Local
Finance director, beloved soccer player Dan White dies at 57
Longtime Washingtonian once worked for Whitman-Walker
Arlington, Va., resident Dan White, an award-winning amateur soccer player and longtime supporter of the Federal Triangles Soccer Club, D.C.’s LGBTQ soccer league, who worked as a finance director for domestic and international nonprofit organizations for more than 30 years, died at his home on Dec. 22 of a heart attack. He was 57.
Friends and associates said White displayed a unique dedication, commitment, and affection for both the multitude of soccer tournaments and LGBTQ amateur participants he played with as well as for the nonprofit organizations for which he worked.
“Dan’s professional work was rooted in nonprofit finance,” said Nick Napolitano, a friend and associate with the Federal Triangles Soccer Club. “He worked at the Whitman-Walker Clinic’s Office of Finance for 15 years, rising from staff accountant to the level of finance director,” Napolitano said. According to White’s LinkedIn page, he worked at Whitman-Walker, now known as Whitman-Walker Health, from 1987 to 2002.
Cornelius Baker, who served as Whitman-Walker’s executive director from January 2000 to December 2004, said White worked closely with Whitman-Walker’s longtime executive director Jim Graham from the time White began working at Whitman-Walker in 1987. Graham left Whitman-Walker at the end of 1998 after winning election to the D.C. Council.
Baker said White’s skills in financial management were especially helpful in 2001, at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when major fundraising events, including Whitman-Walker’s annual AIDS Walk, were severely curtailed.
Following his 15-year tenure at Whitman-Walker, White served as finance director or finance manager for at least five other nonprofit organizations, including his most recent stint as finance and administration director for the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics, known as Jhpiego.
The program, which is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, provides global health experts who live and work in more than 40 developing countries who help improve the quality of health services for women and families, a write-up on its website says. White, among other things, oversaw the financial planning, management and reporting activities for the organization’s global health projects.
Prior to joining Jhpiego, White served as director of finance and administration for Mothers2Mothers, an international nonprofit group based in Cape Town, South Africa. Its website says it is dedicated to preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV by providing education and support for pregnant women and new mothers living with HIV.
White’s friend and soccer teammate Leslie Engleking said White worked out of the organization’s Cape Town and London offices from June 2018 to December 2019 to oversee its $28 million budget.
In earlier years, White served from 2004 to 2018 as associate director of finance and later as finance manager for the D.C. office of FHI 360, a human development organization that provides family planning and reproductive health services in 70 countries and all U.S. states.
In 2004, White served for 10 months as finance manager for U.S. Action, a D.C.-based social justice advocacy group, shortly after serving a year and a half as director of finance for the D.C.-based international group Center for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA), which advocates for the rights of women and children.
White was born and raised in Arlington, Va., where he graduated from Bishop O’Connell High School in 1980. He later received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, Md.
“He was proud to be a lifelong Washingtonian,” said Napolitano, who noted that White as an adult had lived in the D.C. neighborhoods of Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, and Columbia Heights before moving back to Arlington’s Crystal City neighborhood about two years ago.
Napolitano and Engleking, both former soccer teammates of White, and his longtime friend Laila Hirschfeld said White’s role as an amateur soccer player and his involvement with the Federal Triangles Soccer Club, for which he was the founding treasurer in 1990, were among the most important aspects of his life.
“Dan was one of the most talented players to ever step on the pitch for Federal Triangles Soccer Club,” Napolitano said. “He won the Golden Boot at the 2001 International Gay and Lesbian Football Association World Championships in London, and more often than not he was the goal leader on the many teams he played on, which included FTSC squads that traveled to Barcelona, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia,” according to Napolitano. The Golden Boot is an award given to a player who scores the most goals in a game or tournament.
White was also among the first inductees into the FTSC’s Hall of Fame in 2006, said Napolitano, who noted that White continued playing in various local soccer leagues until 2016, when a foot injury ended his playing endeavors.
