The D.C.-based LGBTQ youth services organization SMYAL was founded in 1984.

(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key, Doug Hinckle, Kristi Gasaway, Yevin Yum, Clint Steib, Jonathan Ellis, Pete Exis, Erin Webber and Damien Salas)

Founded in 1984 by a small group of volunteer gay and lesbian activists who recognized the need for a safe place for LGBTQ youth to meet and receive support, the group SMYAL has evolved over the past 40 years into one of the nation’s largest organizations providing a wide range of support, including housing and mental health counseling, for LGBTQ youth in the D.C. metro area.

SMYAL’s work over its 40-year history and its plans for the future were expected to be highlighted and celebrated at its annual fundraising brunch scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 21 at D.C.’s Marriott Marquis Hotel. SMYAL says the event will be hosted by a “star-studded group,” including MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart.

“What a profound moment and opportunity to be able to be here while celebrating the 40th anniversary,” said Erin Whelan, who began her role as SMYAL’s executive director in September 2022. “It’s an exciting time for us,” Whelan told the Blade in a Sept. 11 interview along with SMYAL’s Director of Communications Hancie Stokes.

“We just finished a strategic plan,” Whelan said. “Not only are we reflecting on the previous 40 years but really looking to the next three to five years,” she said, adding that the plan calls for continuing SMYAL’s growth, which accelerated  over the past four or five years.

Whelan and Stokes spoke with the Washington Blade at SMYAL’s headquarters and LGBTQ youth drop-in center in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. SMYAL’s ability to purchase that building in 1997 through financial support from the community, has played an important role in SMYAL’s history, according to Whelan and Stokes.

The two-story building consists of two attached row houses that it has converted into offices and meeting space.

The two pointed to information posted on the SMYAL website, including information from D.C.’s Rainbow History Project, which tells the story of SMYAL’s founding in 1984. It was a time when many LGBTQ youth faced hardship and discrimination as well as challenges from their families, some of whom were unaccepting of their kids who thought about identifying as gay, lesbian or gender nonconforming.

Local gay activist and attorney Bart Church, one of SMYAL’s co-founders, told fellow activists that he was prompted to help launch an LGBTQ youth advocacy group after learning that gender nonconforming youth, including some who “crossed dressed” and identified as a gender other than their birth gender, were being incarcerated in D.C.’s St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital.

“Recognizing that that these young people were not mentally ill, but instead needed  programs that were safe and affirming to explore their identities, Bart and several other allied community members formed a group called SMYAL,” a statement released by SMYAL says. It says Church and other founders named the group the Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League.

“We met at first at Bart’s apartment,” said another co-founder, Joe Izzo, who later worked for many years as a mental health counselor at D.C.’s Whitman-Walker Clinic. In addition to the incarceration of some of the youth at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Izzo said the SMYAL founders were concerned about the impact of the AIDS epidemic on gay youth, who may not have been informed about safer sex practices.

D.C. gay activist and economist Chuck Goldfarb, who said he became involved as a SMYAL volunteer in 1986, said he recalls hearing from gay and lesbian social workers who also became involved with SMYAL “that a number of youths who were, in the term they used, cross dressing, were getting locked up in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital psychiatric ward.”

“And Bart Church called together people he knew were service providers and said let’s get together and do something about it,” Goldard told the Blade. “And the first thing they started doing was to put together a referral list of LGBT supportive therapists and counselors,” according to Goldfarb, who could be called to help LGBT youth, and their families address issues such as sexual orientation and gender identity.

Among the original group of founders credited with helping to transform SMYAL into a larger, more comprehensive organization was Stephan Wade, who developed a training program and led a needs assessment effort. The assessment, among other things, determined that what LGBT youth at that time most needed was a safe place to meet and socialize with others like themselves, the SMYAL write-up says.

“Within three years, SMYAL established a well-respected program of youth socialization and education  as well as a training program for adult professionals, with outreach to schools, runaway shelters, and juvenile correctional facilities,” the write-up says. “Many individuals contributed to the SMYAL program, but it was Stephan Wade’s expertise and leadership that turned a plan into reality,” it says. The write-up says Wade died of AIDS-related complications in 1995.

With Wade and his fellow volunteers putting in place SMYAL’s first drop-in center for LGBTQ youth and the other programs supported by volunteer counselors and other professionals, SMYAL hired its first full-time staff member in 1989, the write-up says.

