Opinions
Carol Schwartz for mayor, ‘intolerant of intolerance’
Candidate’s daughter, daughter-in-law on why Mom is best choice for city
Carol Schwartz learned the harsh lessons of discrimination growing up Jewish in West Texas. (Washington Blade file photo by Pete Exis)
By STEPHANIE SCHWARTZ & JACKIE BRYKS
One of my proudest moments occurred when my mother, Carol Schwartz, won the National Capital Area Leadership Award from the Human Rights Campaign in 2002. In her acceptance speech, my mom told a story I had never heard. In high school and college, she had two friends who were gay. A few years after graduating, both committed suicide. It’s rare that my mother doesn’t share what’s on her mind, but I guess in this case, her friendships with these two men and their endings had weighed on her mind, silently until then.
I think my mother’s early experience with discrimination made her particularly empathetic to those who face it. Though nothing like many LGBT youth or other minorities endure, she did face anti-Semitism while growing up in West Texas. During the only snow day of her childhood, she got out of school early and a group went to a friend’s house. But the mother wouldn’t allow a Jewish person in her home so she stood outside in the snow for hours, waiting for the others. This incident of prejudice was not the first or the last—and they scarred. In addition, her only sibling Johnny, 18 months older, had intellectual disabilities, and she had to protect him from taunts and ridicule. That, plus the racism she observed in that place and time, made her “intolerant of intolerance” — a phrase Mom uses. I am sure that feeling has fueled her work in public and community service, starting as a special education teacher.
It is fortunate that in the last decade many people have joined the LGBT cause. But Carol Schwartz was there early on, fighting for our rights 40 years ago. When she was on the D.C. Board of Education in the mid-1970s, she pushed through the law that forbade employment discrimination against DCPS teachers and other personnel based on sexual orientation.
During her four terms on the D.C. Council, that commitment continued. She introduced the law that prohibited the harassment of students based on sexual orientation and gender identity. She provided additional funding for the Office of Human Rights. She spoke out against the effort to exempt transgender people from certain protections under the D.C. Human Rights Act. She was instrumental in pushing the domestic partnership law—the strongest in the country—and had she been on the Council in 2009, would have voted for same-sex marriage. She was an active proponent of and a contributor to needle exchange programs and co-sponsored medical marijuana legislation, and lobbied Congress to stop the hold-up of both.
She also protected workers by putting forth the strongest Whistleblowers Protection Law in the country, which the federal government replicated, and made D.C. the second jurisdiction in the country to give sick and safe leave to workers who did not have that human benefit—and lost her Council seat because of it.
What someone chooses to do outside their role in elected office is also revealing. My Mom has chosen to lend her leadership skills to a host of volunteer community service organizations. To name just a couple, she was a member of the board of the Safe Haven Outreach Ministry, a service provider for low-income and homeless adults, who are substance abusers living with HIV/AIDS. And she was elected to be a 17-year member of the board of the Whitman-Walker Clinic, including during the worst years of the AIDS crisis, and was elected its vice president.
Her work, both elected and volunteer, earned her Best Straight Ally three times from Blade editors and readers as well as the Blade’s Local Female Hero.
One of my mom’s proudest moments was when she walked me down the aisle as I married my spouse Jackie in October of 2012 in New York. Years before, I had been engaged to a man. Soon after my broken engagement I became involved with a woman, then a man, then a woman again on my journey to where I belonged. But through it all, there was my mom, always supporting me. That support wasn’t a surprise. She had already been a member of PFLAG as a friend for decades before she knew she would qualify in every category.
As her daughter I have gotten the unique perspective on relationships she’s formed. Friends can’t have a birthday without getting an off-key birthday song on their voicemail. She looks after numerous seniors. And like many, she’s lost too many friends to AIDS, but there she was saying goodbye during their last moments, lying in bed with them, holding them. The faces of those friends are still displayed in photos in her home.
A good gay friend of hers often asks, “Do you ever spend time with people who aren’t gay?” “Yes,” she answers, “When I have to.”
She’s been a good role model. I have tried to follow her lead in my own career — working in a group home for people with cerebral palsy, serving as criminal defense attorney for Legal Aid, and advocating on behalf of victims of child abuse as a Children’s Services attorney for NYC in the Bronx.
Her empathy helps her build bridges. One of the reasons my Mom stayed a Republican all those years was because she was better able to lobby Congress on behalf of D.C. When a member of Congress put forth a rider that banned gay and lesbian adoptions, she and activist Carl Schmid were able to get an appointment. In that meeting, she spoke about her LGBT friends who had adopted children and the vibrant and loving families that exist for these kids who barely had hope for one — and cried. Later that day, the rider was withdrawn. This is what D.C. needs — someone who can be tough when called for but is always compassionate and unifying.
