Local
Record turnout for Pride
‘Wonderfully diverse’ crowd defies heat, humidity
Capital Pride’s parade June 12 featured 175 contingents — the most ever for the event. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
A record-breaking 175 contingents in last weekend’s Capital Pride parade and about 250,000 people at the street festival the next day showed the world how “wonderfully diverse we are as a community,” according to the event’s lead organizer.
Dyana Mason, executive director of Capital Pride Alliance, the non-profit group that organized Washington’s 35th annual LGBT Pride events, called the festivities a “great success.”
“It was wonderfully diverse and had a true cross section of our community,” she said. “It was just wonderful to see everybody from Results Gym to Rainbow Families D.C. to faith communities to the leather contingent. Everybody was there and just being themselves.”
As in past years, the parade’s lead contingent was the lesbian motorcycle group Dykes on Bikes. And a short distance behind them, a contingent of the city’s elected officials joined the parade.
Among them were Mayor Adrian Fenty and his chief rival in the September Democratic primary, City Council Chairman Vincent Gray.
Others included D.C. Congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and gay D.C. Council members David Catania (I-At Large) and Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who also are up for re-election this year.
They were joined by Council members Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), Kwame Brown (D-At Large), Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) and Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6).
Also marching in the parade was former D.C. Parks & Recreation director and gay City Council candidate Clark Ray, who is challenging Mendelson in the September primary.
The politicians, including Fenty and Gray, appeared to be well received as they passed large crowds along a parade route that stretched from 24th and P streets, N.W., around Dupont Circle to the gay enclave along 17th Street.
From there, the parade turned east on P Street, where it passed the official reviewing stand in front of the Whole Foods supermarket near 15th and P streets before ending on 14th Street at Thomas Circle.
The politicians — all of whom are strong supporters of LGBT civil rights — were quickly followed by colorful floats carrying performing drag queens, shirtless male swim team members, gym enthusiasts riding exercise machines, and country western dancers performing the two-step.
Capital Pride officials identified certain contingents as winners of Capital Pride’s annual parade awards: Ziegfeld’s/Secrets nightclub took the Cher Award for Best Theme/Energy; Results Gym captured the Tina Turner Award for Best Float; D.C.’s Different Drummers won the Nancy Sinatra Award for Best Marching Contingent; G Worldwide Resorts earned the Dame Edna Award for Best Visiting Contingent; and Fuego gay bar received the Liberace Award for Most Outrageous.
Also receiving loud applause and cheers along the parade route were the contingents and cars carrying this year’s Capital Pride heroes and super heroes, who were selected for their longtime support for LGBT-related causes.
Among them was Deacon Maccubbin, the former owner of Lambda Rising bookstore who is credited with initiating and organizing the city’s first annual LGBT Pride celebration in 1975.
For many activists, the parade’s route along 17th Street between R and Q streets, N.W., had a special significance this year. On June 10, three days before the parade kick-off, Fenty led a ceremony naming the section of 17th Street between R and Q streets Frank Kameny Way after the nationally recognized D.C. gay civil rights leader.
The ceremony included the unveiling of a newly installed street sign bearing the name Frank Kameny Way, which was visible to parade goers. The street-naming came about through an executive order issued by Fenty.
Kameny, who is credited with founding the city’s gay civil rights movement in the late 1950s, spoke at the ceremony, saying that he could never have predicted the advances in LGBT rights since he was fired in 1957 from his job as a civilian astronomer with the Army Map service because of his sexual orientation.
Joining Fenty in the street naming ceremony was Jack Evans, the Ward 2 Council member whose district includes the newly designated Kameny Way, and gay ANC Commissioner Mike Silverstein, who was among the Dupont Circle ANC commissioners that formally requested the street’s designation.
Also speaking at the ceremony was John Berry, the gay director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Berry noted that OPM’s predecessor agency, the U.S. Civil Service Commission, was the agency that fired Kameny more than 50 years ago for being gay.
“Frank is the perfect storm,” Berry said. “The wall of resistance that he encountered when he challenged his dismissal back in 1957 would have been insurmountable to most people. With no more support than his own brilliant mind and his own powerful lungs, he faced down the United States government.”
Berry noted that over the ensuing decades, Kameny played a key role in guiding the LGBT civil rights movement through battles that ended the government’s ban on civilian gay employees, ended the psychiatric and psychological professions’ classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and lifted the government’s ban on issuing security clearances to gay federal employees and contract workers.
