Local
Gender Rights Maryland launches
Trans group gets rolling; Equality MD announces strategic plan
‘There’s never been a trans-focused politically directed organization in Maryland before,’ said Dana Beyer of Gender Rights Maryland. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
Things continue percolating for LGBT activist groups in Maryland. Gender Rights Maryland, a new group dedicated to getting trans protection legislation passed, had its launch events last weekend. And this week Equality Maryland announced a strategic plan for how it plans to regroup and rebuild for the rest of the year.
On June 23, Gender Rights held a gathering at Blair Mansion Inn Restaurant in Silver Spring. According to Dana Beyer, the group’s volunteer executive director, about 60 attended.
“It was kicked off with a lot of enthusiasm,” Beyer said. “There was a nice broad spectrum of people there and it was very inspiring. There was definitely a sense that this was a historic event. There’s never been a trans-focused politically directed organization in Maryland before.”
Last weekend, the group’s organizers met with leaders from national LGBT groups based in Washington at the DoubleTree Hotel on Rhode Island Avenue, then on Sunday the board held its first meeting. The organization has a 16-member board but hopes to expand to 18.
Beyer, who co-founded the organization with four other transgender Maryland residents, says the group has been a dream of hers for years. A number of considerations, Beyer says, factored into the timing of the group’s formation — a public accommodations bill getting further along toward passage (though it ultimately fell one vote shy of what it needed) in the state’s most recent legislative session and the national media attention that a video received showing Maryland resident Chrissy Lee Polis getting beaten in a McDonald’s restaurant in April. Beyer says many in the group have assisted Polis in getting help. They say she’s doing well. Polis attended Baltimore Pride two weekends ago.
Also last week, Equality Maryland announced a six-month “strategic action plan” that the organization’s remaining five board members are enacting. The organization is in the midst of “a thorough self-evaluation” the release said. Recent months have been tumultuous for the group. Former director Morgan Meneses-Sheets was fired in April. Two LGBT bills — one for same-sex marriage and another for transgender accommodations — failed earlier this year. The board is about half the size it was six months ago. Only one person remains on staff, an office manager. Other employees of recent months had contracts that were not renewed, the board said. After June 30, the organization will have two staff members — an office manager and a gender identity field organizer — and plans to retain Lynne Bowman as a contractor and to add Andy Szekeres as a fundraising consultant.
“Over the past two months, the remaining members of the board have undertaken a thorough process of self-evaluation,” said Patrick Wojahn, chair of Equality Maryland Foundation, which leads the organization’s education efforts, in the announcement. “Through individual conversations, over a dozen Listening Tour stops and more than 1,200 responses to our online survey, we have actively gathered input about what people want to see from their statewide equality organization. We have coupled that input with the results of a comprehensive internal review and developed a strong six-month plan that will allow Equality Maryland to become the organization it must be in order to achieve legislative and cultural equality in our state.”
Board Chair Lisa Polyak mentioned several other goals, such as a “major” reconstitution of the board with “more diversity and a bigger skills set,” the hiring — tentatively slated for fall — of a new executive director with a new job description, financial stabilization and “more input from the community about what our mission should be.”
Polyak said board members have left for a variety of reasons. At least one resigned over the handling of Meneses-Sheets’ employment but another, Scott Davenport, moved out of the area and another took on more responsibilities at his job, Polyak said.
“It wouldn’t be fair to characterize it as any one thing,” she said.
Polyak said the formation of Gender Rights Maryland is a “natural evolution for the trans community” and cited other states, such as New York and Massachusetts, that have both state LGBT organizations and separate transgender political groups.
“I think it’s a great thing,” she said. “It ultimately gives more power to the issue of gender identity concerns, which, frankly, just based on numbers, is numerically small. It makes sense that they might have their own organization for protections. … We look forward to working with them.”
Did the Equality Maryland upheaval contribute to the formation of Gender Rights Maryland? Beyer, a former Equality Maryland board member, said “nothing in politics or life is ever completely isolated” and that it’s hard to quantify to what degree one series of events affected her group’s launch.
“Our desire, willingness and determination to start really had nothing to do with Equality Maryland,” she said. “But that’s not to say that the vacuum left by having no trans board members there and the organization having spent most of its political capital on marriage didn’t provide an opening for us to take off and grow … I think it was the time. The time was now for us to grow, regardless of the state of Equality Maryland.”
The group’s main priority is to pass a comprehensive gender identity anti-discrimination bill by the end of the 2012 legislative session.
And has the passage of same-sex marriage in New York cast this year’s Maryland failings in a harsher light? Gov. Martin O’Malley told regional news outlets a stronger stance on his part in support would “have kicked it into the gutter of partisan division.”
Polyak doesn’t buy it.
“When you see executive leadership that is fully invested in the passage of any law, the chances of its success are much higher and that’s what we saw in New York. Gov. Cuomo used his policy tools as well as the bully pulpit and in closed door meetings admonished senators that our families and our relationships are just as valid. He spoke from the heart and there’s no substitute for authenticity. If Gov. O’Malley would show similar heart when he speaks of the commitment to this bill that he says he possesses, if he really put his heart into it and made it part of his legislative package for 2012, it would pass. It’s not a partisan issue. Sen. Allan Kittleman, a Republican, has spoken very movingly of his commitment from a civil rights standpoint and we believe there are those of a similar mind in the House of Delegates.”
Maryland
Steny Hoyer, the longest-serving House Democrat, to retire from Congress
Md. congressman served for years in party leadership
By ASSOCIATED PRESS and LISA MASCARO | Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the longest-serving Democrat in Congress and once a rival to become House speaker, will announce Thursday he is set to retire at the end of his term.
