Local
Student wins national history contest with Stonewall riots as topic
Thousands view exhibit at ceremony at University of Maryland campus
Nicholas Gupta won the national history contest on the University of Maryland College Park's campus with an exhibit about the Stonewall riots, which took place 43 years ago, June 28. (Public domain image)
Thousands of students, teachers, and parents attended a ceremony at the University of Maryland in College Park on Thursday, June 14, in which a 17-year-old high school student won the National History Day Contest award for an exhibit on the 1969 Stonewall riots.
Nicholas Gupta, a student at Pensacola High School in Florida, won the first-place award for a museum style exhibit he worked on for eleven months called “Out of the Closet and Into the Streets: The Stonewall Uprising of 1969.”
Gupta, who’s straight and just completed his junior year at Pensacola High, said he first learned about the Stonewall riots while searching for a topic for the contest. Organizers of the annual contest called on students to select a topic that fits into the theme of “revolution, reaction, and reform in history.”
“When I read about the Stonewall uprising it was something that really hit me,” Gupta told the Blade. “You know, wow, this is something that nobody really talks about. It’s kind of left out of the history books.”
The Stonewall riots took place in New York’s Greenwich Village in June 1969 after police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Police said they raided the bar because it didn’t have a liquor license at a time when it was illegal to serve alcohol to homosexuals in New York City.
In what was believed to be a first of its kind development, the gay male, lesbian, and transgender patrons of the bar fought back, throwing bottles and rocks as police attempted the arrest them. The riots, which took place over several days, have been credited with triggering the modern LGBT rights movement.
More than half a million elementary and secondary school students participate in the National History Day Contest each year, according to a statement released by the National History Day organization, which is based on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, Md.
“Students choose historical topics related to a theme and conduct extensive primary and secondary research through libraries, archives, museums, oral history interviews and historic sites,” the statement says.
Gupta said that after pouring over articles, books, and newspaper reports on the Stonewall riots he traveled to New York City, where he conducted additional research at the New York Public Library. While in New York, he visited the Stonewall building, which is the current home of a gay bar bearing that name. He said he also interviewed gay author and historian David Carter, who wrote the 2004 book, “Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution,” considered the definitive work on the subject.
Gupta’s wining exhibit on the Stonewall riots is believed to represent just the second time a gay related subject has won a National History Day Contest award. The first such entry to win occurred last year in the form of a student documentary on the 1977 campaign by singer and Florida orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant to repeal a gay rights ordinance passed in Dade County, Fla., which includes the city of Miami.
Gupta was among 152 winners in the national contest, in which first, second, and third place winners are chosen among individual and group categories of papers, exhibits, performances, documentaries, and websites.
The statement released by contest organizers says this year’s contest included 2,794 students and 1,691 entries, the largest number ever in the contest’s history.
District of Columbia
Mayor Bowser signs bill requiring insurers to cover PrEP
‘This is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS’
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on March 20 signed a bill approved by the D.C. Council that requires health insurance companies to cover the costs of HIV prevention or PrEP drugs for D.C. residents at risk for HIV infection.
Like all legislation approved by the Council and signed by the mayor, the bill, called the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act, was sent to Capitol Hill for a required 30-day congressional review period before it takes effect as D.C. law.
Gay D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) last year introduced the bill.
Insurance coverage for PrEP drugs has been provided through coverage standards included in the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. But AIDS advocacy organizations have called on states and D.C. to pass their own legislation requiring insurance coverage of PrEP as a safeguard in case federal policies are weakened or removed by the Trump administration, which has already reduced federal funding for HIV/AIDS-related programs.
Like legislation passed by other states, the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act requires insurers to cover all PrEP drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Studies have shown that PrEP drugs, which can be taken as pills or by injection just twice a year, are highly effective in preventing HIV infection.
“I think this is a win for our community,” Parker said after the D.C. Council voted unanimously to approve the bill on its first vote on the measure in February. “And this is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
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.
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