“Frank, for every one of us who walk this street, and I walk it daily, your name up here is going to remind us of the power of one person, the power of persistence,” Berry said. “You have changed the world for the better.”
But on the day of the parade, Fenty and other parade goers passing along 17th Street were greeted by another type of sign: professionally printed poster-sized placards bearing the message “Fenty is M.I.A.”
Gay Democratic activist Lane Hudson, who is backing Gray in the mayor’s race, said he and others had the signs made and attached them to light poles along the parade route on 17th Street and along the section of P Street where the parade reviewing stand was located.
Hudson said the placards were intended to deliver a message to parade participants that Fenty has been “missing in action” on a number of LGBT-related issues by not speaking out or meeting with members of the community to address those issues. Anti-LGBT hate crimes, LGBT youth matters and the HIV/AIDS fight were among the issues cited by the signs as issues to which Fenty is not devoting enough attention.
Fenty backers dispute those assertions, though, saying the mayor has extensively addressed those issues during his more than three years in office.
The signs Hudson placed on the light poles list a website for obtaining more information on the subject, but it wasn’t operational earlier this week. Hudson said he planned to activate the site soon.
Capital Pride Alliance President Michael Lutz said the June 13 Capital Pride street festival, held along Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., between Third and Seventh streets, also appeared to have attracted an unprecedented number of groups, businesses and vendors. Literature released by Capital Pride shows nearly 250 booths lining Pennsylvania Avenue and several side streets.
Among the businesses setting up booths were SunTrust Bank, the Spy Museum, Verizon Wireless, America Online, the New York Times, and the Washington Nationals Baseball Club. Dozens of local and national LGBT organizations also had booths, with many promoting their latest programs and projects.
The intense heat and humidity throughout the day of the street festival was interrupted briefly as rain showers fell for less than five minutes.
Mason credited drag performer Destiny B. Childs with keeping the entertainment going and the crowd pleased from the festival’s main stage during the rain. With the U.S. Capitol as a backdrop looming above the stage, Childs, whose legal name is Richard Legg, staged a show “that was really something to see,” Mason said.
Country western singer Chely Wright, the festival’s headliner performer, closed the program on the main stage to cheering fans. Wright, who came out as lesbian earlier this year in People magazine, recently completed a new album and is promoting an autobiography.
District of Columbia
Blade editor to be inducted into D.C. Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame
Kevin Naff marks 24 years with publication this year
Longtime Washington Blade Editor Kevin Naff will be inducted into D.C.’s Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame in June, the group announced this week.
Hall of Fame honorees are chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter. Naff and two other inductees — Seth Borenstein, a Washington-based national science writer for the AP and Cheryl W. Thompson, an award-winning correspondent for National Public Radio — will be celebrated at the chapter’s Dateline Awards dinner on Tuesday, June 9, at the National Press Club. The dinner’s emcee will be Kojo Nnamdi, host of WAMU radio’s weekly “Politics Hour.”
“I am tremendously honored by this recognition,” Naff said. “I have spent a lifetime in the D.C. area learning from so many talented journalists and am humbled to be considered in their company. Thank you to SPJ and to all the LGBTQ pioneers who came before me who made this possible.”
Naff joined the Blade in 2002 after years in print and digital journalism. He worked as a financial reporter for Reuters in New York before moving to Baltimore in 1996 to launch the Baltimore Sun’s website. He spent four years at the Sun before leaving for an internet startup and later joining the mobile data group at Verizon Wireless working on the first generation of mobile apps.
He then moved to the Blade and has served as the publication’s longest-tenured editor. In 2023, Naff published his first book, “How We Won the War for LGBTQ Equality — And How Our Enemies Could Take It All Away.”
Previous Hall of Fame inductees include luminaries in journalism like Wolf Blitzer, Benjamin Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, and Edgar Allen Poe. The Blade’s senior news reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. was inducted in 2015.
Maryland
Supreme Court ruling against conversion therapy bans could affect Md. law
Then-Gov. Larry Hogan signed statute in 2018
By PAMELA WOOD, JOHN-JOHN WILLIAMS IV, and MADELEINE O’NEILL | The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ kids in Colorado, a ruling that also could apply to Maryland’s ban on the discredited practice.
An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide whether it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court’s majority, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
District of Columbia
As mayor’s race takes shape, candidates endorse LGBTQ equality
Like nearly all recent D.C. elections, LGBTQ voters will be choosing a candidate for mayor in 2026 from a list of mostly strong LGBTQ rights supporters in the city’s June 16 primary.
