Local
‘Strategic blunder of monstrous proportions’
Insiders rip HRC, Gill decision to cancel Maryland vote on marriage
(Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
The decision to cancel a March 11 vote on a same-sex marriage bill in the Maryland House of Delegates was a mistake that could hurt rather than help the chances for passing the bill within the next several years, according to Maryland-based advocates who lobbied for the bill.
The advocates who expressed this view, some of whom spoke on condition that they not be identified, said at least four national LGBT groups put pressure on lawmakers through Equality Maryland, the statewide LGBT group, to withdraw the bill rather than risk a losing vote.
One of the advocates called the national groups and their political operatives who came to Maryland to lobby for the bill well intentioned but unfamiliar with the nuances and “rhythms” of the Maryland Legislature.
“I think this was a strategic blunder of monstrous proportions,” said Mark McLaurin, political director of Maryland’s Local 500 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which lobbied for the bill.
McLaurin, a gay man who has lobbied the Maryland Legislature for progressive causes for more than 15 years, said many insiders familiar with the legislature don’t think a losing vote by a close margin would hurt the bill’s chances in the future.
On the other hand, McLaurin and others who favored taking a vote on the marriage bill said the legislature has a history of not taking up highly controversial bills two years in a row. McLaurin said he fears that the bill won’t come back for a vote until 2015, even though Speaker of the House Michael Busch (D-Anne Arundel County) said he would try to bring the measure back in 2012.
Busch said supporters appeared to fall just a few votes shy of the 71 votes needed to pass the bill in the 141-member House. However, he said wavering delegates might have chosen to vote “yes,” raising the possibility that the bill could have passed.
Several knowledgeable sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed with McLaurin’s assessment.
“Gill and HRC decided it was detrimental to the larger movement to have the vote go down,” one source said. “Gays and lesbians in Maryland deserved a debate and a vote on legislation that we waited years for.”
Another source criticized Busch’s handling of the bill.
Maryland House of Delegates Majority Leader Kumar Barve and Maryland House Speaker Michael Busch (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
“[Speaker Michael] Busch could have squeezed harder but didn’t. This is a new House of Delegates and this man didn’t bother to take the temperature of the new House of Delegates. I was shocked. I thought House leadership was more strategic, intelligent and powerful than this and it all evaporated.
“God forbid we put our swing vote Democrats on the line to take a vote for our families. Or maybe the Speaker has lost control of his chamber.”
There was also criticism of Gov. Martin O’Malley, who the sources faulted for not taking a more public stand in support of the bill.
“O’Malley stopped by Friday for a photo op with marriage supporters,” one source said. “What a vacant gesture at the 11th hour. You couldn’t write an op-ed the week before?”
The Civil Marriage Protection Act won approval in the Maryland Senate earlier this month. It died last Friday for at least this year when the House of Delegates approved by voice vote a motion to send it back to committee.
All of the bill’s sponsors, including seven openly gay members of the House of Delegates, appeared to support the motion, a development that stunned LGBT activists watching the proceedings from the visitors’ gallery.
The motion to recommit the bill to committee came after supporters and opponents engaged in an emotional, two-and-a-half hour debate over the bill. Most of the activists for and against the bill watching from the galleries didn’t know that the bill’s sponsors had decided beforehand to cancel the vote.
McLaurin said he learned from those attending strategy meetings that the eight-member LGBT Caucus of the legislature was divided over whether to postpone the House vote.
The caucus includes Sen. Richard Madaleno (D-Montgomery County), and House of Delegates members Maggie McIntosh, Mary Washington, and Luke Clippinger, each Democrats from Baltimore; Heather Mizeur, Bonnie Cullison, and Anne Kaiser, each Democrats from Montgomery County; and Peter Murphy, a Democrat from Charles County.
Spokespersons for Equality Maryland, the statewide LGBT group that led the lobbying effort for the bill, and officials with the national groups Freedom to Marry and Human Rights Campaign defended the decision to withdraw the bill.
