Jim Graham. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

A Ward 5 civic activist and supporter of former Mayor Adrian Fenty has filed papers with the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics to begin the process of seeking a recall election to oust Mayor Vincent Gray and Council Chair Kwame Brown, both Democrats, from office.

The activist, Frederick Butler, says he also plans to file papers seeking a recall election against gay D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) and Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3).

Butler has said each of the four elected officials were responsible for encouraging or failing to take steps to prevent corruption in government. He said Graham should be held responsible for the arrest in 2009 and guilty plea last year of his former chief of staff, Ted Loza, for accepting a “gratuity” from a taxicab industry official seeking to influence taxi related legislation then pending before the Council.

Federal authorities that investigated Loza said Graham was not implicated in the alleged corruption scheme. Last June, a federal judge sentenced Loza to eight months in prison.

Graham could not be immediately reached for comment.

Most political observers say Butler lacks the financial resources and support for the difficult task of obtaining 45,000 petition signatures within the next 180 days to place a recall election for Gray and Brown on the ballot in the November election. He would need signatures from 10 percent of the registered voters in Wards 1 and 3 to place Graham and Cheh on the ballot for a recall election in November. Observers note that attempts have been made to recall every previous mayor accept Walter Washington and all of them failed to obtain the signatures needed to place a recall on the ballot.

Butler is a friend and protégé of Fenty’s controversial supporter and college fraternity brother Sinclair Skinner, who came under investigation by the City Council after his company, Liberty Engineering and Design, received city contracts under the Fenty administration that critics said were due to cronyism.

Skinner came under fire from gay activists during one of Graham’s re-election campaigns when news surfaced that he distributed anti-gay fliers attacking Graham on behalf of one of Graham’s opponents in the Democratic primary.

Local gay activists Rick Rosendall and Peter Rosenstein, who backed Gray for mayor in the 2010 election, said they see no interest within the LGBT community for recalling Gray, Brown, Graham, or Cheh. Gay Democratic activist John Fanning, who supported Fenty in the 2010 mayoral election, said he, too, has no interest in seeing the four officials subjected to recall.

“I won’t sign the petition,” said Fanning. “My feeling is why don’t we wait until the next regular election and let the voters decide then.”

Gay bar Mova is reopening at a new location at 2204 14th St., N.W., far removed from its former P St. digs. (Washington Blade file photo by Pete Exis)

A “Taste of Miami Beach” will be the theme of the grand reopening party for the D.C. gay bar Mova, which is scheduled to take place Friday, Jan. 13, at the bar’s new location at 2204 14th St., N.W.

Owner Babak Movahedi said Mayor Vincent Gray and D.C. Council members Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) and David Catania (I-At-Large) were expected to be on hand for an official ribbon-cutting ceremony to officially open the establishment.

According to Movahedi, Mova has been operating in the new location in an unofficial “soft opening” since early November, with the aim of ironing out any glitches and incomplete construction tasks. He said the Jan. 13 event will include the opening of the bar’s as-yet-to-be-used rooftop terrace.

The reopening event will also feature hosts and entertainers, including a DJ, that regularly are featured at the Mova bar and lounge in South Miami Beach.

“We’re bringing in a whole bunch of people from Miami who we’ve used as part of our team such as DJs and hosts and shot boys and circus acts,” Movahedi said.

He said the night will begin with a private VIP reception from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. after which the bar will be open to the public at 10 p.m. At 1 a.m. a drawing will take place in which a winner will receive a trip to Miami Beach that includes an airline ticket and hotel room, Movahedi said.

Activist Frank Kameny died on Oct. 11, which is National Coming Out Day. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

Local and national public officials joined D.C.’s LGBT community in remembering the life and accomplishments of veteran gay rights leader Frank Kameny at memorial events this fall following Kameny’s death in Washington on Oct. 11.

Kameny, 86, is credited with being one of the leading strategists for the early gay rights movement beginning at least a decade before the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, which historians consider the starting point for the modern LGBT rights movement.

LGBT movement leaders who knew Kameny say he laid the groundwork for the movement to advance following the Stonewall Riots and going forward, playing a pivotal role in advancing the cause of LGBT equality over a period of 50 years.