Stokes points out that SMYAL drew considerable media attention in 1990 when vocal opposition surfaced to ads SMYAL had placed in high school newspapers announcing its services for LGBT youth, which were initially approved by school officials. The opposition, coming from some parents and conservative advocates opposed to LGBTQ rights, in the long run may have generated attention to SMYAL and its programs that prompted others to support SMYAL including financially.

The SMYAL write-up says the first annual fundraising brunch, which is the organization’s largest fundraising event, began in 2003. Stokes said in the following years SMYAL has received support from local foundations and through a major individual donor program as well as from grants from the D.C. government that support specific SMYAL programs.

Stokes and Whelan also point out that in 2013 SMYAL changed its name from Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League to Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders, which kept the SMYAL initials. The two said the change reflects SMYAL’s significant expansion of its services beyond its initial core program of providing a safe meeting space for LGBTQ youth.

The two note that in 2017 SMYAL began its housing program for homeless LGBTQ youth; in 2019 it launched its Little SMYALs program, which provides services for youth between the ages of 6 and 12 and their families. And in 2021 SMYAL launched its Clinical Services program, which provides mental health counseling for LGBTQ youth.

Stokes and Whelan said the Little SMYALs program involves parents bringing in their kids mostly to a Saturday gathering where the kids meet, socialize, and play games or do artwork. The two said in the age range of 6 to 12, the Little SMYALers, as they are called, are mostly dealing with their gender identity rather than sexual orientation.

“Kids are expressing to their parents or caregivers that they might feel different,” Whelan said. “Often times that’s expressing that they don’t feel like they are the gender in which they were born. And so, the parents are starting to talk with that youth about what that is.”

Stokes said the Little SMYALs program reaches out to parents as well as the youth. “How do we equip parents to be there to support and believe them when they come out,” is a question that Stokes said SMYAL tries to address. “How do you make sure you are a safe resource when your young person comes to you and says this is who I am? We want people to see you fully and authentically.”

Stokes and Whelan said SMYAL currently has a staff of about 43 and an annual budget of $5.1 million. They said about 90 families are currently enrolled in the Little SMYALs program, with about 30 families with their kids attending on a monthly basis. They said the youth ages 13 through high school age come at least twice a week after school hours and on Saturdays.

“And they do all sorts of things from sharing, just talking, listening to music, eating, and just being in community with each other,” Whelan said of the older kids. Stokes noted that SMYAL also organizes events for the older youth, including a Pride Prom for youth “who might not feel comfortable bringing their partner of choice to their school’s prom.”

The two said SMYAL also organizes an annual activist summit for youth interested in becoming leaders and organizers. They said about 90 youth attended this year’s summit. 

“I think one thing that I’m really proud of is that we started as a grassroots organization out of a need in our community,” Whelan said. “And I think through the 40 years that we’ve been in existence, we continue to really anchor in what are the most pressing needs of our communities,” she said. 

Further information about SMYAL’s programs and the upcoming brunch can be accessed at smyal.org.

It’s no surprise that the fall movie landscape finds an unusually large number of films – most of them documentaries – about trans people and the challenges they face in trying to achieve an identity that matches their own sense of self. 

Transgender rights or even acceptance have never been in such a precarious place within the American political landscape since queer rights were acknowledged at all in the mainstream conversation. After eight years of ramped-up efforts by anti-trans activists to essentially legislate them out of legal existence, trans people find themselves facing a divisive and uncomfortably close election that will likely have an existential impact on their future, accompanied by persistent and vocal efforts by the conservative right-wing crowd to ostracize and stigmatize them within public perception. They’re not the only target, but they are the most vulnerable one – especially within the evangelical strongholds that might swing the election one way or the other – and that means a lot of conservative crosshairs are trained directly on them.