As D.C. is economically booming, it’s too easy to forget those who are left out. What we need now is a strong caretaker who has proven she can take care of business and people, and who will also continue the fight for LGBT — and voting — rights. I know of no better leader—or person—than my mom to be your mayor.
Stephanie Schwartz, Democrat
Longtime LGBT ally Carol Schwartz at Gay Pride Day in 1986. (Washington Blade archive photo by Doug Hinckle)
Proud of my mother in law
Soon after meeting my now wife, I made the charged pilgrimage from my home in New York for the first meeting with her mother, Carol Schwartz. You know the deal, everybody on their best behavior trying to make a good impression. Carol seemed to like me a lot, but I can say for certain that she blew me away. All I knew going into that first meeting was that Carol was some sort of local D.C. politician, a Republican no less. This meeting took place more than six years ago — a time during which the national Republican Party was less than welcoming to gays and lesbians. So let me be frank: As a lifelong gay rights advocate, I had some misgivings, apprehension even. But the reality upended all my preconceptions (a life lesson against pigeonholing people if I ever saw one).
Because what I found was the most progressive, most welcoming, most gay-positive person I had ever met. And these many years later, after marrying Carol’s daughter, Stephanie, I have been proud to learn — and not just from the family — that Carol, being Carol, used her estimable energies over decades to transform this progressive instinct into concrete policies supporting the LGBT community.
I was also proud that when the Republican Party continued to drift further and further to the right on social issues — notably on women’s health and LGBT rights — Carol, though usually loyal to a fault, decided to leave the party and register as an Independent. To me, that label suits her to a tee.
Jackie Bryks, Democrat
Opinions
Let love and compassion guide our response to Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis
Former president is diminished, but he and family deserve love and prayers
When I heard Joe Biden had serious prostate cancer, I felt immediate compassion for him and his family. I am a prostate cancer survivor myself. Then I heard how Trump, and some of his MAGA Republicans, responded and was amazed at how they are able to constantly sink to new lows. Trump’s son posted on X “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???” Clearly, they will never give up on being vile human beings.
The equally disgusting Joe Scarborough had on a doctor who declared he positively knows Biden must have known about his cancer years ago, although he knows nothing about the case. The reality, coming from many specialists, is at this time only Biden’s doctors know when he was diagnosed, and whether he even had regular PSA tests done, and when. Based on the latest research, the American Urological Association (AUA) age guidelines are that they do not recommend routine PSA screening for men 70 or older. This is because prostate cancer is normally very slow growing, and if you were to be diagnosed after 70, you will likely die of something else. Then you had the felon in the White House talking about “stage nine” cancer. Is he really so dumb? Guess he is as he tries to prove it nearly every time he opens his mouth. Talk about diminished.
Now is Biden diminished from what he was years ago? It is clear he is. Should the people around him have tried to hide that in order to have him run again, no! But the-then president’s hiding health issues is nothing new. Wilson was severely impaired and it is said his wife Edith ran the country for his last year in office. The same was said about Nancy Reagan when they hid Reagan’s Alzheimer’s. Kennedy hid his Addison’s disease and other infirmities, and Trump hid how sick he was from COVID, when being helicoptered to the hospital. Is it wrong to hide these things from the American public, yes, but clearly not unusual. Actually, the media is often complicit in this, which many said they were in Biden’s case. Then you have a guy like Jake Tapper who is happy to be complicit, so he can now write a book about it and make loads of money. Very sad.
I think the time has come in the case of Joe Biden, for us to just offer him and his family some love and prayers, and the hope he will be able to manage his cancer and live a long life. Then turn the page and deal with the things that will matter more to the lives of the American people today.
