Local
Anniversary for marriage
One year after the first same-sex couples wed in D.C., all eyes are on Maryland
Candy Holmes (left) and Darlene Garner on their wedding day last March. (Blade file photo by Michael Key)
As the battle over marriage equality in Maryland reaches its endgame, the sparks it throws are reflected in the lives of real people, including a married couple wed just next door in Washington on the first day the D.C. same-sex marriage law went into effect in March of 2010.
Residents of Bowie, Md., one of the three couples wed with fanfare at the Human Rights Campaign headquarters on March 9, 2010 — Candy Holmes and Darlene Garner — looked back this week at the struggles to win equality in D.C. and the continuing efforts in Maryland.
“In retrospect, it’s been a mixed year,” Holmes says. “Because it was a great year to be married in D.C. in my hometown and Darlene’s adopted city, really it was a year of a piece of heaven, once we got through the murky waters that it might be taken away by the courts. It was the realization of something long desired by us, to be married, and legally acknowledged so, to the love of my life.”
“But when we come back to where we live, in Maryland, where our marriage is not recognized, the struggle goes on because we were free to be married in D.C., but we are not free to be married in Maryland — yet.”
Holmes and Garner — who dated on and off for 14 years before getting married — are both ordained ministers in the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a liberal, mostly gay Christian denomination — and now they are determined to see the blessings afforded to them by marriage become theirs by right also where they live.
“We have so much enjoyed the last 12 months as a married couple,” Garner says. “We have been completely embraced by our extended and blended families — children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, cousins — and I will be eternally grateful to the D.C. government elected officials, and also remain hopeful that the elected officials in my home state will follow the example set in our national capital.”
When Garner and Holmes boast of their blended, extended family, they are not talking idly. Garner is the mother of four, grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of three, the eldest of whom is now 3 years old.
Holmes considers Garner’s offspring hers too.
The giddiness and hoopla from a year ago now long since subsided, how do they assess what marriage equality means to them today? Once they were married, “there’s been a big difference at work,” says Holmes, who has worked as a manager in the federal government’s GAO (now called the Government Accountability office) for 34 years. “It shows up in how people greet me and treat me, the respect and regard from others.”
Statistics from D.C. Superior Court’s Marriage Bureau show a surge of weddings in the District, more than double the number from the prior year, March 2009-March 2010.
Those numbers — 6,604 marriages in D.C. from March 3, 2010, when the same-gender right to marry, enacted in December 2009, went into effect, through March 2, 2011 — vaulted over the number from the prior year, when only 3,101 couples applied for marriage licenses in D.C.
The city doesn’t track how many straight couples there were versus same-sex couples, but the court attributes the spike to the change in the marriage law.
Speaking last week at an event held to celebrate enactment of the new law, Mayor Vincent Gray said he “was thrilled to hear this,” adding that the new law “has been so smoothly implemented,” even though he acknowledged that he has lost some friends due to his own outspoken support for the measure when he served on City Council until being elected mayor in November. But he said that was a price he willingly has paid for doing what he called “the right thing.”
As for the possibility that the new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives might still seek to roll back the new law, the mayor said he was aware it could happen, but “I haven’t heard anything yet” about it.
And so the dust in D.C. has settled. And in the wake of the new law have come party planners and experts in wedding officiating like Deborah Cummings-Thomas and Sheila Alexander-Reid, both licensed and ordained to perform weddings, lesbians and partners since May of last year in Marry Me in D.C., which helps connect people wanting to marry in D.C. with what Cummings-Thomas calls “our network of gay and gay-friendly service providers who celebrate, not just tolerate them on their wedding day.”
On March 19, Marry Me in D.C. hosts a “Marriage Equality Wedding Expo,” from noon to 4 p.m. at the Washington Court Hotel, 525 New Jersey Avenue NW, on Capitol Hill. Tickets are $10 in advance or $15 at the door. Advance registration is encouraged at marrymeindc.com.
Robin McGehee (Blade file photo by Michael Key)
Marriage not a happy ending for all
With the legalization of same-sex marriage comes, inevitably, gay divorce.
Robin McGehee has felt its sting. The 37-year-old California resident and lesbian who decided to wed in June 2008, says she decided to un-wed a year and a month later, in July 2009. She and her partner took their vows under California’s same-sex marriage law prior to its being overturned by the state’s voters in November 2008 ballot when Proposition 8 passed. Their marriage remained valid however under a grandfather clause.
But it fell victim nevertheless, in an ironic way, says McGehee, since it was the fight against its passage that brought her into the fray to oppose Prop 8.