“Frank Kameny is one of the most significant figures in the history of the American gay rights movement,” said D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray at a Nov. 3 memorial viewing for Kameny at the city’s Carnegie Library building.

Gray was joined at the memorial viewing by several members of the D.C. City Council, including gay Council members David Catania (I-At-Large) and Jim Graham (D-Ward 1); D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier and D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D).

A gay Air Force sergeant and four gay military veterans in full dress uniform, including gay former Army Lt. Dan Choi, joined Catania and Graham as pallbearers, carrying an American flag-draped coffin bearing Kameny’s remains into the building’s ceremonial atrium.

Organizers of the ceremony, led by local activists and Kameny friends Bob Witeck and Charles Frances, said the flag-draped coffin honored Kameny, among other things, for his service in the Army in World War II, where he served in combat in Europe.

Year In Review: 2011

Among other accomplishments, activists said Kameny became the first known gay person to publicly challenge an act of anti-gay discrimination when he sued the federal government for firing him from his job in 1957 as a civilian astronomer with the U.S. Army Map Service because of his sexual orientation.

After losing his case in the lower courts, Kameny set yet another precedent by bringing the first known gay-related case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court upheld a lower court ruling against Kameny and refused to take his case on the merits.

But in a 61-page legal brief petitioning the court to take the case, which Kameny wrote, he pulled together what some gay historians consider a gay rights manifesto that became the underpinning of the LGBT rights movement for years to come.

In a second memorial for Kameny held Nov. 15 at the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill, several public officials, including members of Congress and an Obama administration official, cited Kameny’s role as a national civil rights figure.

“His life cleared the path that I and countless others followed into public service,” said John Berry, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, who in 2009 became the Obama administration’s highest-level openly gay appointee.

“His unrelenting and unceasing fight for gay rights enabled other Americans to step out of the closet and into the full light of equality,” Berry told the gathering. “But most importantly, his long battle and eventual triumphs show the miracles that one person wrought upon the world.”

Kameny’s friends and colleagues said they were saddened over his passing but uplifted in knowing that Kameny lived to see many of the LGBT rights initiatives he fought for come to fruition, including an apology by the government, more than 50 years later, for its decision to fire him.

Kameny also lived to see the Library of Congress acquire more than 50,000 documents from his gay rights-related papers collection; the Smithsonian Institution’s American History Museum acquire and display picket signs he and his fellow activists carried in gay rights protests in the 1960s; the D.C. government’s naming a section of 17th Street, N.W., near Dupont Circle as Frank Kameny Way; and a decision by city officials to designate Kameny’s house as an historic landmark.

Arrangements are being made for a burial service for Kameny’s ashes at D.C.’s historic Congressional Cemetery in the spring.

Councilmember Phil Mendelson introduced the bill expected for a 2012 vote. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

In a little noticed development, D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At-Large) introduced a bill in October that would allow same-sex couples who marry in D.C. but live in states that don’t recognize their marriage to return to the District to get a divorce.

Supporters say the bill, the Civil Marriage Dissolution Equality Amendment Act of 2011, is needed because states that don’t recognize same-sex marriage have no legal mechanism to issue a divorce to gay or lesbian couples who wish to dissolve their D.C. marriage through a divorce.

Under the city’s existing marriage law, which allows same-sex couples to marry, one or both parties to a same-sex marriage performed in D.C. would have to become a city resident for six months before the city would grant the couple a divorce.

Married same-sex couples who are city residents have the same rights to a divorce as opposite-sex married couples under the existing law.

MORE IN THE BLADE: DC MARRIAGE BECOMES LAW

“In order to maintain basic dignity for couples married in the District, and unable to divorce in their home state, this bill is necessary,” said gay activist Bob Summersgill in testimony in support of the bill at a Dec. 8 Council hearing called by Mendelson.

“If we offer civil marriage, we must offer civil divorce,” Summersgill said.

Eight of the Council’s 13 members signed on to Mendelson’s bill as co-sponsors, including gay Council members David Catania (I-At-Large) and Jim Graham (D-Ward 1).

MORE IN THE BLADE: THE HISTORIC VOTE FOR MARRIAGE IN D.C.

