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Comings & Goings
Houdart joins Out Leadership in key role
The Comings & 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].
The Comings & Goings column also invites LGBTQ+ college students to share their successes with us. If you have been elected to a student government position, gotten an exciting internship, or are graduating and beginning your career with a great job, let us know so we can share your success.
Congratulations to Fabrice Houdart on his new position as Managing Director, Global Equality Initiatives with Out Leadership. According to its website, “Out Leadership is a global LGBT+ business advisory organization that partners with the world’s most influential companies to build business opportunities, cultivate talent, and drive LGBT equality forward. We believe that LGBT+ inclusion positively impacts business results, and that including LGBT+ people at the most senior level of executive leadership builds business.”
Out Leadership CEO & Founder Todd Sears said, “We could not be more excited to have Fabrice joining as Managing Director, Global Equality Initiatives. 2020 is a big year for us as we celebrate 10 years in business. When I started Out Leadership in 2010, we were the first organization to focus on driving LGBT+ equality in business. We’ve seen this grow from a summit in New York to become a global movement. As we’ve evolved it has become apparent that businesses are now at the forefront in driving LGBT+ equality. ”
Upon accepting the position Houdart said, “Joining Out Leadership is the next logical step for me after spending the past decade building the economic and business case for LGBTI inclusion at the World Bank and the United Nations. In a global context of populism and nationalism, the private sector will be a key ally in keeping the momentum on LGBTI equality we have known since Stonewall. I look forward to contributing to build a global coalition of companies steered by Out Leadership to push for positive social change.”
Most recently, Houdart served as the Human Rights Officer at the United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Before that he worked at the World Bank in a number of roles.
Houdart has received a host of awards, including being named second on Yahoo Finance’s Top 30 LGBT+ Public Sector Leaders 2019.
Houdart earned his bachelor’s of business administration in Business and Economics from the University of Paris, Dauphine, Paris, France, and his MBA in International Business/Information Technology from American University in D.C.
Congratulations also to Tommy Wrenn, new Associate Director of Individual Giving at Resources for the Future (RFF), which works to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. He is leaving his current position with the Public Justice Foundation where he was Development Program Assistant. Upon accepting the position with RFF, Wrenn said, “Fundraising for Public Justice has been an incredible opportunity, especially over the last three years, and such a supportive environment of my professional development. I am looking forward to this next chapter, joining an incredible team that is growing and strengthening RFF’s nearly 70 years of independent, impartial research.”
Wrenn has held positions as Program Assistant with The Nexus Fund, Washington, D.C. and as a Young Fellow for Young Adult Outreach with Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) in D.C. He began his career in Washington as an intern in the White House.
He is a board member and trustee of the Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership and a board member of the Friends Committee on National Legislation. He is receiving the 2020 Outstanding Young Professional in Fundraising award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals International organization.
Tommy earned his bachelor’s in political science with minors in communication and music from Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C.
Congratulations also to Kevin McDuffie, Tyler Townsend and Bob Suppies the new owners of Aqua Grill in Rehoboth Beach, Del., and to Rick Hardy and David Lyons who bought Grub Market on Rehoboth Avenue in Rehoboth Beach and will reopen it in the spring as Coho’s Market and Grill.
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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