“Dan managed to pack a tremendous amount of life into a short amount of time, and had traveled to almost every continent,” Hirschfeld said. “He loved good food and savored good wine,” she said, adding, “his favorite place was on the beach, especially the Outer Banks, drink in hand, surrounded by a small group of laughing friends. Which is how we, his chosen family, the family that loved and cherished him just as he was – a kind, loving, smart, funny, flirty, generous, successful, thoughtful, talented soul – will think of him always.”
Hirschfeld and other close friends said White is survived by his soccer fans and former team members and a long list of friends and chosen family members. They said that due to COVID-19 restrictions, a memorial celebration of White’s life will be postponed until later this year.
Per his request, he was to be cremated and his ashes will be scattered later this year in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Hirschfeld said. She said condolences in White’s name can be expressed with donations to Whitman-Walker Health, the local LGBTQ youth advocacy group SMYAL, and Team D.C., the LGBTQ sports organization of which the Federal Triangles Soccer Club is a part.
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.
District of Columbia
As mayor’s race takes shape, candidates endorse LGBTQ equality
Like nearly all recent D.C. elections, LGBTQ voters will be choosing a candidate for mayor in 2026 from a list of mostly strong LGBTQ rights supporters in the city’s June 16 primary.
As of March 30, the D.C. Board of Elections’ list of candidates who submitted the required number of petition signatures for the June 16 primary ballot included 10 mayoral candidates: nine Democrats and one Statehood Green Party candidate.
Among those candidates, six, all Democrats, have issued statements expressing strong support for LGBTQ rights, including the two leading Democratic contenders, former D.C. Council member Kenyan McDuffie and current Council member Janeese Lewis George, who represents Ward 4.
One of the lesser-known Democratic candidates who released an LGBTQ supportive statement, Rini Sampath, a cyber security consultant, told the Washington Blade she identifies as queer, becoming one of the first known LGBTQ D.C. mayoral candidates to gain access to a major party primary ballot.
“We’re living in an extremely diverse community, an extremely unique community,” she told the Blade. “And being able to self-label, self-identify as queer is something that I just want to take pride in.”
Similar to McDuffie and Lewis George, Sampath released statements to the Blade and the Capital Stonewall Democrats, the city’s largest LGBTQ local political group, expressing support for LGBTQ rights and outlining plans for LGBTQ supportive policies if elected mayor.
Although many D.C. LGBTQ activists have said they have yet to decide whom to support for mayor, those who have decided appear to be divided between McDuffie and Lewis George. Most D.C. political observers consider McDuffie and Lewis George to be the two leading candidates in the mayoral race.
The other Democratic mayoral contenders who have released statements expressing support on LGBTQ issues include Gary Goodweather, a local real estate manager and developer who has been actively campaigning at LGBTQ events; Vincent Orange, a former At-Large and Ward 5 D.C. Council member; and Kathy Henderson, a longtime Ward 5 community activist and elected Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner.
The remaining two Democratic mayoral candidates, Hope Solomon, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security contractor and Dupont Circle civic activist; and Ernest Johnson, a real estate broker and Ward 1 community activist, did not respond to inquiries from the Blade and Capital Stonewall Democrats seeking information about their position on LGBTQ related issues.
Robert Gross, the Statehood Green Party candidate who is running unopposed in the June 16 primary, also didn’t respond to inquires from the Blade about his position on LGBTQ issues.
D.C. Board of Elections records show that at least five Republican candidates filed papers to run for mayor in the June 16 GOP primary, but none of them remained as candidates as of March 30, when the election board issued its updated candidate list.
Just one of the five Republican candidates replied to an email message from the Washington Blade sent to all mayoral candidates in early March seeking their position on LGBTQ issues. That candidate, Esa Muhammad, whose website identifies him as an engineer, consultant, and local business owner, sent a reply expressing opposition to LGBTQ rights.