The two Council members who voted against the city’s same-sex marriage law at the time the Council passed it in 2009 — Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) and Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) — did not sign on as co-sponsors to Mendelson’s divorce bill. Both are up for re-election in 2012.

Mendelson’s bill states that “An action for divorce by persons of the same gender, even if one or neither party to the marriage is a bona fide resident of the District of Columbia… would be eligible for a divorce in the city if the following circumstance apply:

“The marriage was performed in the District of Columbia; and neither party to the marriage resides in a jurisdiction that will maintain an action for divorce, provided that it shall be a rebuttable presumption that a jurisdiction will not maintain an action for divorce if the jurisdiction does not recognize the marriage.”

Brian Moore, an aide to Mendelson, said the full Council is expected to vote on the bill in early 2012. Moore said no one showed up at the Dec. 8 hearing to oppose the bill.

“The legislation addresses a problem with uneven laws across the country regarding marriage rights,” Summersgill said in his testimony. “Only a handful of states are up to the District’s standard of human rights. In states with laws promoting anti-gay discrimination, divorce of legally married same-sex couples is not an option.”

Rick Rosendall, vice president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, told Mendelson at the hearing that GLAA endorses the legislation.

“This bill fills a gap in the law crated by our being ahead of the historical curve,” Rosendall said in his testimony. “None of us celebrates the dissolution of a marriage, but equality under the law must extend to every contingency. The lack of a clear legal mechanism for divorce can make an unhappy situation much worse for all involved.”

The following was submitted as a letter to the editor. Visit washingtonblade.com to join the discussion.

On behalf of Helping Our Brothers and Sisters, I would like to express our thanks to all who helped pay tribute to the life’s work of Franklin Edward Kameny. For many of us, this is the perfect time not simply to say our thanksgiving, but also to redouble our efforts to help achieve equality and to end discrimination.

Special thanks also must go to our Mayor Vincent Gray and the leadership of our D.C. Council members, especially David Catania and Jim Graham who paid personal tribute to Dr. Kameny at the Carnegie Library.

We also express thanks to the Members of Congress and public officials who eulogized him beautifully on Capitol Hill including Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Reps. Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin, and John Berry, director of OPM. We are grateful to Yale law professor Bill Eskridge for his moving tribute to Kameny.

Thus far, with the generosity of many friends, we have covered expenses for Kameny’s viewing at Carnegie Library and his essential funeral costs, too. To be clear, we are especially grateful to our mayor’s staff for taking care of most of these expenses associated with the public events and the generous use of the prestigious Carnegie Library atrium.

In addition, we have now paid the deposit on a fitting, public gravesite for Kameny at the historic Congressional Cemetery. Charles Francis and Rick Rosendall volunteered to help identify and secure the ideal site near the resting place of Leonard Matlovich as well as Barbara Gittings (who will one day be interred at Congressional with her partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen), but not too close to J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.

To honor Frank Kameny’s distinguished military service in Europe during World War II, a U.S. Army grave marker has been ordered and will be supplied at our government’s expense. However, to further distinguish Frank’s legacy as civil rights hero, we will have a second grave footer emblazoned with his famous remark: “Gay is Good.” We anticipate a graveside service in early spring when the markers and the gravesite are made ready.

For all who wish to help raise the remaining $4,000 anticipated, you may make your tax-deductible contribution online at HelpingOurBrothersandSisters.org or simply mail a check to HOBS, P.O. Box 53477, Washington, D.C. 20009. You also may email us at HOBSDC@gmail.com to make arrangements.

Any and all contributions raised beyond these expenses will go toward helping others who are at risk within the LGBT community. Wishing everyone a memorable Thanksgiving Holiday, and to never forget that “Gay is Good.” —Marvin Carter, president, HOBS

Director of the Office of Personnel Management, John Berry, addresses the attendees at the memorial service for Frank Kameny. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

In a memorial service on Capitol Hill Tuesday night, three members of Congress, an Obama administration official, and a Yale Law School professor described the late gay rights leader Frank Kameny as a major figure in the U.S. civil rights movement who changed the course of history for LGBT Americans and the nation.