As of March 30, the D.C. Board of Elections’ list of candidates who submitted the required number of petition signatures for the June 16 primary ballot included 10 mayoral candidates: nine Democrats and one Statehood Green Party candidate.
Among those candidates, six, all Democrats, have issued statements expressing strong support for LGBTQ rights, including the two leading Democratic contenders, former D.C. Council member Kenyan McDuffie and current Council member Janeese Lewis George, who represents Ward 4.
One of the lesser-known Democratic candidates who released an LGBTQ supportive statement, Rini Sampath, a cyber security consultant, told the Washington Blade she identifies as queer, becoming one of the first known LGBTQ D.C. mayoral candidates to gain access to a major party primary ballot.
“We’re living in an extremely diverse community, an extremely unique community,” she told the Blade. “And being able to self-label, self-identify as queer is something that I just want to take pride in.”
Similar to McDuffie and Lewis George, Sampath released statements to the Blade and the Capital Stonewall Democrats, the city’s largest LGBTQ local political group, expressing support for LGBTQ rights and outlining plans for LGBTQ supportive policies if elected mayor.
Although many D.C. LGBTQ activists have said they have yet to decide whom to support for mayor, those who have decided appear to be divided between McDuffie and Lewis George. Most D.C. political observers consider McDuffie and Lewis George to be the two leading candidates in the mayoral race.
The other Democratic mayoral contenders who have released statements expressing support on LGBTQ issues include Gary Goodweather, a local real estate manager and developer who has been actively campaigning at LGBTQ events; Vincent Orange, a former At-Large and Ward 5 D.C. Council member; and Kathy Henderson, a longtime Ward 5 community activist and elected Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner.
The remaining two Democratic mayoral candidates, Hope Solomon, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security contractor and Dupont Circle civic activist; and Ernest Johnson, a real estate broker and Ward 1 community activist, did not respond to inquiries from the Blade and Capital Stonewall Democrats seeking information about their position on LGBTQ related issues.
Robert Gross, the Statehood Green Party candidate who is running unopposed in the June 16 primary, also didn’t respond to inquires from the Blade about his position on LGBTQ issues.
D.C. Board of Elections records show that at least five Republican candidates filed papers to run for mayor in the June 16 GOP primary, but none of them remained as candidates as of March 30, when the election board issued its updated candidate list.
Just one of the five Republican candidates replied to an email message from the Washington Blade sent to all mayoral candidates in early March seeking their position on LGBTQ issues. That candidate, Esa Muhammad, whose website identifies him as an engineer, consultant, and local business owner, sent a reply expressing opposition to LGBTQ rights.
“Unfortunately, I do not support LGBTQ because The God only created 2 genders (Adam/Eve),” he wrote. “Anyway, I will be fair to you all despite your sick way of looking at life,” he stated.
Capital Stonewall Democrats President Stevie McCarty said his group sent questionnaires to all the Democratic mayoral candidates as well as to Democrats running for other offices such as D.C. Council. Information posted on the group’s website shows only four of the mayoral candidates returned a complete questionnaire: McDuffie, Lewis George, Goodweather, and Sampath.
Each of them provides detailed information of their plans for supporting LGBTQ policies if elected and their record of support on LGBTQ issues. McCarty said the questionnaire responses for all candidates that submitted them can be accessed at outvotedc.org.
He said Capital Stonewall Democrats will hold virtual LGBTQ forums in April, including a mayoral forum on April 8. He said the group’s members will vote on the candidate endorsements online from April 20 through May 11, and the group expects to announce its endorsements May 14.
GLAA DC, formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, has issued candidate ratings for most D.C. elections since the 1970s, and the nonpartisan LGBTQ group was expected to issue ratings for mayoral candidates this year. But like in recent years, the group is expected to base its ratings on mostly non-LGBTQ issues, with a progressive, left-leaning perspective, according to a nine-page “Back to Basics GLAA Policy Brief 2026” that the group released in March.
The LGBTQ activists who are backing McDuffie or Lewis George appear to be gravitating to the two based on their political leanings separate from LGBTQ issues, just like voters in general. Lewis George, who identifies as a democratic socialist, is popular among LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ “progressives.”
McDuffie, who is seen as a more moderate candidate along the lines of current D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, is being supported by LGBTQ activists who hold those views, some of whom currently work in the Bowser administration.
