of Catholic health care, which includes serving those who are vulnerable, Catholic health care services and providers ‘must employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who experience gender incongruence or gender dysphoria’ and to provide for the full range of their health care needs, employing only those means that respect the fundamental order of the human body,” it adds.
The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2024 condemned gender-affirming surgeries and “gender theory.” The USCCB directive comes against the backdrop of the Trump-Vance administration’s continued attacks against the trans community.
The U.S. Supreme Court in June upheld a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming medical interventions for minors.
Media reports earlier this month indicated the Trump-Vance administration will seek to prohibit Medicaid reimbursement for medical care to trans minors, and ban reimbursement through the Children’s Health Insurance Program for patients under 19. NPR also reported the White House is considering blocking all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors.
“The directives adopted by the USCCB will harm, not benefit transgender persons,” said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based LGBTQ Catholic organization, in a statement. “In a church called to synodal listening and dialogue, it is embarrassing, even shameful, that the bishops failed to consult transgender people, who have found that gender-affirming medical care has enhanced their lives and their relationship with God.”
President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a bill that reopens the federal government.
Six Democrats — U.S. Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), Don Davis (D-N.C.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) — voted for the funding bill that passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. Two Republicans — Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Greg Steube (R-Fla.) — opposed it.
The 43-day shutdown is over after eight Democratic senators gave in to Republicans’ push to roll back parts of the Affordable Care Act. According to CNBC, the average ACA recipient could see premiums more than double in 2026, and about one in 10 enrollees could lose a premium tax credit altogether.
These eight senators — U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Angus King (I-Maine), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) — sided with Republicans to pass legislation reopening the government for a set number of days. They emphasized that their primary goal was to reopen the government, with discussions about ACA tax credits to continue afterward.
None of the senators who supported the deal are up for reelection.
King said on Sunday night that the Senate deal represents “a victory” because it gives Democrats “an opportunity” to extend ACA tax credits, now that Senate Republican leaders have agreed to hold a vote on the issue in December. (The House has not made any similar commitment.)
The government’s reopening also brought a win for Democrats’ other priorities: Arizona Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva was sworn in after a record-breaking delay in swearing in, eventually becoming the 218th signer of a discharge petition to release the Epstein files.
This story is being updated as more information becomes available.
Chilean presidential election outcome to determine future of LGBTQ rights in country
EXCLUSIVE: Garcia, Markey reintroduce bill to require US promotes LGBTQ rights abroad
Could lower rates, lagging condo sales lure buyers to the table?
Gay, straight men bond over finances, single fatherhood in Mosaic show
High cost of living shuts essential workers out, threatens D.C.’s economic stability
Pro-trans candidates triumph despite millions in transphobic ads
Democratic Socialism won’t win the whole country
US bishops ban gender-affirming care at Catholic hospitals
Gottmik and Violet Chachki are bringing drag excellence across the country with ‘The Knockout Tour’
Federal government reopens
-
Politics4 days agoPro-trans candidates triumph despite millions in transphobic ads
-
Opinions4 days ago
Democratic Socialism won’t win the whole country
-
National4 days ago
US bishops ban gender-affirming care at Catholic hospitals
-
Drag5 days ago
Gottmik and Violet Chachki are bringing drag excellence across the country with ‘The Knockout Tour’
