Local
Comings & Goings
Longtime Fox 5 anchor Will Thomas lands at Sotheby’s
The ‘Comings & Goings’ column chronicles important life changes of Blade readers.
The Comings and Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at [email protected].
Sam McClure (Photo courtesy of McClure)
Congratulations to Sam McClure who is the new director at the LGBT Health Resource Center of Chase Brexton Health Care. The Center’s mission is to provide health information and resources to Baltimore’s LGBT community. Patrick Mutch, president and CEO said of McClure, “We were impressed by Sam’s dedication to the LGBT community, and her understanding of the current challenges its members face in accessing welcoming health care and other essential resources. We welcome her to the Chase Brexton team and know she will carry on the important work that our LGBT Health Resource Center does each day.”
Upon taking her new job McClure said, “Wellness means more than access to medical treatment when it’s needed. It’s also about individuals having the ability to live well and sustain themselves and their families. LGBTQ people can face barriers when trying to do this and some of them are multiplied and magnified by a shortage of informed and affirming health care providers. Chase Brexton’s LGBT Health Resource Center is leading from this intersection of needs. I’m looking forward to leading the center’s efforts to improve healthcare access and outcomes for all LGBTQ people.” Among her first priorities will be meeting local LGBTQ community leaders in Baltimore and building on the center’s existing relationships and partnerships.
In her previous role, she was senior vice president of the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, where she led affiliate relations, external affairs, public policy and advocacy, and supplier diversity teams, as well as serving as part of the organization’s executive leadership team.
McClure is a nationally recognized keynote speaker, commentator, panelist, and a subject matter expert on LGBTQ Economic Development. An award-winning strategist, she created the LGBT Business Builder initiative (a collaboration between the NGLCC and the U.S. Small Business Administration) and built local collaboration models in 13 cities. The program won a Bright Idea Award from Harvard University.
Congratulations also to Will Thomas who is joining TTR Sotheby’s International Realty. Prior to working in real estate full-time, Thomas was an Emmy Award-winning journalist and anchor on Fox 5. At Fox he helped re-launch the weeknight 11 o’clock newscast as co-anchor and developed a three anchor format for evening newscasts. He created signature on-air segments including “Will You Eat There” that focused on the D.C. region’s restaurant scene.
Thomas began his career after graduation having won first place in the national William Randolph Hearst competition during his last semester in school. He first worked at the ABC affiliate in Albuquerque, N.M., and then became an anchor-reporter at the CBS station in Austin, Texas. He was then wooed by Fox stations in Los Angeles and D.C. and, as we know, he chose D.C. When Thomas came to D.C., the station was making moves to hire younger people to infuse more energy into the newscasts. He soon received anchoring opportunities and within a couple of years became the weekend evening anchor.
Thomas said, “After a 20-year run at Fox 5, choosing to leave the station was a very difficult decision but one I did for family reasons.” He added, “I first moved to the nation’s capital thinking it would be a stopover in my career but fell in love with the Washington metropolitan area and its people.”
Thomas noted, “I am not saying goodbye to broadcasting altogether. I have created a digital studio in the District to file reports on luxury real estate including my own client listings, topical news about real estate, finance, design, lifestyle and philanthropy. I will invite my colleagues to appear to talk about some of Sotheby’s other prestigious listings.”
Will Thomas (Photo courtesy of Thomas)
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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