More than 200 people turned out for the service, which was held in the historic caucus room at the Cannon House Office Building across the street from the U.S. Capitol.

“His life cleared the path that I and countless others followed into public service,” said John Berry, the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, who in 2009 became the Obama administration’s highest-level gay appointment.

“His unrelenting and unceasing fight for gay rights enabled other Americans to step out of the closet and into the full light of equality,” Berry told the gathering. “But most importantly, his long battle and eventual triumphs show the miracles that one person wrought upon the world.”

Berry’s sentiment was echoed by gay U.S. Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), and Yale Law School Professor William Eskridge Jr. Each told of how Kameny’s 50-year tenure as the nation’s preeminent gay rights strategist and advocate changed the course of the nation’s history and improved the lives of LGBT people and other Americans.

Rep. Barney Frank also made remarks at the service. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Gay rights advocate and Kameny friend Charles Francis said he and others who organized the memorial service chose to hold it on Nov. 15 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kameny’s co-founding of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. Gay historians consider Mattachine of Washington to be D.C’s and the nation’s first homosexual civil rights organization.

Francis noted that Kameny and fellow activist Jack Nichols started the organization in 1961 not long after the Cannon Caucus Room, where Kameny’s memorial service was being held, was the site of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s widely publicized hearings in which communists and homosexuals were said to be a threat to the nation.

Eskridge praised Kameny’s role as a legal strategist and noted that Kameny waged one of the first effective efforts to repeal state sodomy laws, which classified gay sex as a crime. Eskridge and Norton, who called Kameny a civil rights champion, each compared the gay rights leader to American civil rights heroes in the black civil rights movement such as Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall.

Norton said that Kameny’s decision to become the first known gay person to fight his dismissal on grounds of homosexuality from his federal government job as an astronomer in 1957 was similar to Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in the back of the bus as an act of defiance of the South’s segregation laws.

“He wore that dismissal as a badge of honor,” Norton said. “It is Frank’s lonely act of defiance that sets him apart” at a time when it was unthinkable for gays to stand up for their rights, she said.

Eskridge said Kameny’s work to advance legal rights for LGBT people in the early years of his activism in the 1960s was especially remarkable because he wasn’t a lawyer.

He said that in 1961 Kameny became the first in the U.S. civil rights movement to argue that sexual orientation should be treated the same as race in connection with laws and policies that ban discrimination.

“Those were remarkably good arguments,” said Eskridge. “Today they can get you tenure at a university. But back then they could land you in jail.”

Rep. Frank said Frank Kameny was an inspiration and role model for him at a time when he grappled with how his own status as a gay man would impact his plans to enter the realm of politics and run for public office in Massachusetts.

Frank said one of Kameny’s many accomplishments in the gay rights movement was his self-confidence and aggressive and assertive demeanor in informing the world that his cause was just and right.

“He was certainly the opposite of the stereotype of a gay person as a shrinking violet,” Frank said.

Baldwin said she, too, considered Kameny a role model in her own coming out as a lesbian interested in becoming involved in public affairs and politics.

“My own introduction to Frank came when I was in college,” she said. “I was just coming out. I sought everything I could find to read about our LGBT leaders… And what I learned about Frank Kameny, the Mattachine Society and so many other pioneers made me incredibly proud,” she said.

Attendees of Frank Kameny's memorial. (Blade photo by Michael Key)

Berry, who delivered the main eulogy for Kameny at the memorial service, said he had the honor as head of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to extend to Kameny a formal apology on behalf of the government for Kameny’s dismissal from government service in 1957.

“The apology closed an important cycle in his life’s work,” said Berry, who noted that it came more than 50 years after Kameny has been credited with initiating and living to see a long list of changes that have improved the lives of LGBT people.

An end to a government ban on granting security clearances to gays, the end of the ban on gays from serving in the military, the elimination of anti-gay sodomy laws, and the removal of the psychiatric profession’s classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder are all actions that Kameny played a key role in bringing about, Berry said.

“We have lost one of the great champions of truth. His life was long and full, his victories many and great. He has left his mark upon the world, and its stewardship falls to us now,” Berry told the gathering.

“The end of Frank’s avenue must not be the end of ours. We must continue on the journey forward. It is up to us to carry on the battles yet un-won, to write history and guard the future and to morn this great soul.”