Those are the things the felon in the White House, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, along with the MAGA Congress, are trying to do to them. Things like taking away their healthcare, and thereby also causing the closure of some rural hospitals. Things like the mass firings of federal workers, including thousands of veterans. Things like making it harder for our veterans to access their healthcare by cutting services at the Veterans hospitals. Things like increasing costs for groceries, and other items, due to the felon’s ineffective use of tariffs. Things like seeing college costs go up, as foreign students who pay the full fare at most schools, are sent home or denied visas. Things like making it harder to file for social security by closing so many offices, and pretending to lower drug prices, but not really doing it. Things like cutting research looking for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, MS, HIV/AIDS, and a host of other diseases, which will hurt people for decades to come. Things like creating havoc in the world, and bowing down to dictators. Things like walking away from our allies and making the world a less safe place for all of us, including abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to his friend Putin. I always believed Putin has some dirt on him. Trump said Zelenskyy would be responsible for WW III. But it’s Trump who will be, if it happens. Then we must put a focus on the idiot who is secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., and whether he will allow the flu and covid vaccines, being readied for the fall, to be available in a timely manner. Will he continue to disparage all vaccines, and by doing so, cause deaths here, and around the world. Things like abandoning the fight against climate change and thereby screwing the planet and future generations.
These are the things the American public really needs to know about, and care about. It may have been wrong to hide Biden’s being diminished, but he is no longer in office, and he no longer impacts people’s lives on a daily basis. The felon in the WH does, and that is where the focus must be.
A first generation American from Queens, N.Y., Kameny was a decorated WWII veteran. With a prodigious 148 I.Q., he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University. In 1957 he was recruited by the Army Map Service, a pioneering agency in space exploration.
In 1953 in the wake of McCarthyism, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450 that prohibited homosexuals from military or civilian employment. Having nothing to do with workplace conduct, the Army learned that Kameny might be a homosexual. When confronted, he equivocated and was terminated. Unlike then thousands of other homosexuals terminated from government employment, Kameny fought back.
He took on the military and Civil Service Commission including being the first openly gay man to file an appeal about gay rights to the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped co-found and chair the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first gay rights organization in the nation’s capital.
He wrote letters to, among others, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He founded and chaired the Eastern Conference of Homophile Organization, the nation’s first regional gay organization.
In the 1960s homosexuality, even with a consenting adult in the privacy of one’s bedroom was criminal. The police entrapped and extorted gay men. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness. A bar could lose its license if there was more than one homosexual in their establishment. Homosexuals were considered dangerous, deviant and demented.
Kameny coined the phrase “Gay Is Good.” He organized picketing called Annual Reminders each July 4 from 1965 to 1969 at Independence Hall. The picketers were the first to call for gay equality. The 1965 Annual Reminder had 39 activists making it then the largest demonstration for gay rights. In the mid-1960s the country had an estimated 300 gay and lesbian activists.
He published a newsletter that became the Washington Blade, now the nation’s oldest LGBTQ weekly newspaper. Kameny and Barbara Gittings, the mother of the movement that demonstrated for the right to be heard at the 1971 American Psychiatric Association meeting. Their panel at the 1972 meeting with a masked psychiatrist using a pseudonym and voice modulator was so impactful that the APA created a panel to determine if homosexuality as a mental illness was based on science or discrimination. In 1973, that classification was removed.
He advised gays and lesbians who were the subject of discharge from federal government service. He identified test cases and referred them to the ACLU, Lambda Legal and other counsel. Slowly, but surely those cases began a process for LGBTQ equality.
His efforts led D.C. to be the first city to overturn its sodomy criminal laws. He helped found the first national LGBTQ organization, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. His efforts laid the groundwork for HRC and National LGBTQ Task Force.
After Stonewall in June 1969, he chaired a meeting of NY, Philadelphia and D.C. activists that authorized and helped organize to help remember Stonewall the first New York Pride Parade. He believed that Stonewall could be the movement’s Boston Tea Party. He marched in that 1970 parade holding a picket emblazoned with “Gay Is Good.”
He was the first out person to run for Congress as the D.C. delegate. Money left over from his campaign was used to fund the first gay rights television commercial. In July 1975, he was the first to be advised by the Civil Service Commission that it would eliminate homosexuality as a basis for not hiring or for firing a federal civilian employee. In 1977, he attended the White House’s first meeting with gays and lesbians.
Kameny died on Oct. 11, 2011, National Coming Out Day. He lived to see marriage equality approved in several states. He attended the signing by President Obama of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which enabled gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Kameny is buried in the Congressional Cemetery. On his tombstone is inscribed “Gay Is Good.” Over 70,000 of his documents are in the Library of Congress and picket signs from the pioneering demonstrations are housed in the Smithsonian Institution.
On May 21 LGBTQ national organizations gather in front of the Supreme Court. One hundred activists will each hold a candle for his 100th birthday. Fifteen national leaders will engage in picketing similar to the 1965 picketing at the White House and Independence Hall. They will honor Frank Kameny; celebrate the 10th anniversary of marriage equality (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015); and push back on those who would attempt to render us invisible, deny our history and undermine our equality. We will remember the nation’s loss when it fired a Harvard Ph.D. in astronomy because of his status as a homosexual. History repeats itself. This month the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to terminate transgender servicemembers solely because of their sexual orientation. How far we have come. How much farther we have to travel.
