Connect with us

National

Gay Boston Marathon runners unhurt by bombings

Five D.C. Front Runners members crossed finish line before explosions

Published

on

Boston marathon, Brian Beary, Lennie Carter, gay news, Washington Blade
Boston marathon, Brian Beary, Lennie Carter, gay news, Washington Blade

D.C. resident Lennie Carter runs in the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. (Photo courtesy of Lennie Carter.)

Adrian Budhu had just turned onto Boylston Street from Hereford Street to run the final stretch of the Boston Marathon on Monday when the first of two bombs placed along the route exploded.

He and other runners had begun to slow down as the second device detonated two blocks west of initial blast near the Prudential Center a few seconds later.

Budhu, who was running to raise money for the Theater Offensive, a Boston-based group that uses art to highlight the lives of LGBT people, said volunteers, first responders and even his fellow runners told them to run backwards away from the finish line after the explosions.

He ran west on Boylston Street and eventually to his home in the nearby South End.

“At that time the spectators are cheering everyone because you can see the finish line, you can see the big clock,” Budhu told the Washington Blade on Tuesday as he recalled the scene on Boylston Street. “Everything you’ve put in this race is about to happen [and then] everyone just stopped. It was just surreal.”

The two explosions killed three people and wounded at least 170 others near the finish line in front of the Boston Public Library. Local, state and federal authorities continue to investigate who placed the devices the Associated Press reported were made from pressure cookers that contained nails, ball bearings and metal shards along Boylston Street.

The Dallas Voice reported on Tuesday that Javier Pagan, the Boston Police Department’s LGBT liaison, was among the first who responded to the scene after the bombs exploded.

Former GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios was running about a third of a mile away from the finish line at the intersection of Massachusetts and Commonwealth Avenues when the two explosions took place. His son Javier who was waiting for him at the finish line near Copley Square was uninjured.

“He was, as many people were, very frightened,” Barrios, who is the chief executive of the American Red Cross of Eastern Massachusetts, told the Blade. “We’ve talked a lot about this.”

Kilian Melloy, who is a massage therapist who volunteers with the Boston Athletic Association, which organizes the marathon, was in the basement of the John Hancock Building near Copley Square massaging a runner who had just finished the race when the bombs exploded. He said he had no idea of what had just happened on nearby Boylston Street until a volunteer came into the room and told everyone to evacuate the building and walk away from the finish line.

He told the Blade it took him an hour and a half to walk with his massage table from Copley Square to a subway station in Kendall Square in Cambridge over the Longfellow Bridge that spans the Charles River. Melloy further detailed his experience in a blog post to the EDGE Media Network.

“I’m really angry and I’m also really sad,” he told the Blade. “I’m in the healing profession and to think about how people got hurt — cruelly hurt — that’s very upsetting.”

Members of gay D.C. running group complete race

Five members of the D.C. Front Runners also ran in this year’s race.

Lennie Carter, who had previously run 10 Boston Marathons, crossed the finish line about 25 minutes before the bombs exploded. He told the Blade earlier on Tuesday before he boarded his flight back to D.C. that he was about to return to Boylston Street to meet his partner and watch the rest of the runners finish when he decided to return to their hotel near Tufts Medical Center.

“We just got to the room and everybody started calling us to make sure we were okay,” Carter said. “We turned on the TV and we had just been there I would say within 10 minutes of when everything went off.”

Boston marathon, Brian Beary, Lennie Carter, gay news, Washington Blade

D.C. residents Brian Beary and Lennie Carter pose at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 14, 2013. (Photo courtesy of Lennie Carter)

D.C. resident Brian Beary, who ran the marathon for the first time, also first heard about the bombings after he returned to his hotel. His parents who had traveled from Ireland to watch the race had been standing for about an hour at the same location along Boylston Street where the second bomb exploded.

They left the area after Beary crossed the finish line.

“Basically if I had run an hour slower, they would have been right there,” he told the Blade after he returned to D.C. “They were right at the spot where the explosion was.”

’So many kids’ along the marathon route

Beary noted the contrasts he saw during the annual event that draws hundreds of thousands of spectators along its 26.2 mile route from Hopkinton to Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood on the third Monday in April — Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts.

He said he had goose bumps as he ran through the so-called Scream Tunnel at Wellesley College, up Heartbreak Hill in nearby Newton and on other parts of the course. Beary also noted runners observed a moment of silence for the victims of last December’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., before the race began.

“It was just one of the most beautiful marathons I’ve ever run — if not the most, until obviously the horrible stuff that came later,” Beary said.

Budhu further noted the “so many kids” he saw along the marathon’s route to watch the race. These included Martin Richard, an 8-year-old boy from Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood who died during the first bombing as he and his family stood watching the runners cross the finish line.

“It’s so not necessary,” Budhu said. “It’s so appalling. It’s so horrific. I just cannot believe it happened.”

Advertisement
FUND LGBTQ JOURNALISM
SIGN UP FOR E-BLAST

New York

Men convicted of murdering two men in NYC gay bar drugging scheme sentenced

One of the victims, John Umberger, was D.C. political consultant

Published

on

(Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

A New York judge on Wednesday sentenced three men convicted of killing a D.C. political consultant and another man who they targeted at gay bars in Manhattan.

NBC New York notes a jury in February convicted Jayqwan Hamilton, Jacob Barroso, and Robert DeMaio of murder, robbery, and conspiracy in relation to druggings and robberies that targeted gay bars in Manhattan from March 2021 to June 2022.

John Umberger, a 33-year-old political consultant from D.C., and Julio Ramirez, a 25-year-old social worker, died. Prosecutors said Hamilton, Barroso, and DeMaio targeted three other men at gay bars.