Among those attending the Kameny memorial service were gay U.S. Reps. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who, along with Norton, Frank, and Baldwin, served as official congressional hosts for the event. Also attending were Gautam Raghavan, associate director of public engagement at the White House, who serves as White House liaison to the LGBT community; White House press spokesperson Shin Inouye; and D.C. Council members David Catania, Jim Graham, and Mary Cheh.

Kameny Memorial. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

A gay Air Force sergeant and four gay military veterans in full dress uniform joined gay D.C. Council members David Catania and Jim Graham as pallbearers at a memorial viewing on Thursday honoring the late gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny.

The contingent of pall-bearers, including gay former Army Lt. Dan Choi, carried an American flag draped coffin bearing Kameny’s remains into the main hall of the historic Carnegie Library in downtown Washington, where the viewing was held.

Friends and activists who knew Kameny during his 50 year tenure as one of the nation’s and D.C.’s leading LGBT rights advocates said the ceremony and memorial viewing of his closed coffin was a befitting sendoff for a man they said improved the lives of millions of LGBT Americans.

Members of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington opened the ceremony by singing the National Anthem as D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, four D.C. Council members and a contingent of friends and activists stood near the coffin.

Hundreds of activists, community allies, public officials, and D.C. residents who knew Kameny or knew of his work filed past the coffin between 3 p.m. and the start of the ceremony at 6:60 p.m. Among them was John Berry, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the highest ranking openly gay appointee in the Obama administration.

Kameny Memorial. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

The Rev. Elder Troy Perry, founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, which caters to mostly LGBT congregations throughout the country, traveled from his home base in Los Angeles to attend the event. Perry, an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights for more than 30, worked with Kameny on national LGBT related projects in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mayor Gray said Kameny’s civil rights work led to a “massive, positive change” in the way LGBT people live their lives both in D.C. and across the nation.

“Frank Kameny is one of the most significant figures in the history of the American gay rights movement,” Gray told the gathering. “It was a poignant coincident that Dr. Kameny passed away on National Coming Out Day because he came out as a proud gay man in an era in which there were virtually no social and legal supports for sexual minorities who chose to live their lives openly in this country.”

Organizers of the ceremony, led by local activists and Kameny friends Charles Francis and Bob Witeck, placed at one end of the coffin a picket sign that Kameny made for a 1962 gay rights protest he organized outside the White House. The sign, still attached to its original wood stick handle, states, “Homosexuals Ask for the Right to the Pursuit of Happiness.”

At the other end of coffin stood a portrait of Kameny painted by local gay artist Don Patron.

Norton, a leader of the black civil rights movement, said Kameny’s acts of “defiance” and “raw, pure undiluted courage” during the decades he fought oppression against LGBT people put him in a place similar to that of black civil rights legend Rosa Parks.

Norton noted that Kameny began his fight for equality and justice for LGBT people shortly after he was fired for being gay from his job as an astronomer with the U.S. government in the late 1950s.

“Frank Kameny no more set out to sacrifice his livelihood when he refused to deny his sexual orientation to federal authorities than Rosa Parks intended to give up her work as a seamstress when she refused to move to the back of the bus,” Norton said. “Rosa Parks got tired of suppressing her full identity and her full dignity. So did Frank Kameny,” said Norton, adding, “There is a special place in our country for people like Frank Kameny. The phrase he coined, ‘Gay is Good,’ is every bit as significant as Black is Beautiful.”

Kameny died in his home Oct. 11 at the age of 86. Organizers of his memorial said a larger community memorial celebration of his life will take place Nov. 15 at a location to be announced.

“He was a great man who made it possible for me to be who I am,” said Rick Wood, a D.C. gay activist who said Kameny helped him organize the city’s first gay youth group 25 years ago.

“When I heard of Frank’s passing I was heartbroken but also grateful for the fearless and brave life that he led,” said Catania. “We’re all better off for having had Frank walk this earth. He changed minds and opened hearts to acceptance and tolerance in Washington and all over the world.”

Graham, who said he got to know Kameny during Graham’s tenure as director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic, called Kameny an “extraordinary” figure on the Washington scene for half a century.