After getting iced out of volunteer work at her son’s Catholic school, she became a gay activist and helped organize the National Equality March, held in Washington in October 2009. As a newly mobilized activist, she says, she was “on the road almost every weekend for months at a time.”
And that activism led her away, she acknowledges, from placing a focus needed at home, to repair the fraying ties that bound her with her spouse, a woman 19 years her senior, with whom she had joined in 2001 in a domestic partnership contract under California law. They had been a couple for 11 years at the time of their wedding.
She says she “met someone on the road, someone I connected with emotionally.” Basically, she admits, “I fell for someone else.” They have now been together for a year and a half, and they face, McGehee says, “the same challenges,” because now she is also working a second job, as executive director of GetEqual, a group that focuses on using non-violent civil disobedience to advance LGBT rights.
As for her former spouse, they remain in constructive discussions over dual issues, caught up still in legal proceedings over the terms of ending both their marriage and their earlier domestic partnership. Closure should come, she expects, “any time now.”
Rehoboth Beach
Officials raise troubling concerns about Rehoboth mayoral candidate Suzanne Goode
Homophobic emails, ‘aggressive’ behavior cited: ‘It just seems to be getting worse’
As Rehoboth Beach voters prepare to elect a new mayor on Aug. 8, some city officials and local residents are raising new concerns about the behavior of City Commissioner and mayoral candidate Suzanne Goode.
In addition to a history of troubling emails in which she has used homophobic language and criticized the city’s rainbow crosswalks, Goode is being accused of inappropriate behavior by a neighbor and a fellow Commissioner related to a dispute on the Nextdoor online platform.
The Blade spoke to City Manager Taylour Tedder, Commissioner Chris Galanty, and others about Goode’s behavior during her time as commissioner.
Goode was elected commissioner in August 2024. Fellow commissioner Susan Stewart, who is also running for mayor, criticized Goode’s behavior in a March 9, 2026 meeting, bringing up emails outlining Goode’s offensive conduct toward city staff.
In one email, Goode wrote to Rehoboth Beach City Solicitor Lisa Borin Ogden: “I am sorry that I learned from Google when you were first interviewed [in the] spring [of] 2025 that you are Jewish. My opinion of my fellow Jews declined significantly thanks to you since last summer. Actually would have thought you would have more compassion than the average person, based on your late brother. Except you don’t. I am sick of your haughty attitude toward me.”
In other emails, Goode questions why city officials encouraged CAMP Rehoboth and Clear Space Theatre to apply for grant funds. She has denigrated both institutions, referring to CAMP as a “questionable non-profit” and Clear Space as “second rate” with a “woke, drag queen bent” at times. She accuses Rehoboth’s LGBTQ community of displaying “their sex lives in public view” and fears physical violence from LGBTQ activists.
Goode disputed the claims and called for the city to remove Stewart’s remarks from the website.
The following statements were included in the emails sent by Goode:
• “Gays and theatre aficionados can donate as much as they like to these pet causes. Some taxpayers think the theatre is second-rate as community theatres go, and many dislike the RB emphasis on LGBTQ when heterosexuals don’t demand equivalent display of their sex lives in public view.”
• “Just because the LGBTQ community feels oppressed and discriminated against, that doesn’t mean that those who identify as LGBTQ are better able to recognize racial discrimination than someone like myself. It might surprise some of you to learn that I briefly dated an African American fellow college student.”
• “A performing arts and LGBTQ agenda isn’t appropriate for BOC spending when the city faces over $60M in debt.”
• “But there are some folks in town, who ironically have to remain in the closet (conservatives now have to do what gays had to do in the 20th century — ah, the irony) who object to the woke, drag queen bent of Clear Space at times. They have confided this in me, and thanked me for fighting for their tax dollars. Maybe I will regret speaking up, as some LGBTQ activist will attack me physically, even though I am a complete supporter of gay rights, and have as many gay male friends as female friends now that I live in RB with a large gay population.”
In the emails, Goode also referred to City Manager Tedder as “the mayor’s whore.”
Stewart told the Blade that the troubling behavior has since escalated.
Commissioner Chris Galanty spoke to the Blade about Goode’s behavior as commissioner and her issues with the rainbow crosswalks in town.
“Suzanne told me on two separate occasions that she didn’t like the rainbow crosswalks, and she said that she didn’t understand why they had to exist, and she didn’t understand why gay people had to advertise their sexuality, and she said straight people don’t have to do that.”
Galanty said that when he challenged her on this, she “moved very quickly to another topic.” He said that she has now shifted her perspective and is more concerned that the rainbow crosswalks are an issue of labor costs.