Malcolm Lazin is the national chair, Kameny 100. He is the executive director, LGBT History Month and executive producer of three LGBTQ documentaries including Gay Pioneers. He was an adjunct professor of LGBT History and Rights at New College of Florida. www.kameny100.org.
Opinions
Returning to Alcatraz: Memory through a queer lens
Trump would like to ‘rebuilt and reopen’ notorious island prison
When I arrived at Alcatraz Island, what I felt wasn’t curiosity — it was discomfort. Standing before such a photogenic landscape, something felt off. As if the place was trying to erase what it truly was: a mechanism of punishment, a machine built to control and define who should be excluded. I couldn’t walk those corridors without thinking about what this place represents for so many of us: a symbol of how the state has decided, time and again, that some lives matter less.
As a queer person, what struck me wasn’t just the past Alcatraz holds — but how that past is still alive in today’s policies. As I looked into the empty cells, I thought about the many LGBTQIA+ people who have been punished simply for existing. People like Frank Lucas Bolt, the first prisoner of Alcatraz — not convicted for violence, but for “sodomy,” a label the legal system used to persecute gay men.
He was not the only one. For decades, being gay or trans was enough to end up in a federal prison or a psychiatric hospital. Not for a crime, but for defying the norm. The legal and medical systems worked hand in hand to suppress any deviation from prescribed gender and sexuality. In prisons, queer people were subjected to physical punishment, solitary confinement, and even conversion therapy. Alcatraz was not an exception — it was one of the system’s most brutal epicenters.
But the queer memory of this place isn’t found in tourist brochures. To uncover it, you have to read between the lines, search through archives that are never taught in schools, and listen to those who still carry the scars. Walking among those walls, I realized that remembering isn’t enough — we have to contest the meaning of memory itself. What isn’t told, is repeated.
That’s why, when a few weeks ago President Trump said he’d like to “rebuild and reopen Alcatraz,” I didn’t take it as just another symbolic gesture. I took it as a warning. In times of crisis, punishment becomes an easy offer: lock them up, expel them, make them disappear. And in that narrative, queer, migrant, and racialized bodies are always the first to be targeted.
The danger isn’t just in the idea of a reopened prison, but in what it represents: The longing to return to a social order that was already deeply unjust. The nostalgia for “tough-on-crime” prisons is the same one that criminalizes unhoused people, persecutes migrants, and stigmatizes queer and trans youth in public spaces. Anyone who dreams of locking up more people isn’t thinking about justice — they’re thinking about control.
In 1969, a group of Native American activists occupied Alcatraz for over a year. They did it to denounce land theft and the government’s betrayal of treaties. During their occupation, they painted a message on the island’s water tower: “Peace and Freedom. Home of the Free Indian Land.” That gesture was a radical reclamation of space, a way of saying: this island can also be a place of resistance.
Alcatraz holds many layers. It was a high-security prison, yes, but it also became the stage for one of the most powerful acts of civil disobedience in the 20th century. That tension still lingers. The question is not just what happened at Alcatraz, but what we want it to represent today. A renewed model of punishment — or a site of memory that helps us prevent more harm?
As I walked its halls, I couldn’t stop thinking about the migrant detention centers that are still full today. About trans people held in inhumane conditions. About arbitrary detentions. About those of us who, like me, crossed borders just to survive. The distance between that Alcatraz and our present is not as wide as we’d like to believe. The walls may change, but punishment still operates on the same bodies.
Standing before the empty cells, I felt what many must have felt there: the weight of abandonment, the state’s mark upon their body, the feeling that their existence was a problem. But I also felt something else: conviction. The certainty that we will no longer walk into those spaces in silence. That we will not let ourselves be labeled as “mistakes” or “deviants.” That if they try to lock us up again, they will find us organized, with memory, with dignity.
Alcatraz does not need to be rebuilt. It needs to be understood. And we — queer, racialized, migrant communities — need to transform that understanding into action: to push back against hateful rhetoric, to protect those still living under threat, and to tell our full stories. Let no one be punished again for being who they are. Let history not become a locked cell once more.
The views expressed in this article are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, colleagues, or any affiliated organization. They are shared from a personal perspective shaped by lived experience and advocacy work.
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Frank Kameny’s legacy lives on