They said the decision was made jointly by the bill’s lead sponsors, including the one gay male and six lesbian delegates, who determined it was better to postpone the vote than to risk a losing vote, which they said would be perceived as a defeat.
“This is a strategic effort to give ourselves more time to make the case and win,” said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry. “And all of us believe we can win. It’s just a matter of nailing down the votes and getting there.”
HRC spokesperson Fred Sainz said the decision to cancel the vote came after it became clear that supporters didn’t have the votes to pass it.
“This was a shared decision by all the stakeholders – Equality Maryland, the state’s LGBT Caucus, Gill Action, Freedom to Marry, and HRC,” he said. “It was the consensus belief that the best way to win marriage in Maryland was by a delay and not by losing a vote.”
Officials with Gill Action, a philanthropic group founded by gay businessman Tim Gill in Colorado that funds LGBT rights causes, did not return a call seeking comment.
An official with the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, Robin Brand, also pushed for postponing the vote, activists familiar with the legislature said. Brand told the Blade she discussed the issue with the gay delegates in the Victory Fund’s role of working with openly gay elected officials. She said she left it up to them to decide on whether or not a vote should be taken.
McLaurin, a former member of the Equality Maryland board, said the advocates who wanted the vote to go forward believe it would have been worth “a roll of the dice” to determine if supporters had the 71 votes needed to pass the bill.
“In the worst case scenario we would have come up two or three votes short,” he said. “And I think that a loss by two or three votes would be much more galvanizing to the community of supporters that we’re going to need to rally and accomplish this goal.”
McLaurin added, “Either way it was going to get billed as a failure. I’d rather have on record who’s with us and who’s against us.”
Another former Equality Maryland board member, David Toth, wrote in a Facebook posting that the group was deleting messages left on its own Facebook page that were posted by a large number of supporters who expressed outrage over the decision not to have a vote on the bill.
“Anyone who is asking questions of EqMD or its staff is having their posts deleted like crazy,” he wrote. “After donating thousands of dollars and working on the board for over six years I simply find this appalling.”
Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry (Blade photo by Michael Key)
Wolfson of Freedom to Marry cautioned that a public fight over the decision not to have a vote could hurt efforts to bring the bill back next year.
“This is a temporary pause in the voting and it’s not a pause in the work,” he said. “So we don’t need finger pointing and recriminations, we need redoubling the effort to win.”
Although Equality Maryland, led by executive director, Morgan Meneses-Sheets, was billed as the lead organization calling the shots, insiders say field workers from the national groups like Freedom to Marry, HRC and Gill Action Fund far outnumbered Equality Maryland’s staffers working the halls of the legislature in Annapolis.
It was the national groups, rather than Equality Maryland, that had the ear of supportive lawmakers, including the LGBT Caucus members, during the days leading up to the scheduled vote on the bill in the House, McLaurin and other insiders said.
In a March 10 e-mail sent to LGBT Caucus members and other lawmakers supporting the bill, representatives of Freedom to Marry, Gill Action and HRC urged the lawmakers to postpone the vote.
“With the rights of so many Marylanders on the line, we wanted to flag our serious concern about going to a floor vote tomorrow when it’s not been confirmed we have 71 votes,” the e-mail says. “Various counts have us at 69 or 70 but not 71 or beyond.”
The e-mail adds, “The decision on whether to ask the leadership to move forward or postpone the vote rests with our openly LGBT legislators and other sponsors (in consultation with EQMD) who know their colleagues far better than we do, and who have so courageously led the way.”
The e-mail was signed by Bill Smith and Sarah Vaughn, national political director and deputy political director of Gill Action; Marty Rouse and Sultan Shakir, the lead officials at HRC’s field office; and Marc Solomon, national campaign director for Freedom to Marry.
In a separate e-mail sent the next day to most of the same people, HRC’s Rouse warned of serious political consequences if a vote on the marriage bill were to be taken.