“Unfortunately, I do not support LGBTQ because The God only created 2 genders (Adam/Eve),” he wrote. “Anyway, I will be fair to you all despite your sick way of looking at life,” he stated.
Capital Stonewall Democrats President Stevie McCarty said his group sent questionnaires to all the Democratic mayoral candidates as well as to Democrats running for other offices such as D.C. Council. Information posted on the group’s website shows only four of the mayoral candidates returned a complete questionnaire: McDuffie, Lewis George, Goodweather, and Sampath.
Each of them provides detailed information of their plans for supporting LGBTQ policies if elected and their record of support on LGBTQ issues. McCarty said the questionnaire responses for all candidates that submitted them can be accessed at outvotedc.org.
He said Capital Stonewall Democrats will hold virtual LGBTQ forums in April, including a mayoral forum on April 8. He said the group’s members will vote on the candidate endorsements online from April 20 through May 11, and the group expects to announce its endorsements May 14.
GLAA DC, formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, has issued candidate ratings for most D.C. elections since the 1970s, and the nonpartisan LGBTQ group was expected to issue ratings for mayoral candidates this year. But like in recent years, the group is expected to base its ratings on mostly non-LGBTQ issues, with a progressive, left-leaning perspective, according to a nine-page “Back to Basics GLAA Policy Brief 2026” that the group released in March.
The LGBTQ activists who are backing McDuffie or Lewis George appear to be gravitating to the two based on their political leanings separate from LGBTQ issues, just like voters in general. Lewis George, who identifies as a democratic socialist, is popular among LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ “progressives.”
McDuffie, who is seen as a more moderate candidate along the lines of current D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, is being supported by LGBTQ activists who hold those views, some of whom currently work in the Bowser administration.
Among Lewis George’s LGBTQ supporters are longtime Ward 8 community leader Philip Pannell and former Capital Stonewall Democrats president Howard Garrett. Among the LGBTQ McDuffie backers are longtime D.C. Democratic activists John Fanning and David Meadows.
Longtime D.C. LGBTQ Democratic Party activist Peter Rosenstein, who is supporting McDuffie, has raised concerns about Lewis George’s backing by the national group Democratic Socialists of America. In Facebook postings, Rosenstein points to the Democratic Socialists of America’s opposition to Israel as a country and said it is viewed by many in the Jewish community as promoting antisemitism. He has criticized Lewis George for not speaking out against that and for accepting the DSA’s endorsement.
In an interview with the Blade, Lewis George strongly disputed that assessment, saying she has been a strong ally and supporter of the Jewish community.
“I’m a member of the Metro DSA here in D.C. that I work with to fight for labor and for tenant rights,” she said. “I’m also a member of the Democratic Party,” she added, saying, “There are things that the Democratic Party does that I don’t agree with. There are things that the national DSA does that I don’t agree with. That’s a group that I work with.”
“But I want to be clear that I am running for mayor to represent all of our community, and that includes our amazing and historical Jewish community here in D.C.,” she said. “I have had the amazing opportunity to spend time at synagogues and talking to Jewish leaders and groups and institutions. And so, there should be no worry here.”
Following are short excerpts from the detailed statements five of the nine Democratic mayoral candidates submitted to the Capital Stonewall Democrats or the Washington Blade.
Kenyan McDuffie: “As mayor, every piece of legislation I sign, craft, or endorse should also encompass the interest and input of the LGBTQ community members and advocates…From housing to health care and everything in between… We have a dire crisis regarding the rise in homelessness especially among the youth in our LGBTQ communities. In my administration that simply cannot be the status quo and will not be…I have been a consistent champion for our LGBTQ community and will remain so as Mayor of D.C.’
Janeese Lewis George: “As mayor, I will protect our LGBTQ+ neighbors against federal attacks on their identity, including their health care…On the Council I have been a strong supporter of pro-LGBTQ+ bills, including making D.C. a sanctuary for people seeking gender-affirming health care as well as addressing discrimination and harassment in nightlife and hospitality…And as mayor, I am prepared to move up and win those fights – a fight for D.C. statehood, a fight for our true economy, and a real opportunity to uplift our Black queer and trans youth.”