The jury convicted Hamilton and DeMaio of murdering Umberger. State Supreme Court Judge Felicia Mennin sentenced Hamilton and DeMaio to 40 years to life in prison.

Barroso, who was convicted of killing Ramirez, received a 20 years to life sentence.

Continue Reading

National

Medical groups file lawsuit over Trump deletion of health information

Crucial datasets included LGBTQ, HIV resources

Published

on

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Nine private medical and public health advocacy organizations, including two from D.C., filed a lawsuit on May 20 in federal court in Seattle challenging what it calls the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s illegal deletion of dozens or more of its webpages containing health related information, including HIV information.

The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, names as defendants Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS itself, and several agencies operating under HHS and its directors, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.

“This action challenges the widespread deletion of public health resources from federal agencies,” the lawsuit states. “Dozens (if not more) of taxpayer-funded webpages, databases, and other crucial resources have vanished since January 20, 2025, leaving doctors, nurses, researchers, and the public scrambling for information,” it says.

 “These actions have undermined the longstanding, congressionally mandated regime; irreparably harmed Plaintiffs and others who rely on these federal resources; and put the nation’s public health infrastructure in unnecessary jeopardy,” the lawsuit continues.

It adds, “The removal of public health resources was apparently prompted by two recent executive orders – one focused on ‘gender ideology’ and the other targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) programs. Defendants implemented these executive orders in a haphazard manner that resulted in the deletion (inadvertent or otherwise) of health-related websites and databases, including information related to pregnancy risks, public health datasets, information about opioid-use disorder, and many other valuable resources.”

 The lawsuit does not mention that it was President Donald Trump who issued the two executive orders in question. 

A White House spokesperson couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit. 

While not mentioning Trump by name, the lawsuit names as defendants in addition to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., Matthew Buzzelli, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health; Martin Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Thomas Engels, administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration; and Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management. 

The 44-page lawsuit complaint includes an addendum with a chart showing the titles or descriptions of 49 “affected resource” website pages that it says were deleted because of the executive orders. The chart shows that just four of the sites were restored after initially being deleted.

 Of the 49 sites, 15 addressed LGBTQ-related health issues and six others addressed HIV issues, according to the chart.   

“The unannounced and unprecedented deletion of these federal webpages and datasets came as a shock to the medical and scientific communities, which had come to rely on them to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, assist physicians and other clinicians in daily care, and inform the public about a wide range of healthcare issues,” the lawsuit states.

 “Health professionals, nonprofit organizations, and state and local authorities used the websites and datasets daily in care for their patients, to provide resources to their communities, and promote public health,” it says. 

Jose Zuniga, president and CEO of the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC), one of the organizations that signed on as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement that the deleted information from the HHS websites “includes essential information about LGBTQ+ health, gender and reproductive rights, clinical trial data, Mpox and other vaccine guidance and HIV prevention resources.”

 Zuniga added, “IAPAC champions evidence-based, data-informed HIV responses and we reject ideologically driven efforts that undermine public health and erase marginalized communities.”

Lisa Amore, a spokesperson for Whitman-Walker Health, D.C.’s largest LGBTQ supportive health services provider, also expressed concern about the potential impact of the HHS website deletions.

 “As the region’s leader in HIV care and prevention, Whitman-Walker Health relies on scientific data to help us drive our resources and measure our successes,” Amore said in response to a request for comment from  the Washington Blade. 

“The District of Columbia has made great strides in the fight against HIV,” Amore said. “But the removal of public facing information from the HHS website makes our collective work much harder and will set HIV care and prevention backward,” she said. 

The lawsuit calls on the court to issue a declaratory judgement that the “deletion of public health webpages and resources is unlawful and invalid” and to issue a preliminary or permanent injunction ordering government officials named as defendants in the lawsuit “to restore the public health webpages and resources that have been deleted and to maintain their web domains in accordance with their statutory duties.”

It also calls on the court to require defendant government officials to “file a status report with the Court within twenty-four hours of entry of a preliminary injunction, and at regular intervals, thereafter, confirming compliance with these orders.”

The health organizations that joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs include the Washington State Medical Association, Washington State Nurses Association, Washington Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Academy Health, Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, Fast-Track Cities Institute, International Association of Providers of AIDS Care, National LGBT Cancer Network, and Vermont Medical Society. 

The Fast-Track Cities Institute and International Association of Providers of AIDS Care are based in D.C.

Continue Reading

U.S. Federal Courts

Federal judge scraps trans-inclusive workplace discrimination protections

Ruling appears to contradict US Supreme Court precedent

Published

on

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Screen capture: YouTube)

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas has struck down guidelines by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission designed to protect against workplace harassment based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The EEOC in April 2024 updated its guidelines to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which determined that discrimination against transgender people constituted sex-based discrimination as proscribed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

To ensure compliance with the law, the agency recommended that employers honor their employees’ preferred pronouns while granting them access to bathrooms and allowing them to wear dress code-compliant clothing that aligns with their gender identities.

While the the guidelines are not legally binding, Kacsmaryk ruled that their issuance created “mandatory standards” exceeding the EEOC’s statutory authority that were “inconsistent with the text, history, and tradition of Title VII and recent Supreme Court precedent.”

“Title VII does not require employers or courts to blind themselves to the biological differences between men and women,” he wrote in the opinion.

The case, which was brought by the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, presents the greatest setback for LGBTQ inclusive workplace protections since President Donald Trump’s issuance of an executive order on the first day of his second term directing U.S. federal agencies to recognize only two genders as determined by birth sex.

Last month, top Democrats from both chambers of Congress reintroduced the Equality Act, which would codify LGBTQ-inclusive protections against discrimination into federal law, covering employment as well as areas like housing and jury service.

Continue Reading

Popular