“It is not possible to overstate the contribution that has been made by Frank Kameny for human rights, for gay and lesbian people and for everybody because, in point of fact, he was concerned about everybody,” Graham said.

Rick Rosendall, vice president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance and a friend and colleague of Kameny’s for more than 20 years, read from a chapter Kameny wrote for a book about the early “homophile movement” that was published during Kameny’s early years of activism. Kameny’s message in the book chapter was intended for a gay audience.

“It’s time to open the closet door and let in the fresh air and the sunshine,” Rosendall quoted Kameny as saying. “It is time to doff and discard the secrecy, the disguise and the camouflage. It is time to hold up your heads and to look the world squarely in the eye as the homosexuals that you are, confident of your equality, confident in the knowledge that as objects of prejudice and victims of discrimination, you are right and they are wrong, and confident of the rightness of what you are and the goodness of what you do. It is time to live your homosexuality fully, joyously, openly and proudly, assured that morally, socially, physically, psychologically, emotionally, and in every other way – gay is good.”

Joining the contingent of gay military pallbearers were four members of the D.C. Police Department’s Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit, who served as pallbearers at the conclusion of the ceremony. With participants and well wishers lining the steps and plaza outside the Carnegie Library, the GLLU members and two of the gay military veterans carried Kameny’s coffin to a hearse on the street

Kameny’s friends and activist colleagues said they arranged for Kameny’s body to be cremated, based on Kameny’s expressed wishes, shortly after his death on Oct. 11. An urn bearing his ashes had been placed in the coffin for the ceremony.

Witeck said he and others close to Kameny had yet to decide on a burial site or other resting place for the Kameny’s ashes. One place under consideration, Witeck said, is D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery.

Last year's AIDS Walk. (Blade photo by Michael Key)

This year’s AIDS Walk Washington’s grand marshals include D.C. Council member Jim Graham and two others who participated in the first walk back in 1986 — Maudie Jones, a retired Army nurse, and Joe Izzo, a psychotherapist and employee of Whitman-Walker Health since 1986. They may not have the star power of, say, Lynda Carter, who served as grand marshal last year, but their ties to the clinic and the Walk run much deeper.

“It’s hard to put it into words,” Izzo says of being named grand marshal this year. “I just feel old.”

Izzo, 63, not only walked the first year, but has walked every year since, inspired and motivated by the people he has lost to AIDS and his partner who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1992 and has been living with the disease.

“By 1987, I had already lost three dozen friends and acquaintances to HIV/AIDS,” Izzo says of why he walked that first year, losing his first friend to AIDS in 1983. “In fact, that … summer … five of my friends died.”

Izzo says that first year felt more like a demonstration than what the Walk feels like today, with people holding signs asking for more government support.

He looks forward to seeing all the people who participate in the Walk and all the support the event attracts, saying it’s inspiring.

One year that stands out in Izzo’s mind in particular is Oct. 6, 2001, less than a month after the 9-11 attacks.

“We had gotten used to having 10,000 plus people … that year we were lucky to have gotten 2,500,” Izzo says. “It was a steely gray day and every plane that went over, you had your heart in your mouth … but it was a very memorable year … the Walk still happened.”

The 25th Annual AIDS Walk is Saturday and will start and end at Freedom Plaza.

The fundraising goal this year is $1 million and they are hoping for 10,000 participants. As of Tuesday afternoon, about $600,000 had been raised.

Registration, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt display and other activities begin at 7 a.m. A program featuring music, speakers and warm-up exercises will begin at 8:15 a.m. and the fifth annual 5k timed run begins shortly after at 8:30. The AIDS Walk will step off at 9:15 and there will be a post-Walk celebration beginning at 10.

Registration fees range from $25 to $40.

For more information and to register for the walk, visit aidswalkwashington.org.

Gay D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At-Large) introduced a bill on Tuesday that would require specific courses dealing with HIV/AIDS as part of the continuing education standards for the city’s medical professionals.

“This legislation is an important step forward in our continuing efforts to remain at the forefront of HIV/AIDS education, prevention, and treatment,” Catania said in a statement. “The bill will ensure that our healthcare workforce has the tools it needs to respond to the ever-changing epidemic in the District of Columbia.”