Gary Goodweather: “A Goodweather administration will defend every D.C. law protecting LGBTQ residents. I will establish a Defend DC office to coordinate the District’s legal and public response to federal overreach, with LGBTQ+ protections explicitly within its mandate…My affordable D.C. plan will produce 50,000 new homes with 36,000 affordable units, and I will ensure LGBTQ+ youth housing programs are funded as a budget priority.”
Rini Sampath: “I am an immigrant, proud queer woman, and a 10-year resident of Washington, D.C…For me, LGBTQ+ voters including transgender and nonbinary residents, are not a separate or symbolic constituency; they are a core part of a broader, multiracial, cross-ward coalition rooted in in equity and opportunity.”
Vincent Orange: “I have a long and consistent record of supporting LGBTQ+ equality and inclusion in the District of Columbia, grounded in both policy and personal commitment. As the District’s Democratic Committeeman from 2006 to 2015, I publicly supported marriage equality and voted accordingly … During my time on the D.C. Council, I worked to advance protections for LGBTQ+ residents, including authoring and passing legislation to prohibit discrimination against transgender individuals in the workplace.”
Kathy Henderson: Kathy Henderson has maintained a consistent record of treating all members of the community with dignity, compassion, and respect, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, identity, political party, national origin, or ideology. Kathy Henderson embraced the late Wanda Alston as a colleague and good friend…Alston was the first director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs and Henderson helped to organize and facilitate the first LGBTQ citizens summit.”
Local
D.C.’s affirming congregations to mark Holy Week, Easter
Dignity Washington among groups holding events
LGBTQ-friendly congregations in the D.C. area this week are marking Easter and Holy Week.
The Metropolitan Community Church of Washington, D.C., located in Mount Vernon Square, holds both online and in-person services.
An online-only Good Friday service will take place on April 3 at 7 p.m. In person or online Resurrection Sunday services will take place on April 5 at 10:30 a.m.
Dignity Washington, an LGBTQ Catholic group, is also holding Holy Week and Easter events.
The group on March 29 held a Palm Sunday prayer event. Dignity Washington on April 5 will hold a Mass at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church at 6 p.m. It will be livestreamed on Facebook.
Foundry United Methodist Church holds two Easter Sunday services at 9 and 11:15 a.m.
Riverside Baptist Church, located in Southwest Washington, is an “Inclusive, Multicultural, Christ-Centered” congregation that also offers Holy Week and Easter activities.
The church on Good Friday at 3 p.m. is holding an outreach period in which they will clean up the neighborhood. Easter Sunday services will be held at 9:45 a.m., starting with a musical prelude, followed by services.
The church offers weekly “Wednesday Witness,” a youth and safety zone drop-in, serving as a safe space for the students of Jefferson Middle School and the community. It takes place from 3-5 p.m.
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center offers a comprehensive list of inclusive faith communities on its website. The Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists offers a list of churches partnered with their organization that are inclusive and mainly Baptist, but the group does feature churches of other denominations.
The 18th National Rainbow Seder took place at the Human Rights Campaign on March 29. The sold out event is the country’s largest Passover Seder for the Jewish LGBTQ community.
Organizations behind the event included Bet Mishpachah, a local D.C. LGBTQ synagogue that Rabbi Jake Singer-Beilin leads, and GLOE, an Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center program that sponsors events for the queer Jewish community. The theme for this year’s Seder was “Liberation for All Who Journey: Remembering, Resisting, Rebuilding.” Rabbis Atara Cohen, Koach Frazier, and Avigayil Halpern led it.
The Seder honored the late GLOE co-chair Michael Singer. Singer also served on the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center’s board.
“This Seder is both a celebration of how far we have come and a call to continue building a more just and inclusive world.” Bet Mishpachah Executive Director Joshua Maxey told the Washington Blade.
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