Goode told the Blade that, “Unfortunately, the rainbow crosswalks have potentially reduced the upkeep of the conventional crosswalks. But the rainbow crosswalks are attractive in and of themselves, and they do add to our recognition of Rehoboth’s longstanding status as a gay-friendly town.”
Accusations of “aggressive” behavior by Goode aren’t limited to emails. Last summer, Goode came to the home of Diana Jones, a property owner in Rehoboth Beach who is a neighbor of Galanty’s. Jones spoke to the Blade to share her experience with Goode.
Jones is active on Nextdoor, an online social network for neighborhoods. She said that she got involved on the platform during the time of the commissioners election last summer, in which her neighbor, Chris Galanty, was elected as commissioner.
Jones said that she made posts supporting Galanty. She said that someone posted a link of a lawsuit that involved Goode’s husband, Jeffrey Goode, who lost his race for commissioner last summer. Jones said that she reposted the link after it was taken down.
Jones said that the lawsuit was “very relevant to somebody who is running for city commissioner.”
Jones said that Suzanne Goode showed up at her house as a result of the post. Jones was out walking her dog nearby so Goode briefly spoke with Jones’s husband who was home.
“She came over to my house because she was saying I was doxing him,” said Jones. Jones said that Goode then found her as she was walking her dog and tried to talk to her about her Nextdoor posts, saying that she “brought up a very painful time in her life.”
Jones said that she has not had any communication with Goode since.
When asked for comment on the situation with Jones, Goode responded by saying “Diana Jones’s behavior toward me was despicable, and the way she has chosen to give her side of the story to news media says more about her than it will ever say about me.”
Galanty told the Blade that Goode came to his house in late June of this year when he was not home. She then called him about Jones.
“She relayed to me that she was having a disagreement with my neighbor on the Nextdoor platform, and she asked me to intercede with the neighbor,” said Galanty. “She said, ‘Please speak to her because I am frustrated with what she is saying. She needs to stop, and you need to say something to her.'”
Galanty said that Goode called him four times and texted him 32 times in the span of three and a half hours the next day.
Galanty said that he responded the next day, telling her that her behavior was inappropriate.
“Eventually it took a couple of weeks, but she apologized in her own way. She just said we just need to let it go.”
From his perspective as commissioner, Galanty said, “She likes to re-litigate things that have happened, six months ago, nine months ago. She likes to rehash issues that are in the past.”
“She can be really aggressive, and people are just really turned off by her,” said Galanty.
Tedder, who has accused Goode of creating a “hostile work environment,” told the Blade about his experiences working with Goode.
“She does not support the staff, and constantly tells us to resign,” said Tedder.
Tedder said that Goode texted City Solicitor Ogden at 7:45 a.m. on a Saturday, telling her to resign.
“Sometimes she does have good ideas. It’s just it gets so lost in these pages and pages of emails and thousands of emails that she sends,” said Tedder.
In regards to Goode’s behavior, Tedder said it has been going on since the beginning. “It just seems to be getting worse.”
Maryland
Advocates for trans students urge Md. to fight White House threats
Four school districts under federal investigation
By JESSICA CALEFATI | Allies of transgender children are urging state education officials to fight back against the Trump-Vance administration, which has threatened to punish a growing number of Maryland school districts over local policies that affirm students’ gender identities.
The advocates testified Tuesday morning before the Maryland State Board of Education — one day after the U.S. Education and Justice departments alleged that Anne Arundel County’s school system violated federal student privacy law by withholding a student’s gender identity from their parents. A spokesperson for the district said Monday legal counsel had not yet reviewed the claims and that the district had no further comment.
School districts in Prince George’s, Montgomery, and Frederick Counties were already under investigation for allegedly violating Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination. The federal government last month threatened to revoke funding from the districts because they allow trans students to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their identities.
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
Maryland
White House threatens Anne Arundel schools over gender identity policy
District faces possible legal action or loss of federal funding
By JESSICA CALEFATI | The Trump-Vance administration on Monday threatened to punish Anne Arundel County’s school system with legal action or the loss of federal funding for allegedly withholding information about a student’s gender identity and transition from the child’s parents.
The U.S. Education and Justice Departments together determined that the suburban Maryland district treats students’ gender identities as confidential medical information that cannot be shared with parents, in violation of federal student privacy law, according to a news release. A federal lawsuit filed against the district earlier this month made similar claims.
“As a mother and a grandmother, it is unconscionable that any school district would hide the most sensitive information about children in their care from their own parents,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement. “This is not only an affront to basic moral principles, but also to parents’ rights under federal law.”
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
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