It’s a position they’re used to, unfortunately, which is precisely why there are so many erudite and artistic voices within the trans community emerging, prepared by years of experience and education gained from dealing with persistent transphobic dogma in American culture, to illuminate the trans experience and push back against the efforts of political opportunists by letting their stories speak for themselves. Surely there is no weapon against hatred more potent than empathy – once we recognize our own reflection in those we demonize, it’s hard to keep ourselves from recognizing our shared humanity, too – and perhaps no more potent way of conveying it than through the most visceral artistic medium of all: filmmaking

Particularly timely, in the wake of an Olympics marked by controversy over the participation of Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting in the women’s competition, is “Unfightable,” from producer/director Marc J. Perez. Offering up a harrowing, heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring portrait of Alana McLaughlin – a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant who, following gender transition, turned female MMA fighter only to face resistance and transphobic prejudice within the rarified cultural microcosm of professional sports – while also taking a deep dive into the world of  Mixed Martial Arts and the starkly divided attitudes of those who work within it, it aims to turn one person’s trans experience into a metaphor for the struggle of an entire community to be recognized and accepted on its own terms. For the most part, it succeeds.

Unlike many such biography-heavy documentaries, “Unfightable” allows its subject – the charismatic and outspoken McLaughlin, whose presence rightly dominates the film and leaves the most lingering impression – to narrate her own story, without interpretation or commentary from “talking head” experts. From the grim-but-all-too-familiar story of her upbringing in a deeply religious family (and yes, conversion “therapy” was involved) through her struggle to define her identity via a grueling military career, her eventual transition, and her emergence as only the second transfeminine competitor in the professional MMA arena and beyond, Perez treats most of the movie’s narrative thrust like an extended one-on-one interview, in which McLaughlin delivers the story as she experienced it. This one-on-one honest expression is effectively counterpointed by the rhetoric of other MMA personalities who participated in the film, some of which is shockingly transphobic despite protestations of having “nothing against” trans people.

At the same time, the film acknowledges and amplifies supportive voices within the MMA, whose efforts to bring McLaughlin into the fold were not only successful, but ultimately led to her victorious 2021 match against French fighter Celine Provost. It’s a tale that hits all the touchstone marks of queer/trans experience for those whose lives can’t really begin until they break free of their oppressive origins, and whose fight to claim an authentic life for themself is frequently waged against both the families who ostensibly love them and the prejudices of a society eager to condemn anything that deviates from the perceived “norm”. Naturally, as a story of individual determination, self-acceptance, and success against the odds, its main agenda is to draw you in and lift you up; but it does so while still driving home the point about how far the road still stretches ahead before trans athletes – and by extension, trans people in general – are afforded the same legitimacy as everyone else.

To ensure that reality is never forgotten or taken lightly, we are offered some pretty egregious examples; from prominent fighters who insist they “have no problem” with trans people as a preface for their transphobic beliefs about trans athletes, to McLaughlin’s long wait before finding another MMA pro who was willing to fight her we are confronted with a pattern of prejudice blocking her path forward. And though it documents her triumph, it reminds us that three years later, despite her accomplishments, she has yet to find another MMA pro willing to give her another bout.

If nothing else, though, “Unfightable” underscores a shift in attitudes that reflects the progress – however slow or maddeningly hard-won it may be – of trans people carving out space for themselves in a social environment still largely hostile to their success or even their participation. As McLaughlin’s journey illustrates, it takes dogged persistence and a not-insignificant level of righteous anger to even pierce the skin of the systemic transphobia that still opposes the involvement of people like her in sports; her experience also bears witness to the emboldened bigotry that has doubled-down on its opposition to trans acceptance since the 2016 election of a certain former president who is now seeking a second chance of his own – highlighting the dire consequences at stake for the trans community (and, let’s face it, the entire queer community alongside every other group deplored and marginalized by his followers) should his efforts toward a comeback prove successful.

Yet as grim an outlook as it may acknowledge, “Unfightable” doesn’t leave viewers with a belief in sure defeat; in the toughness of its subject – who is, as it proudly makes clear, a veteran of combat much more directly dangerous than anything she will ever encounter in the ring – and her refusal to simply give up and go away, it kindles in us the same kind of dogged resistance that fueled her own transcendence of a toxic personal history and allowed her to assert her identity –  triumphantly so, despite the transphobia that would have kept her forever from the prize.

That’s a spirit of determination that we all could use to help drive us to victory at the polls come November. Like Alana McLaughlin, we have neither the desire nor the ability to go back to the way our lives were before, and Perez’s documentary helps us believe we have the strength to keep it from happening.

“Unfightable” opened for a limited release in New York on Sept. 13 and begins another in Los Angeles on Sept. 20. It will air on ViX, the leading Spanish-language streaming service in the world, and in English on Fuse TV, following its theatrical run.