Among Lewis George’s LGBTQ supporters are longtime Ward 8 community leader Philip Pannell and former Capital Stonewall Democrats president Howard Garrett. Among the LGBTQ McDuffie backers are longtime D.C. Democratic activists John Fanning and David Meadows.
Longtime D.C. LGBTQ Democratic Party activist Peter Rosenstein, who is supporting McDuffie, has raised concerns about Lewis George’s backing by the national group Democratic Socialists of America. In Facebook postings, Rosenstein points to the Democratic Socialists of America’s opposition to Israel as a country and said it is viewed by many in the Jewish community as promoting antisemitism. He has criticized Lewis George for not speaking out against that and for accepting the DSA’s endorsement.
In an interview with the Blade, Lewis George strongly disputed that assessment, saying she has been a strong ally and supporter of the Jewish community.
“I’m a member of the Metro DSA here in D.C. that I work with to fight for labor and for tenant rights,” she said. “I’m also a member of the Democratic Party,” she added, saying, “There are things that the Democratic Party does that I don’t agree with. There are things that the national DSA does that I don’t agree with. That’s a group that I work with.”
“But I want to be clear that I am running for mayor to represent all of our community, and that includes our amazing and historical Jewish community here in D.C.,” she said. “I have had the amazing opportunity to spend time at synagogues and talking to Jewish leaders and groups and institutions. And so, there should be no worry here.”
Following are short excerpts from the detailed statements five of the nine Democratic mayoral candidates submitted to the Capital Stonewall Democrats or the Washington Blade.
Kenyan McDuffie: “As mayor, every piece of legislation I sign, craft, or endorse should also encompass the interest and input of the LGBTQ community members and advocates…From housing to health care and everything in between… We have a dire crisis regarding the rise in homelessness especially among the youth in our LGBTQ communities. In my administration that simply cannot be the status quo and will not be…I have been a consistent champion for our LGBTQ community and will remain so as Mayor of D.C.’
Janeese Lewis George: “As mayor, I will protect our LGBTQ+ neighbors against federal attacks on their identity, including their health care…On the Council I have been a strong supporter of pro-LGBTQ+ bills, including making D.C. a sanctuary for people seeking gender-affirming health care as well as addressing discrimination and harassment in nightlife and hospitality…And as mayor, I am prepared to move up and win those fights – a fight for D.C. statehood, a fight for our true economy, and a real opportunity to uplift our Black queer and trans youth.”
Gary Goodweather: “A Goodweather administration will defend every D.C. law protecting LGBTQ residents. I will establish a Defend DC office to coordinate the District’s legal and public response to federal overreach, with LGBTQ+ protections explicitly within its mandate…My affordable D.C. plan will produce 50,000 new homes with 36,000 affordable units, and I will ensure LGBTQ+ youth housing programs are funded as a budget priority.”
Rini Sampath: “I am an immigrant, proud queer woman, and a 10-year resident of Washington, D.C…For me, LGBTQ+ voters including transgender and nonbinary residents, are not a separate or symbolic constituency; they are a core part of a broader, multiracial, cross-ward coalition rooted in in equity and opportunity.”
Vincent Orange: “I have a long and consistent record of supporting LGBTQ+ equality and inclusion in the District of Columbia, grounded in both policy and personal commitment. As the District’s Democratic Committeeman from 2006 to 2015, I publicly supported marriage equality and voted accordingly … During my time on the D.C. Council, I worked to advance protections for LGBTQ+ residents, including authoring and passing legislation to prohibit discrimination against transgender individuals in the workplace.”
Kathy Henderson: Kathy Henderson has maintained a consistent record of treating all members of the community with dignity, compassion, and respect, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, identity, political party, national origin, or ideology. Kathy Henderson embraced the late Wanda Alston as a colleague and good friend…Alston was the first director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs and Henderson helped to organize and facilitate the first LGBTQ citizens summit.”
VIDEO: Gay journalist detained for booing Trumps at ‘Chicago’ opening night
Idaho Gov. signs harshest anti-trans bathroom bill in the country
Award-winning D.C. chef reaching new culinary heights
Trans-driven ‘Serpent’s Skin’ delivers campy sapphic horror
Now more than ever: the importance of LGBTQ activism
‘Out for McDuffie’ event held at D.C. gay bar
‘Jonah’ an undeniably compelling but unusual memory play
The Oscar-losing performance that’s too good to miss
Thousands attend ‘No Kings’ protests in D.C.
