Local
Shutdown of GLLU website raises questions
Spokesperson says site closed after longtime volunteer operator stepped down
A volunteer says D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier and other police
officials lost interest in keeping the GLLU website active, a claim disputed by MPD. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
LGBT activists and officials with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department have given conflicting accounts of the reason behind the shutdown earlier this month of the volunteer operated website of the department’s Gay & Lesbian Liaison Unit.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has disputed claims by some LGBT activists that she shut down the site, saying through a spokesperson that the site closed after its longtime volunteer operator stepped down.
But the site’s operator, Sterling Spangler, told the Blade that Lanier and other MPD officials rejected his request that they recruit another volunteer to run the site, which some in the LGBT community viewed as the GLLU’s “official” website.
Spangler, a former GLLU volunteer, told the Blade he has operated and maintained the website since 2003. He said the site was housed on an outside server independent of the MPD’s website and that its domain name was purchased and set up by Matt Ashburn, another GLLU volunteer, shortly after the GLLU was first created by former D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey.
Activists, including Spangler, say the site – although run by volunteers – became the de facto official GLLU website in 2006, when Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government named the GLLU the winner of its prestigious Innovations in American Government Award, which came with a $100,000 grant.
According to Spangler and other activists, at that time, the official MPD website didn’t have a page or section devoted to the GLLU. Spangler said as many as a half dozen or more GLLU volunteers from the LGBT community helped maintain the website, GLLU.org.
Spangler noted that the GLLU.org website was paid for entirely by funds from the Harvard grant. The grant requires the GLLU to have a website for carrying out the grant’s mission of reaching out to the LGBT community on police related issues.
Spangler, who served as manager of the website until October of this year, said things changed when newly elected Mayor Adrian Fenty named Lanier as the new police chief in early 2007. Lanier quickly moved to decentralize the GLLU by creating affiliate members in each of the department’s seven police district.
While activists didn’t object to the affiliate members they complained that the new chief was cutting back on resources and personnel for the central GLLU office in Dupont Circle. Spangler said Lanier’s changes and the subsequent decision by Sgt. Brett Parson to leave the GLLU to work as a street patrol supervisor resulted in the website “withering on the vine.”
“I couldn’t get anyone to give us content for the site,” he said. “After a while the site looked ridiculous because it was so out of date. And I wasn’t sure the community cared anymore.”
Under Lanier’s tenure, the MPD’s official website added special pages for the GLLU and the department’s three other special liaison units.
But to the amazement of many LGBT activists, high-level MPD officials disclosed earlier this year that they had not been aware of the GLLU.org site or of the Harvard grant and about $49,000 in grant funds that remained in an account hosted by the non-profit charitable gay group Brother Help Thyself.
Brother Help Thyself became the fiduciary agent for the grant funds in 2009 after another group linked to Harvard ceased operating, according to Mark Clark, the Brother Help Thyself treasurer.
Clark said Harvard informed the GLLU in 2006 that an independent, non-profit group had to serve as custodian of the funds under rules established by Harvard’s grants program.
Spangler said after more than 10 years as a volunteer, and after he determined the MPD’s top brass wasn’t interested in the website, he informed GLLU interim supervisor Sgt. Matt Mahl in late summer or early fall of this year that he planned to step down from his role of operating the website.
“I don’t know who he contacted,” said Spangler. “But when he got back to me he said MPD has decided to discontinue the website.”
Much to his amazement, Spangler said investigators with the department’s Internal Affairs Unit contacted him for information about the grant funds and informed him that Lanier ordered an investigation of the use of those funds.
Police spokesperson Gwendolyn Crump told the Blade this week that the investigation concluded there “was no misconduct from any member [of the department] and no evidence of misuse of funds.”
Spangler said he learned later through police sources that it was Chief Lanier’s decision to close the website based, in part, on “budgetary issues.”
But Crump, in a statement sent to the Blade, disputed Spangler’s claim.
“Chief Lanier did not shut the site down,” she said. “That website was maintained by a volunteer who is no longer able to maintain the site. All four units of the Special Liaison Division are represented on MPD’s website.”
Spangler considers Crump’s statement misleading, saying MPD officials could easily recruit another volunteer to operate the website. He said the grant funds, which total slightly more than $49,000, could be used to pay for the website’s operation as well as more community outreach efforts by the GLLU.
MPD officials, meanwhile, have not said what they plan to do with the $49,000 in grant funds, which remain in a Brother Help Thyself bank account. Spangler says he remains hopeful that Lanier will reconsider her decision not to arrange for a volunteer or MPD staff person to operate the website.
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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