“I plead with you to please delay this vote,” he said. “It would be devastating to suffer a huge loss. There will be vitriol and pain that may take years to soothe.”
Rouse said he also feared that a losing vote would damage relationships between the LGBT community and lawmakers who voted against the bill.
“I am sure that relationships are already frayed, but, if there are impassioned speeches on the floor, and tears shed, and we still lose, those relationships will be damaged even more. The air in the chamber will be toxic for months if not years,” he said.
McLaurin said at least some of the strained relations that Rouse mentioned have already come about, in part, because of the impassioned debate on the House floor that took place on March 11. He said he was puzzled over why those making the decision chose to have the debate and not go one step further to allow a vote to take place.
According to McLaurin, Speaker Busch left it up to the bill’s supporters and Equality Maryland to make the final call on whether to have a vote.
“From what I’ve been told by people in the know, he said, ‘What’s your pleasure? I’ll defer to you.’”
“And so from my understanding, there was a lot of pressure from the national organizations not to pull the trigger on a vote unless you are certain you had 71 votes because apparently it would demoralize our [same-sex marriage] efforts in Rhode Island and New York,” said McLaurin.
“I say poppycock. Pulling the bill from the floor is a defeat every bit as much as a losing vote is,” he said.
McLaurin said he thinks some of the national LGBT officials pushing for a delay in the Maryland vote had a fundamental misunderstanding that the Maryland House of Delegates would act like the New York State Senate acted in 2008, when it defeated a same-same marriage bill by a 38-24 vote.
Most supporters of the New York bill thought the vote would be much closer. Gay State Sen. Tom Duane (D-Manhattan) said he believed he had lined up enough votes to pass the measure. But when a roll-call vote started, a few wavering senators voted no, causing what observers called a cascading or “avalanche” effect, prompting others whose support was shaky to vote no.
McLaurin said such a development could not happen in the Maryland House of Delegates because all votes are cast electronically at the same time. No one knows who votes which way until the final tally is released seconds after the votes are cast. Pages on the floor then distribute a printout showing how the delegates voted.
“That’s why one of my underlying themes is you’ve got to know the Maryland Legislature,” he said. “We can’t have national groups fly in from L.A. and New York and train in from D.C. and conduct this campaign because we’re fundamentally different. We’re a different body.”
If some of the national group representatives had been in Annapolis at the time the legislature debated a highly contentious bill to repeal the state’s death penalty in 2007 or during several abortion related debates in the 1990s they would have seen a great reluctance to revisit these issues a second time, McLaurin said.
“What I fear is next year there’s just not going to be the stomach to do this again,” he said in discussing the marriage bill. “If you listened to the debate on the floor, everyone spoke of how deeply divided the House was, how deeply emotional this was, how it frayed relationships, how people weren’t speaking to each other.
“Do you think they will have the stomach to do that again next year without any reasonable expectation of a different outcome because they’re still pitching the same ideas to the same audience?”
“No one would be happier to be wrong about this than me,” he said. “But I just don’t think that I am. And I know I’m not alone. Some of the chief strategists behind this bill feel the same way I do.”
Wolfson of Freedom to Marry disputes that assessment.
“Anyone who is making comments to you or to anyone else suggesting that somehow this is over and it’s now a cause for finger pointing has failed to understand that it’s not over,” he said. “We’re in the midst of the work and we all should keep our eye on the prize of doing what we can to round up the last few votes and win.”
District of Columbia
Pride faith services in Washington, D.C.
Almost half of all LGBTQ adults in the U.S. are religious
Are you an LGBTQ person of faith or someone exploring spirituality? It is more common than people realize. According to a Williams Institute study published in October 2020, almost half of all LGBTQ adults in the United States are religious. This may seem counterintuitive as any LGBTQ people have complicated relationships with faith because of very real histories of abuse, trauma, and violence.
