Local
Activists to receive Stein Club awards
City’s largest LGBT political organization issues its leadership awards each year during its anniversary reception
Nikisha Carpenter, Andy Bowen and Toby Quaranta were named as recipients of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club’s Annual Leadership Awards for 2013. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)
LGBT Youth Pride Alliance leader Nikisha Carpenter, D.C. Trans Coalition organizer Andy Bowen, and former D.C. Young Democrats President Toby Quaranta were named Tuesday as recipients of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club’s Annual Leadership Awards for 2013.
The Stein Club, the city’s largest LGBT political organization, issues its leadership awards each year during its anniversary celebration and fundraising reception. This year’s event, which marks the 37th anniversary of the club’s founding in 1976, is scheduled to take place 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28, at the Sonoma Restaurant and Wine Bar on Capitol Hill.
“These awardees represent some of the brightest leaders and advocates we have in our movement and we are proud of the work they’ve done to advance our equality within the Democratic Party and across the D.C. community,” said Stein Club President Martin Garcia in a statement.
“Our community is ripe with outstanding leaders and deciding who among them to recognize was challenging,” Garcia said.
Carpenter, president of Youth Pride Alliance for the past four years, is credited with expanding the organization’s capacity to fulfill its mission of representing the city’s LGBT young people. She will receive the club’s Heil-Balin Community Service Award, named in honor of the late Stein organizers Jerry Heil and Ron Balin, who were partners in life.
Bowen is credited with coordinating the D.C. Trans Coalition’s efforts on several fronts, including shepherding through the D.C. Council legislation reforming the city’s policies for issuing new birth certificates for transgender people and providing safe shelters for LGBT homeless people. She will receive the club’s Wanda Alston Award, named after the late LGBT and women’s rights advocate Wanda Alston.
Quaranta, a former official with the Human Rights Campaign, is credited with advancing LGBT rights work within the D.C. Young Democrats and drawing more participants to the group’s projects, including its involvement in the Obama re-election campaign, during his tenure as president. He will receive the Stein Club’s Desi Deschaine Young Democrat of the Year Award, named for the late Stein Club member and youth advocate Desi Deschaine.
In addition to the awards for the three individuals, the club will present its Richard Rausch Equality Award to the D.C.-based organization TransLAW, which serves as a legal clinic providing assistance to the transgender community, including legal help in the process of changing one’s name and gender. The award is named after the late Stein Club organizer and Democratic Party activist Richard Rausch.
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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