Local
Stein Club president withdraws from consideration for new club election
Special meeting on Wednesday to consider invaliding Dec. 3 election of new slate of officers
A Gertrude Stein Democratic Club endorsements meeting from October of this year, prior to the leadership shake-up. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)
Lateefah Williams, the president of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club who lost her race for a second term in the club’s Dec. 3 election, announced on Sunday that she won’t be a candidate if the club decides to invalidate the balloting for her seat and calls a new election.
Her announcement comes in the wake of an uproar among many of the club’s longtime members over the successful campaign by three young activists who won control of the club by defeating Williams and two vice presidential candidates running on Williams’ slate.
Gay political consultant Martin Garcia, 27, who beat Williams by a vote of 47 to 45, is credited with playing the lead role in organizing the upset victory by arranging for at least 46 mostly young LGBT activists to join the club less than a week before the election and vote for him and his vice presidential running mates.
Angela Peoples, 26, a policy analyst for the U.S. Consumer Financial protection Bureau, and Vincent Villano, 26, communications director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, won the two vice presidential seats on Garcia’s slate.
Club treasurer Barrie Daneker and club secretary Jimmie Luthuli were not challenged by Garcia’s backers and won re-election unopposed. But in winning three of the club’s five officer’s positions, Garcia, Peoples, and Villano were expected to gain control of the club when they take office Jan. 1.
Last week, several longtime members, including transgender activist Jeri Hughes, called for an official challenge to Garcia, Peoples, and Villano’s election. The club’s existing officers responded by calling a special meeting for Dec. 19 to decide whether the election should be invalidated based on the challenges.
Daneker, who is in charge of maintaining the club membership list, said a review of the online application forms for 17 of the new members raised questions about whether some qualified for a lower priced special membership category.
Daneker said the review of the application forms also indicated some of the new members did not submit a valid home address, which could be a violation of club rules.
Those challenging the election say the election should be invalidated if the club determines some of the new members should be disqualified due to membership “irregularities” and the number of disqualified members exceeds the margin of victory of Garcia, Peoples, and Villano. All three won by a margin of between two and seven votes.
The longtime members who called for the special meeting, which is to decide whether the election should be upheld or invalidated, are believed to be supporters of Williams and her slate of officers who lost the election.
Williams announced her withdrawal from consideration for retaining her seat after her current term expires on Dec. 31 in an open letter sent by email on Sunday to the club’s membership.
“While I am deeply humbled and profoundly grateful for the support of these longtime members and I believe that it is important to investigate potential election irregularities, I am also very concerned about the future of the club,” Williams said in her Dec. 16 email.
“It is imperative that the Stein Club move forward into the future as a unified organization, so that we may continue to focus on effectively advocating for the District’s LGBT community,” she said. “To that end, I am removing myself from consideration as the 2013 Stein Club president.”
Williams noted that she recused herself from the vote by the club’s officers, who make up the group’s executive board, to call the special meeting.
“While the decision to hold the special meeting and to possibly invalidate the election results is, and always has been, a different matter than my candidacy, I want to state my intentions unequivocally, so that it’s clear that any decision that is made by the membership at the special meeting should be made independent of me,” Williams said in her email.
Daneker said the club had a total of 190 members prior to the effort by Garcia and his supporters to recruit new members. According to Daneker, 46 new members, including Garcia, Peoples, and Villano, who had not appeared on the club’s membership rolls before, joined the club in the week prior to the Dec. 3 club election.
Although some of the new members have said their recruitment effort doubled the club’s membership, Daneker said the new members appear to have increased the membership from 190 to 236, which is about 24 percent.
Confusion over the membership totals surfaced, Daneker said, when the balloting at the Dec. 3 election showed that a total of 92 ballots had been cast, with Garcia beating Williams by a razor-thin two vote margin. He said some people incorrectly assumed that the 92 people who voted in the election made up most or all of the membership.
When asked why he thought as many as 145 of the 190 existing members didn’t show up for the election, Daneker said, “Historically, we don’t get all the members to come to every single meeting.”
Garcia and his supporters have argued that their election recruitment effort brought in energetic new members who will reinvigorate the club.
“We are disappointed that the Stein leadership intends to challenge new members who want to contribute to Stein’s growth,” Garcia said in a statement released last week.
“These new members are young people, people of color, and people from low-income backgrounds who were otherwise not engaged in Stein’s activities…We should be having a special meeting celebrating these new members and finding ways to engage them.”
In a series of Facebook messages and a commentary in the Blade, Hughes has emerged as the lead advocate for invaliding the election and holding a new election for president and the two vice president’s seats.
An attorney who reviewed the question of whether the Stein Club election can be invalidated has said such an action could only take place if it can be shown that new members gave a false address or joined at the $15 membership rate rather than the standard $35 rate when they were not qualified or the lower rate. The $15 membership is limited under the club’s bylaws to students, senior citizens, and “limited income” members.