This violence still continues in the United States, especially following the Supreme Court’s March 2026 decision in Chiles v. Salazar, who ruled Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors violates the First Amendment, but not everyone has encountered this violence, nor do people who have faced it, separate themselves completely from religion. Many people may seek out affirming faith traditions which are prevalent in the DMV area.
For individuals seeking out faith services during Pride 2026, please check out the list below, which will be updated as more events are publicized.
Memorial Service for SaVanna Wanzer
May 17th at 1 pm
Westminster Presbyterian Church (400 I St SW, Washington, DC 20024)
Westminster Presbyterian will host a celebration of life for legendary DC trans rights activist and founder of DC Trans Pride and Black Trans Pride SaVanna Wanzer who was a long-time member of the church. Live music will begin at 12:15 pm before the start of the memorial service. The service will be livestreamed on the Westminster DC Facebook page. A meal will follow the Sunday service.
There will also be a celebratory vigil held on Saturday, May 16th from 6:30-8 pm for friends and family at the church led by LGBTQ organizer Raycee Pendarvis.
May 23th at 11 am
Downtown Westin (999 9th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001)
This intimate conversation is hosted by Janeé Lee, founder of Queer Ministry, between Black trans and queer people who are surviving religious trauma and navigating their relationship with the church. The workshop, hosted as part of Trans Pride DC, is a chance for people to share their stories at the intersection of queerness and spirituality and to walk away with a spiritual healing guide with affirming scriptures and inclusive theology.
DC Black Pride Worship Service
May 24th at 10 am
Remnant Christian Center (120 West Hampton Avenue, Capitol Heights, MD)
Hosted by The Community Church of Washington DC-UCC, this service will feature speakers and sessions on Black queer faith and unity, including host and speaker Robert D. Wise Jr. for a powerful Pentecost Unity Service. Attendees are encouraged to come dressed in and white.
June 5th at 7 pm
Sixth & I (600 I Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001)
Join Rabbi Jenna will be leading an inclusive, musical service celebrating the diversity of Jewish life in Washington, DC. Happy Hour, which is limited to people 21 and older, will start at 6 pm. The service will start at 7 pm, with dinner at 8:15 pm. The service is free but registration is required, and the kosher-style pescatarian meal does cost money. Register online here.
June 14th at 5 pm
Black Cat (1811 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20009)
Muslim Pride is a community-led and funded grassroots performance series centering queer and trans Muslim artists through music, drag and dance. The series was originally founded in 2020 as a way to create affirming spaces where faith, culture, and queerness can coexist. This year’s series features Mercedes Iman Diamond. This year, Muslim Pride expands to Washington, DC, New York City, and Los Angeles. Buy tickets here.
Pride Celebrations and Sunday Worship Service
June 14th all day
Riverside Baptist Church (699 Maine Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20024)
Join Riverside Baptist Church for a day-long Pride celebration beginning with Pride Weekend/Musical Theater Sunday worship service at 10 am. Later that morning and early afternoon, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm, the church will be hosting a Pride Pageant, a technicolor celebration featuring a runway showcase, line dancing, food, and refreshments.
June 22nd at 7 pm
St. Mark’s Episocpal Church (301 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003)
Join this interfaith service celebrating affirming faith traditions and intertradition dialogue hosted by queer and trans faith leaders. The interfaith service has been hosted annually for over 40 years, and first began back in the 1980s with faith leaders and queer people of faith coming together to mourn and pray at the site of the AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall. Learn more about the history of the interfaith service here.
June 23rd at 6 pm
Holy Trinity Catholic Church (3513 N St NW, Washington, DC 20007)
Holy Trinity will be hosting its 6th annual Pride Mass. After its debut this past summer, the Pride Mass choir will be singing at the Pride Mass in June, and following the Mass, there will be an annual reception with ice cream and other goodies. Learn more about attending the reception and Holy Trinity’s LGBTQ+ Ministry.
Delaware
Blade Foundation awards 9th journalism fellowship to AU student
Thomas Weaverling will cover LGBTQ issues in Delaware this summer
The Blade Foundation this week announced the recipient of its 2026 Steve Elkins Memorial Fellowship in Journalism is Thomas Weaverling, who is scheduled to graduate from American University with a degree in communication, language, and culture this month.
