Local

Gay GOP donor helped fund ‘Hide/Seek’ exhibit

N.Y. businessman wants controversial crucifix video restored to Portrait Gallery

Published

15 years ago

December 9, 2010

Editor’s note: a Blade review of the exhibit is here.

A gay Republican businessman from New York who led the fundraising campaign to underwrite the National Portrait Gallery’s gay exhibit “Hide/Seek” has added his voice to those calling on the gallery to reinstate a controversial video by the late gay artist David Wojnarowicz.

Donald Capoccia, a real estate developer who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001 to serve on the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, and his partner, Tommie Pegues, sent a letter this week to the head of the Smithsonian Institution requesting that the video be “returned to the exhibition floor, without fail, and as soon as possible.”

The role of Capoccia and other gay donors who helped fund the exhibit has been overshadowed by a series of events beginning Dec. 1, when National Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan removed the Wojnarowicz video from the exhibit.

Sullivan said he acted in response to complaints by the Catholic League and Republican members of Congress that an 11-second segment of the video, which showed ants crawling over a crucifix, was offensive and an anti-Christian slur.

“I regret that some reports about the exhibit have created an impression that the video is intentionally sacrilegious,” Sullivan said in a statement. “In fact, the artist’s intention was to depict the suffering of an AIDS victim. It was not the intention of the museum to offend. We have removed the video.”

News of Sullivan’s decision, which surfaced on World AIDS Day, prompted an outcry among gay and AIDS activists and leaders of the arts community, who denounced the action as a form of censorship.

Sullivan told the New York Times he was sympathetic to the activists and artists who decried the decision to pull the video. He said his decision, which he said had the support of the leaders of the Smithsonian Institution, was aimed at quelling a “distraction” from the overall exhibit, which features important works from leading gay and lesbian artists.

The National Portrait Gallery is an arm of the Smithsonian Institution, which, among other things, operates the federally funded museums in the nation’s capital.

Among those who criticized the video and the exhibit itself were Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who will become Speaker of the House in January, and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who will become majority leader at the same time, when Republicans assume control of the House.

Rep. James Moran (D-Va.), whose district includes the Northern Virginia suburbs just outside D.C., said Boehner and Cantor along with other Republicans were exploiting an exhibit, in which just 11 seconds of a single video was offensive to some, for political gain.

Cantor said his concern was that the Smithsonian Institution, of which the National Portrait Gallery is a part, was using government funds to pay for an exhibit that was highly offensive to many Americans.

Cantor and other critics of the exhibit dismissed assertions by Smithsonian officials that private donors picked up the cost of the exhibit, saying taxpayer funds are used for the upkeep of the building and to pay the salaries of Portrait Gallery employees who operate the exhibit.

The National Portrait Gallery has called the exhibit, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” the nation’s first major museum exhibition to “focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture.”

LGBT activists involved in the arts have said the exhibit also shows how gay artists, through their varied works, have grappled with anti-gay bias and prejudice against different forms of gender expression over the past century.

Phillip Clark, chair of the board of D.C.’s Rainbow History Project, called David Wojnarowicz, a gay man who died of AIDS in 1992, an important figure in the LGBT arts community. Clark noted that Wojnarowicz used ants in his video and still photography works as a symbol for depicting human suffering and injustice.

“The image of the Christ figure attacked by ants in ‘A Fire in My Belly’ [the name of the Wojnarowicz video pulled from the exhibit], far from being sacrilegious, is actually a commentary on the destructiveness of society toward AIDS patients in the 1980s,” Clark said.

D.C. gay rights advocate Charles Francis, who recruited former President Gerald Ford to become a board member of a national gay GOP group, the Republican Unity Coalition, before Francis left the Republican Party in 2004, called on the LGBT community to remain supportive of the Smithsonian.

Francis, who joined Capoccia in contributing money to the Hide/Seek exhibit, said he disagrees with the decision by the Portrait Gallery to remove the Wojnarowicz video. But he said the gallery and the Smithsonian as a whole have been supportive of LGBT-related projects in recent years.

“The Smithsonian is doing a great job step by step in expanding and including LGBT Americans in the stories they tell, in the collections they show,” he said. “I think it’s time for the gay community to rally around the Smithsonian.”

PHOTO: “Self-Portrait — Robert Mapplethorpe,” a 1975 Polaroid print, one of the images in the Hide/Seek exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Image courtesy of the Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe, New York City.

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Cameroon

Gay Cameroonian immigrant will be freed from ICE detention — for now

Ludovic Mbock’s homeland criminalizes homosexuality

Published

3 days ago

March 13, 2026

Baltimore Banner

Competitive gamer Ludovic Mbock, left, with his sister, Diane Sohna. (Photo courtesy of Diane Sohna)

By ANTONIO PLANAS | An immigration judge on Friday issued a $4,000 bond for a Cameroonian immigrant and regional gaming champion held in federal immigration detention for the past three weeks.

The ruling will allow Ludovic Mbock, of Oxon Hill, to return to Maryland from a Georgia facility this weekend, his family and attorney said.