Hoyer, who served for years in party leadership and helped steer Democrats through some of their most significant legislative victories, is set to deliver a House floor speech about his decision, according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss it.
“Tune in,” Hoyer said on social media. He confirmed his retirement plans in an interview with the Washington Post.
The rest of this article can be found on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
District of Columbia
Kennedy Center renaming triggers backlash
Artists who cancel shows threatened; calls for funding boycott grow
Efforts to rename the Kennedy Center to add President Trump’s name to the D.C. arts institution continue to spark backlash.
A new petition from Qommittee , a national network of drag artists and allies led by survivors of hate crimes, calls on Kennedy Center donors to suspend funding to the center until “artistic independence is restored, and to redirect support to banned or censored artists.”
“While Trump won’t back down, the donors who contribute nearly $100 million annually to the Kennedy Center can afford to take a stand,” the petition reads. “Money talks. When donors fund censorship, they don’t just harm one institution – they tell marginalized communities their stories don’t deserve to be told.”
The petition can be found here.
Meanwhile, a decision by several prominent musicians and jazz performers to cancel their shows at the recently renamed Trump-Kennedy Center in D.C. planned for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve has drawn the ire of the Center’s president, Richard Grenell.
Grenell, a gay supporter of President Donald Trump who served as U.S. ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term as president, was named Kennedy Center president last year by its board of directors that had been appointed by Trump.
Last month the board voted to change the official name of the center from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump And The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts. The revised name has been installed on the outside wall of the center’s building but is not official because any name change would require congressional action.
According to a report by the New York Times, Grenell informed jazz musician Chuck Redd, who cancelled a 2025 Christmas Eve concert that he has hosted at the Kennedy Center for nearly 20 years in response to the name change, that Grenell planned to arrange for the center to file a lawsuit against him for the cancellation.
“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit arts institution,” the Times quoted Grenell as saying in a letter to Redd.
“This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt,” the Times quoted Grenell’s letter as saying.
A spokesperson for the Trump-Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Washington Blade asking if the center still planned to file that lawsuit and whether it planned to file suits against some of the other musicians who recently cancelled their performances following the name change.
In a follow-up story published on Dec. 29, the New York Times reported that a prominent jazz ensemble and a New York dance company had canceled performances scheduled to take place on New Year’s Eve at the Kennedy Center.
The Times reported the jazz ensemble called The Cookers did not give a reason for the cancellation in a statement it released, but its drummer, Billy Hart, told the Times the center’s name change “evidently” played a role in the decision to cancel the performance.
Grenell released a statement on Dec. 29 calling these and other performers who cancelled their shows “far left political activists” who he said had been booked by the Kennedy Center’s previous leadership.
“Boycotting the arts to show you support the arts is a form of derangement syndrome,” the Times quoted him as saying in his statement.
District of Columbia
New interim D.C. police chief played lead role in security for WorldPride
Capital Pride says Jeffery Carroll had ‘good working relationship’ with organizers
Jeffery Carroll, who was named by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Dec. 17 as the city’s Interim Chief of Police, played a lead role in working with local LGBTQ community leaders in addressing public safety issues related to WorldPride 2025, which took place in D.C. last May and June
“We had a good working relationship with him, and he did his job in relation to how best the events would go around safety and security,” said Ryan Bos, executive director of Capital Pride Alliance.
Bos said Carroll has met with Capital Pride officials in past years to address security issues related to the city’s annual Capital Pride parade and festival and has been supportive of those events.
At the time Bowser named him Interim Chief, Carroll had been serving since 2023 as Executive Assistant Chief of Specialized Operations, overseeing the day-to-day operation of four of the department’s bureaus. He first joined the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department in 2002 and advanced to multiple leadership positions across various divisions and bureaus, according to a statement released by the mayor’s office.
“I know Chief Carroll is the right person to build on the momentum of the past two years so that we can continue driving down crime across the city,” Bowser said in a statement released on the day she announced his appointment as Interim Chief.
“He has led through some of our city’s most significant public safety challenges of the past decade, he is familiar with D.C. residents and well respected and trusted by members of the Metropolitan Police Department as well as our federal and regional public safety partners,” Bowser said.
“We have the best police department in the nation, and I am confident that Chief Carroll will meet this moment for the department and the city,” Bowser added.
But Bowser has so far declined to say if she plans to nominate Carroll to become the permanent police chief, which requires the approval of the D.C. City Council. Bowser, who announced she is not running for re-election, will remain in office as mayor until January 2027.
Carroll is replacing outgoing Chief Pamela Smith, who announced she was resigning after two years of service as chief to spend more time with her family. She has been credited with overseeing the department at a time when violent crime and homicides declined to an eight-year low.
She has also expressed support for the LGBTQ community and joined LGBTQ officers in marching in the WorldPride parade last year.
But Smith has also come under criticism by members of Congress, who have accused the department of manipulating crime data allegedly showing lower reported crime numbers than actually occurred. The allegations came from the Republican-controlled U.S. House Oversight Committee and the U.S. Justice Department
Bowser has questioned the accuracy of the allegations and said she has asked the city’s Inspector General to look into the allegations.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the D.C. police Office of Public Affairs did not immediately respond to a question from the Washington Blade about the status of the department’s LGBT Liaison Unit. Sources familiar with the department have said a decline in the number of officers currently working at the department, said to be at a 50-year low, has resulted in a decline in the number of officers assigned to all of the liaison units, including the LGBT unit.
Among other things, the LGBT Liaison Unit has played a role in helping to investigate hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ community. As of early Wednesday an MPD spokesperson did not respond to a question by the Blade asking how many officers are currently assigned to the LGBT Liaison Unit.
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