He will cover issues of interest to Delaware’s LGBTQ community for 12 weeks this summer. The fellowship is named in honor of Steve Elkins, a journalist and co-founder of the CAMP Rehoboth LGBTQ community center. Elkins served as editor of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth for many years as well as executive director of the center before his death in March of 2018.
Kevin Naff, editor of the Blade, welcomed Weaverling and will introduce him to the Rehoboth Beach community at an event this week.
“If the applicants to our fellowship program are any indication, the future of American journalism is very bright,” Naff said. “Thomas stood out for his broad skillset and strong writing and reporting skills and we’re all excited to work with him this summer.”
Weaverling is the ninth recipient of the Elkins fellowship, which is funded by community donations at the Blade Foundation’s annual fundraiser in Rehoboth Beach. This year’s event is scheduled for May 15 at Diego’s and includes a generous sponsorship from Realtor Justin Noble and remarks from Ashley Biden accepting an award on behalf of her brother Beau Biden for his LGBTQ advocacy while serving as Delaware’s attorney general.
“I am incredibly honored and excited to receive the Steve Elkins Memorial Fellowship in Journalism,” Weaverling said. “Writing for the Washington Blade has been a goal of mine since I began my freshman year of college and I could not be more thrilled to have this opportunity. I am looking forward to getting to know the LGBTQ+ community in Rehoboth Beach and throughout Delaware.”
Weaverling is graduating cum laude with a concentration in journalism and Spanish. He studied in Spain in 2025 and worked in the office of Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) as a policy intern.
For more information on the fellowship program or to donate, visit bladefoundation.org.
District of Columbia
GLAA releases ratings for 18 candidates running for D.C. mayor, Council, AG
Mayoral contender Janeese Lewis Geroge among those receiving highest score
D.C. mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George, a Democrat, is among just four candidates to receive the highest rating score of +10 from GLAA D.C. who are competing in the city’s June 16 primary election.
GLAA, formally known as the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, has rated candidates for public office in D.C. since the 1970s. It rated 18 of the 36 candidates on this year’s primary ballot for mayor, D.C. Council, and D.C. attorney general based on its policy of only rating candidates who return a GLAA questionnaire asking for their positions on a wide range of issues, most of which are not LGBTQ-specific.
Among the candidates who did not return the questionnaire and thus did not receive a rating, according to GLAA, was Democratic mayoral contender Kenyan McDuffie, who along with Lewis George, is considered by political observers to be one of the two leading mayoral candidates running in the Democratic primary.
GLAA President Benjamin Brooks said that when the McDuffie campaign learned that GLAA announced it had released its candidate ratings and McDuffie was not rated because a questionnaire from him was not received a McDuffie campaign worker contacted GLAA. Brooks said the campaign worker told him they didn’t initially believe they received the questionnaire but they discovered this week that it landed in the spam folder of the campaign’s email account.
Brooks told the Washington Blade he informed the campaign worker it was too late for GLAA to issue a rating for McDuffie since the submission deadline for all candidates had passed. But he said GLAA will allow McDuffie to submit a completed questionnaire that it will post on its website along with the questionnaire responses of the other candidates who submitted them to GLAA.
McDuffie’s campaign in a statement to the Blade said the GLAA questionnaire “had gone to a spam folder tied to a campaign email address and was never seen by the campaign.”
“Kenyan McDuffie has long been proud of his record of standing with DC’s LGBTQ+ community,” reads the statement. “He has completed the GLAA questionnaire in every election since his first campaign and, in 2022, earned one of the top two ratings among candidates for the two at-large Council seats that election cycle.”
“Kenyan remains committed to fighting for equality, dignity, safety, and opportunity for LGBTQ+ residents across all eight wards, and our campaign welcomes the opportunity to continue engaging with GLAA and the LGBTQ+ community throughout this race,” it continues.