Catania’s statement says the bill, the HIV/AIDS Continuing Medical Education Amendment Act of 2011, would provide D.C. physicians, physician assistants and nurses with “an understanding of the impact of HIV and AIDS on populations of different ages, as well as different racial and ethnic backgrounds by incorporating HIV/AIDS education into existing continuing education requirements.”

The bill was expected to be sent to the Council’s Committee on Health, which Catania chairs. Eight of the Council’s 13 members signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, including Council Chair Kwame Brown (D-At-Large), and gay Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1).

Our city government has become an embarrassment.

The pity is D.C.’s elected officials don’t seem to realize they have crossed that elusive “line in the sand” with the public.

It’s not difficult to understand why many residents now turn their heads, lower their gaze and recoil when a news report begins, “The D.C. Council today…”

Who knows how that sentence might end?

With a majority of Council members, as well as Mayor Vincent Gray, under what is delicately described as an “ethical cloud,” a bitterly fractured Council has come to resemble a drag queen dressing room before show time — bitchy, yes, but unfortunately, not as amusing or good natured.

However, LGBT political and community organizations utter nary a peep in protest — despite the fact that it’s difficult just to keep all the details of official malfeasance organized in a pitiable voter’s mind.

Can’t someone convince disgraced Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5), who has agreed — without admitting any wrongdoing while a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s office continues — to repay $300,000 in city funds intended for a youth athletic program spent instead on an Audi SUV, trips to golf and other resorts, meals and personal items, that it’s time to go?

Two weeks ago, the wigs really came off during the Council’s traditional pre-meeting breakfast.

Many undoubtedly let loose a cheer that was more than merely a guilty pleasure when gay D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At-Large) was reported to have shouted at colleague Phil Mendelson (D-At-Large), a proponent of raising local income taxes, “I don’t give a shit what you think!” The often mercurial and sharp-tongued Catania was reacting to being chastened by Mendelson, who suggested it was “inappropriate . . . to talk about Council members’ personal issues” when Catania referenced the tax-paying deficiencies of at least two among them.

When Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), the financial dean of the Council who has served for more than two decades and chairs the Committee on Finance and Revenue, exhorts, “This is the worst Council I’ve ever served on,” well, you know something is not quite right.

Following failed attempts by gay D.C. Council member Jim “Don’t-Call-It-a-Bribe” Graham (D-Ward 1) and a handful of others to raise taxes on higher income residents and a proposal by the mayor last spring to raise taxes on those making $200,000 or more was defeated, Mendelson successfully proposed raising taxes on those with incomes above $350,000 to a whopping 8.95 percent, generating $106 million over four years. (When it’s supposed to sunset – like the sales tax increase recently extended.)

Passage by a single vote of a previously rejected increase in D.C.’s already steep income tax rate of 8.5 percent — among the highest in the nation — occurred as the city announced greater-than-expected revenues and a budget surplus of $89 million.

For all the talk about budget cuts last spring, city spending will actually increase to $10.8 billion and a bevy of new fees have been enacted. Like the crack addicts once symbolic of the nation’s capital, give the D.C. Council more money and they will quickly spend it like junkies in search of a fix.

Although the current tax increase affects only about 6,000 taxpayers, a number of those are local small business owners and entrepreneurs – community investors and job creators who should be encouraged to remain committed to our city as residents. While the bridges to business-friendly Virginia, where the top tax rate is more than 3 percent lower, won’t soon be jammed with moving vans, shouldn’t Washington expect a result similar to Maryland’s imposition of a “millionaire’s tax” later abandoned last year – a dramatic drop in tax filings and a loss in revenue due to resident departures?

And if — like Graham, Mendelson and the Council’s other tax-and-spenders — you think D.C.’s income tax scheme is regressive due to a lack of variable tax brackets for those making more than $40,000, why not return the largest taxpayers to the previous top-tier-in-the-nation rate and progressively lower the rates for those below?

Maybe then it wouldn’t feel like being Alice trapped inside Wonderland.

Mark Lee is a local small business manager and long-time community business advocate. Reach him at OurBusinessMatters@gmail.com.