Hughes, while saying the issue of possible membership irregularities should be resolved, has called the election a “farce” because the new members stacked the meeting with their supporters.
“It became a farce when a group of new members – most of whom have never attended a Stein Club meeting or participated in the local issues affecting the District – attended the election night process with the sole intention of usurping the Stein Club leadership,” she said in her commentary.
“They are strangers,” she said. “By their own admission, none had been Stein Club members for more than a week.”
Not all of the club’s longstanding members agree with Hughes that the election should be challenged.
Gay Democratic activist Rick Rosendall, who won election last week as president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, is a longtime Stein Club member.
“Jeri, they won according to the rules,” he told Hughes in a Facebook posting. “They represent the biggest influx of talent and energy into the group in a long time. Forcing them out in a special meeting which itself violates the rules is not legitimate,” he said. “Nor does it advance our cause.”
D.C. transgender activist Julius Agers, the club’s vice president for political and legislative affairs, who did not run for re-election, said he, too, considers the influx of new members to be beneficial to the club.
“Let us all strive as hard as we can to be open minded, and not let old thoughts and old prejudices and old loyalties blur our vision,” he wrote in a Facebook posting on Saturday. “These young people have earned their respect from many circles. In fact, they have done amazing things and I for one am thrilled that they are bringing their passion in our direction.”
The special meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 19, in Room 120 of the John A. Wilson D.C. city hall building at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Delaware
Delaware fines Rehoboth bar $15,000 for discriminating against trans woman
Hideout told patron she had to use men’s room due to gender marker on driver’s license
The Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission voted to fine Hideout Arcade Bar & Grille $15,000 last month due to a discrimination complaint filed by a trans woman over her use of the bathroom.
Katie Sorber, a transgender woman, said that on April 5, 2023, she was stopped by employees and told she could only use the men’s bathroom due to the “male” gender marker on her driver’s license. This occurred after Sorber presented her ID upon entering the bar and ordering a drink.
Sorber took to Facebook to complain about her experience at the bar after she was told to use the men’s bathroom.
On April 12, 2023, Sorber returned to the Hideout but was barred from entering due to her post on social media.
Following Sorber’s post, Bryan Derrickson, the owner of Hideout Arcade Bar & Grille, allegedly began enforcing a policy in which patrons had to use the bathroom that corresponded to the gender marker on their ID.
Derrickson was ordered to pay $10,000 to Sorber, $5,000 to the Special Administration Fund, as well as conduct anti-discrimination training with employees, remove the ban on Sorber from the establishment, and revise the bar’s bathroom policy.
The commission ruled that the bar and Derrickson had wrongfully discriminated against Sorber on the basis of her gender.
Derrickson’s explanations for the denial included safety concerns, a third-party patron complaint, and a reference to the health code. The panel found this to be inconsistent and lacking factual support upon cross-examination.
The case was evaluated under the Delaware Equal Accommodations Law, which explicitly prohibits discrimination and retaliation in places of public accommodation based on gender identity.
This was the second time that the bar has been fined for discriminating against a transgender woman. The bar received a $2,000 penalty in September of last year for denying a transgender woman entry in 2023.
Half of the fine went to Kathy Carpenter Brown, the trans woman who experienced the discrimination. Brown is the founder of TransLiance, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group in Delaware.
District of Columbia
Push to elect more LGBTQ ANC members yields results
31 of 43 known LGBTQ ANC members elected in 2024 seeking re-election
A 2026 list of candidates released by the D.C. Board of Elections shows that 31 of the 43 known LGBTQ candidates who won election in 2024 as Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners have filed the required petition signatures to be placed on the ballot this year to run for re-election.
The Washington Blade reported in 2024 that 43 known LGBTQ candidates won election to ANC seats that year in the November election
In a related development, the president of Capital Stonewall Democrats, D.C.’s largest local LGBTQ political group, said the group this year has recruited at least 39 LGBTQ candidates to run for Advisory Neighborhood Commission seats in the city’s Nov. 3 general election.
The group’s president, Stevie McCarty, an incumbent ANC member in the city’s Shaw neighborhood who is running for re-election, said the 39 candidates and possibly more responded to the group’s Queering ANCs campaign launched on July 7 that includes a website with detailed instructions for how best to run for an ANC seat.
“Since launching in early July, the site has drawn more than 20,000 views, and 39 candidates have used it to actually run,” McCarty said in a statement. He said he wasn’t sure if all the 39 candidates wanted to be identified as LGBTQ, and he was reviewing the list of incumbent LGBTQ ANC members who won election in 2024 to determine if any of the 39 candidates recruited were among those incumbents. He said he was not ready to release the names of the 39 candidates he said his group recruited to run for an ANC seat.
If none of the 39 candidates recruited by Capital Stonewall Democrats are among the 31 known LGBTQ ANC incumbents running for re-election, it would mean at least 70 LGBTQ ANC candidates will be on the city’s November election ballot.