Lewis George and McDuffie, who each have long records of support for the LGBTQ community, are among a total of eight candidates running for mayor on the June 16 primary ballot: seven Democrats and one Statehood Green Party candidate. In addition to Lewis George, GLAA rated just two other mayoral candidates. Rini Sampath, a Democrat who self identifies as queer, received a +6.5 rating, and Ernest E. Johnson, also a Democrat, received a +4.5 rating
Under the GLAA rating system, candidate ratings range from a +10, the highest score, to a -10, the lowest possible score. In its ratings for the June 16 primary, the lowest score issued was +4.5. GLAA said in a statement that each of the 18 candidates it rated expressed strong support for LGBTQ-related issues in their questionnaire responses, indicating that the overall rating scores reflect the candidates’ positions on mostly non-LGBTQ-specific issues.
The three other candidates who received a +10 GLAA rating are each running as Democrats for the Ward 1 D.C. Council seat. They include gay candidate Miguel Trindade Deramo; Aparna Raj, who identifies as bisexual; and LGBTQ ally Rashida Brown. The only other Ward 1 candidate rated by GLAA is LGBTQ ally Terry Lynch, who received a +5.5 rating.
Ward 5 D.C. Councilmember Zachary Parker, the Council’s only gay member who is facing two opponents in the Democratic primary, received a +7 GLAA rating. The two challengers did not return the questionnaire and were not rated.
“In seven out of 10 of our priorities, every candidate indicated agreement,” GLAA said in its statement to the Washington Blade in referring to the candidates it rated. “Total consensus on core issues signals that whomever is elected to Council and mayor, we should expect to hold our elected officials accountable to our goals of protecting home rule, resisting federal overreach, advancing transgender healthcare rights, and eliminating chronic homelessness in the District,” the statement says.
“While candidates agree on the basics, they distinguish themselves in the depth and creativity in their responses, and their record on the issues,” according to the statement, which adds that candidates’ full questionnaire responses and ratings can be accessed on the GLAA website, glaa.org.
Like past election years, GLAA does not rate candidates running for the D.C. Congressional Delegate seat or the so-called “shadow” U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate seats.
With the exception of one question asking about transgender rights, none of the other nine of the 10 questionnaire questions are LGBTQ-specific. But most of the questions mention that LGBTQ people are impacted by the issues being raised, such as affordable housing, federal government intrusion into D.C. home rule, and access to healthcare and public benefits for low-income residents.
One of the questions asks candidates if they support decriminalization of sex work in D.C. among consenting adults, which GLAA supports. Lewis George is among the candidates who said they do not support sex work decriminalization at this time. The other two mayoral candidates that GLAA rated, Sampath and Johnson, said they support sex work decriminalization.
In the race for D.C. attorney general, GLAA issued a rating for just one of the three candidates running: Republican challenger Manuel Rivera, who received a +4.5 rating. Incumbent Democrat Brian Schwalb and Democratic challenger J.P. Szymkowicz were not rated because they didn’t return the questionnaire.
D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson (D), who is running unopposed in the primary, received a +6.5 rating. Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, who is facing three Democratic challengers in the primary and who is a longtime LGBTQ ally, received a +6.5 rating.
In the special election to fill the at-large D.C. Council seat vacated by the resignation of then-Independent Councilmember McDuffie to enable him to run for mayor as a Democrat, GLAA has rated two of the three Independent candidates competing for the seat. Elissa Silverman received a +5.75 rating, and Doni Crawford received a +6.5 rating.
Finally, in the At-Large D.C. Council race GLAA issued ratings for five of the 11 candidates running in the primary, each of whom are Democrats. Oye Owolewa received a +9; Lisa Raymond, +7.5; Dwight Davis, +6.5; Dyana N.M. Forester, +6; and Fred Hill, +6.6.
The full list of GLAA-rated candidates and their detailed questionnaire responses can be accessed at glaa.org.
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