“Realistically, by tomorrow. Hopefully, by today,” said Mbock’s attorney, Edward Neufville. “We are one step closer to getting Ludovic justice.”

The rest of this article can be found on the Baltimore Banner’s website.

District of Columbia

Bowser appoints first nonbinary person to Cabinet-level position

Peter Stephan named Office of Disability Rights interim director

Published

4 days ago

March 12, 2026

Lou Chibbaro Jr.

The Wilson Building (Bigstock photo by Leonid Andronov)

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bower has named longtime disability rights advocate Peter L. Stephan, who identifies as nonbinary, as interim director of the D.C. Office of Disability Rights.

The local transgender and nonbinary advocacy group Our Trans Capital and the LGBTQ group Capital Stonewall Democrats issued a joint statement calling Stephan’s appointment an historic development as the first-ever appointment of a nonbinary person to a Cabinet-level D.C. government position.

“This milestone appointment recognizes Stephan’s extensive expertise in disability rights advocacy and marks a historic advancement for transgender and nonbinary representation in District government leadership,” the statement says.

The statement notes that Stephan, an attorney, held the position of general counsel at the Office of Disability Rights immediately prior to the mayor’s decision to name him interim director.

The mayor’s office didn’t immediately respond to a question from the Washington Blade asking if Bowser plans to name Stephan as the permanent director of the Office of Disability Rights. John Fanning, a spokesperson for D.C. Council member Anita Bonds (D-At-Large), said the office’s director position requires confirmation by the Council.

Stephan couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

“At a time when trans and nonbinary people ae under attack across the country, D.C. continues to lead by example,” said Stevie McCarty, president of Capital Stonewall Democrats. “This appointment reflects what we have always believed that our community is always strongest when every voice is represented in government,” he said.

“This is a historic step forward,” said Vida Rengel, founder of Our Trans Capital. “Interim Director Stephan’s career and accomplishments are a shining example of the positive impact that trans and nonbinary public servants can have on our communities,” according to Rangel.

District of Columbia

Capital Stonewall Democrats set to celebrate 50th anniversary

Mayor Bowser expected to attend March 20 event

Published

5 days ago

March 11, 2026

Lou Chibbaro Jr.

Mayor Bowser is expected to attend the Capital Stonewall Democrats 50th gala. (Blade file photo by Michael Key)

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, members of the D.C. Council, and local and national Democratic Party officials are expected to join more than 150 LGBTQ advocates and supporters on March 20 for the 50^th anniversary celebration of the city’s Capital Stonewall Democrats.

A statement released by the organization says the event is scheduled to be held at the Pepco Edison Place Gallery building at 702 8^th St., N.W. in D.C.

“The evening will honor the people who built Capital Stonewall Democrats across five decades – activists who fought for rights when the odds were against them, public servants who opened doors and refused to let them close, and a new generation of leaders ready to carry the work forward,” the statement says.

Founded in 1976 as the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the organization’s members voted in 2021 to change its name to the Capital Stonewall Democrats.

Among those planning to attend the anniversary event is longtime D.C. gay Democratic activist Paul Kuntzler, 84, who is one of the two co-founders of the then-Gertrude Stein Democratic Club. Kuntzler told the Washington Blade that he and co-founder Richard Maulsby were joined by about a dozen others in the living room of his Southwest D.C. home at the group’s founding meeting in January 1976.

He said that among the reasons for forming a local LGBTQ Democratic group at the time was to arrange for a then “gay” presence at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, at which Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination for U.S. president and later won election as president.

Maulsby, who served as the Stein Club president for its first three years and who now lives in Sarasota, Fla., said he would not be attending the March 20 anniversary event, but he fully supports the organization’s continuing work as an LGBTQ organization associated with the Democratic Party.

Steven McCarty, Capital Stonewall Democrats’ current president, said in the statement that the anniversary celebration will highlight the organization’s work since the time of its founding.

“Capital Stonewall Democrats has been fighting for LGBTQ+ political power in this city for 50 years, electing people, training organizers, holding this community together through some really hard moments,” he said. “And right now, with everything going on, that work has never mattered more. This gala is the first moment of our next chapter, and I want the community to be a part of it.”

The statement says among the special guests attending the event will be Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Malcolm Kenyatta, who became the first openly gay LGBTQ person of color to win election to the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 2018.

Other guests of honor, according to the statement, include Mayor Bowser; D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5, the Council’s only gay member; D.C. Council member Anita Bonds (D-At-Large); Earl Fowlkes, founder of the International Federation of Black Prides; Vita Rangel, a transgender woman who serves as Deputy Director of the D.C. Mayor’s Office of Talent and Appointments; Heidi Ellis, director of the D.C. LGBTQ Budget Coalition; Rayceen Pendarvis, longtime D.C. LGBTQ civic activist; and Phillip Pannell, longtime D.C. LGBTQ Democratic activist and Ward 8 civic activist.

Information about ticket availability for the Capital Stonewall Democrats anniversary gala can be accessed here: capitalstonewalldemocrats.com/50th