McCarty said Capital Stonewall Democrats will send candidate questionnaires to the known LGBTQ ANC candidates as part of its process for endorsing candidates in the November election. He said he expects the group to help campaign for and provide financial support for the ANC candidates it endorses.
The D.C. local government is believed to be unique among U.S. cities in currently having 46 Advisory Neighborhood Commissions consisting of 345 single member districts in neighborhoods throughout the city in which unpaid Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners are elected for two-year terms.
The commissions are charged with considering a wide range of policies and programs impacting their neighborhoods, including traffic, parking, recreation, street improvements, zoning, liquor licenses, and economic development. Although ANCs do not have authority to set or reject policies or actions by city agencies, the agencies are required to give “great weight” to ANC recommendations, according to the law creating the ANCs.
“As an ANC member, I know firsthand how these seats shape our neighborhoods, from housing and public safety to sanitation,” McCarty said in the Capital Stonewall Democrats statement announcing the launch of the Queering ANCs campaign in July. “I’m proud to lead this effort to ensure more LGBTQ+ Washingtonians see themselves as leaders in their communities,” he said.
Some local LGBTQ activists, who asked not to be identified, said they were not aware of a significant boost in new LGBTQ ANC candidates from the Queering ANCs campaign. However, they praised the effort to recruit more LGBTQ ANC candidates and said the campaign could have yielded more candidates if it had started sooner than less than a month before the deadline for becoming a candidate.
McCarty said Capital Stonewall Democrats will continue to recruit LGBTQ D.C. residents to run as write-in candidates for ANC seats, especially in the 45 single member districts in which no candidate will be on the ballot. The Board of Elections candidate list shows many ANC single member districts that have just one candidate running without an opponent.
Following is a list of 33 known LGBTQ ANC candidates running in D.C.’s November 2026 election and the single member districts and neighborhoods in which they are running. All but two – Vita Rangel and J. Swiderski – are incumbents running for re-election. The Washington Blade will update this list if and when more LGBTQ ANC candidates become known.
1A04 – (Columbia Heights) Jeremy Sherman, he/him
1A10 – (Columbia Heights) Vita Rangel, she/ her [non-incumbent candidate]
1B03 – (Columbia Heights/U Street) J. Swiderski, they/he [non-incumbent candidate]
Jamie S. Sycamore, he/him
1B06 – (Columbia Heights/Meridian Hill) Miguel Trindade Deramo, he/him
1B07 – (U Street) Matthew Holden, he/him
1E01 – (Park View) Brad Howard, he/him
2B02 – (Dupont Circle) Jeffrey Rueckgauer, he/him
2B03 – (Dupont Circle) Vincent Slatt, he/him
2C01 – (Penn Quarter) Michael D. Shankle, he/him
2F05 – (Logan Circle) Christopher Dyer, he/him
2F07 – (Logan Circle) Kevin Cataldo, he/him
2G01 – (Shaw)Parker Griffin, he/him Howard Garrett, he/him
2G02 – (Shaw) Alexander ‘Alex’ Padro, he/him
2G04 – (Shaw) Steven McCarty, he/him
3B06 – (Wesley Heights) S. Robert Rodriquez, he/him
3F05 – (Van Ness/Cleveland Park) Adrian Jesus Iglesias, he/him
4B01 – (Takoma) Doug Payton, he/him
4B10 – (Lamond Riggs) Jinin Berry, she/her
4C06 – (Petworth) Christen Boss Hayes, they/them
4E02 – (16th Street Heights) Vince Micone, he/him
5B04 – (Brookland) Ra Amin, he/him
5B05 – (Brookland) Mónica Martínez López, she/her
5D05 – (Trinidad) Salvador Sauceda-Guzman, he/him
5F06 – (Eckington) Joe Bishop-Henchman, he/him
6B03 – (Capitol Hill) David Sobelsohn, he/him
6B09 – (Capitol Hill/Barney Circle) Karen Hughes, she/her
7C01 – (Deanwood) Brian Glover, he/him
7C03 – (Lincoln Heights) Carlos Richardson, he/him
7C04 (Deanwood) Anthony Lorenzo Green
7C08 – (Capitol View) Brandon M. Scott, he/him
8A01 – (Fairlawn) Tom Donohue, he, him
8B06 – (Garfield Heights) Marcus Thomas Hickman, he/him
Congress
Chris Van Hollen says the Democratic Party needs change. Is he the one to lead it?
Senator is backing anti-establishment Democrats across the country
By LEE O. SANDERLIN | The Democratic Party is having something of an identity crisis — losing to President Donald Trump twice in three elections will do that.
Should the party embrace anti-establishment figures who espouse progressive policy ideas like Medicare for all and rhetoric about unrigging the economy for the 1 percent? Or should Democrats try to appeal to moderates who want to return to semi-normalcy in a time of political upheaval?
Although he’s been in Congress since 2002, with key leadership roles throughout his tenure, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, 67, counts himself firmly in the anti-establishment camp.
The rest of this article can be found on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
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