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Making Reconstructing Judaism work for all

Movement’s new director of diversity on overcoming racism, homophobia

Published

5 years ago

February 18, 2021

Kathi Wolfe

Sandra Lawson, gay news, Washington Blade, Reconstructing Judaism — Rabbi **Sandra Lawson** (left) is Reconstructing Judaism’s inaugural director of racial diversity, equity and inclusion. She’s pictured here with her wife **Susan Hurrey**. (Photo courtesy Lawson)

When you’re a kid, you often have no idea what shape your life will take.

Growing up in Missouri in a military, Christian, but not religious, family, Rabbi Sandra Lawson wouldn’t have thought that she would become a rabbi.

Yet in March, Lawson, who is Black, queer, an activist, social media pioneer, vegan, a veteran, and a musician, will become Reconstructing Judaism’s inaugural director of racial diversity, equity and inclusion. (Reconstructing Judaism is the central organization of the Reconstructionist movement of Judaism.)

“Reckoning with racism — both systemic and personal — is one of the moral demands of our time,” Rabbi Deborah Waxman, president of Reconstructing Judaism, said in a statement, “Sandra has the substance, the experience, the passion and the compassion to help lead our movement in this challenging and necessary work.”

Lawson, 51, has done more in her life than a hundred have done in theirs. In a lengthy telephone interview, she talked to the Blade about her life.

“My Dad was in the military,” Lawson said, “he’d grown up dirt poor.”

Her family had some rough patches. Her parents’ marriage was in trouble. Though they weren’t religious, her mother took her to church a few times. “The services were too long! The minister said homophobic things,” she said.

Her parents divorced. “For a few years, my brother and I weren’t in a good space,” Lawson said.

Lawson went to college but she found that she wasn’t able to focus. “I dropped out,” she said, “I took my 20-year-old self and enlisted in the military.”

Lawson didn’t know it then but this was the best thing she could have done. “In the military, I learned to plan and accomplish things,” she said.

She enlisted in the U.S. Army before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” An instructor in officer school, who was gay, went through the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy,” Lawson said, “We asked questions. It was ridiculous, she had no answers.”

Lawson said that she couldn’t let people know an important part of herself. “I couldn’t trust people except for other gay people,” she said. “You developed a code to let other people know that you were queer.”

Lawson was out to her father who was supportive. Don’t worry about being the only gay person, he told her. “He believed women should do what they want to have relationships and a successful career,” Lawson said.

While in the military, Lawson was a Military Police officer. She investigated cases of domestic violence and child abuse. “I was most afraid for the children,” Lawson said, “because they are so helpless.”

Sometimes Lawson broke up bar fights. Often, she worked to deescalate situations. “I was on bases like Fort Bragg. I was like a small town sheriff,” she said.

One case involved a couple and a dildo. A husband was upset because there was a dildo in his wife’s drawer. The husband and wife were fighting aggressively. “There was no winning here,” Lawson said. “We called in a therapist who saw them by herself. Then I was called in when the couple was fighting again. They knew me by now.”

Lawson was called in on another case because a wife set her husband’s clothes on fire in the front yard. “I had to explain to them: ‘I understand you’re mad. But you can’t set fire to military property.’”

In the Army, Lawson learned that it’s good to be physically fit and how to keep focused. She became interested in becoming a personal trainer. “I was good at it, and I made money from it,” she said.

Lawson pursued her education along with her military service and personal training business. She earned a bachelor’s in Sociology from Saint Leo University and a master’s in Sociology from Clark Atlanta University.

In her personal training business, Lawson had Jewish clients and a Jewish girlfriend. Her girlfriend’s family welcomed her to their Shabbat dinners. One of her clients was Rabbi Joshua Lesser. Today, Lawson and Lesser are close friends. After she asked him about Judaism, Lesser invited her to visit his synagogue, Congregation Bet Haverim (CBH).

Lawson worried that CBH might treat her differently because she’s Black. But this was far from the case as the Congregation was welcoming.

“There was this prayer called a Prayer for the End of Hiding, which begins, ‘We as gay and lesbian Jews…,’” Lawson writes on her website, “and the entire community was saying this prayer, even the straight folks.”

Over time, CBH became Lawson’s spiritual home. She converted to Judaism in 2004. Yet, Lawson doesn’t like the term converted. She sees the term “as a way to separate out people who are different in the Jewish community,” she writes on her website.

Her mother told Lawson that the earliest person in her family to come to America was from Ethiopia and a Jew.

“I feel like I didn’t so much convert as get in touch with my roots,” she said.
Her graduate study gave Lawson a background in sociology and research. “I had a better understanding of race and class,” she noted.

Lawson became involved in interfaith community organizing. She wanted to be a bridge between her identities and communities – Black, queer and Jewish. Lawson felt she could do this more effectively if she had the title “rabbi,” and she wanted to raise awareness of racial and ethnic diversity in the Jewish community.

Lawson is a 2018 Reconstructionist Rabbinical College graduate and was ordained as a rabbi in the same year. Since 2018, she has served as Associate Chaplain for Jewish Life at Elon University. She lives with her wife Susan Hurrey and their dogs Simon, Bridget, and Izzy in Burlington, N.C.

The Jewish community hasn’t come to grips with its white privilege, Lawson said. “My hope is that the Jewish community will acknowledge its racism,” she said. “You can’t work against racism in your community if you don’t acknowledge that it exists.”

Jews of color comprise at least 12 to 15 percent of American Jewry, according to a study released in 2019 by the Jews of Color Initiative. Yet, Lawson and other Jews of color experience racial bias in the Jewish community.

Lawson spoke of one example of the racism that she’s experienced. Once, after she’d graduated from rabbinical school, she interviewed with a congregation’s search committee. “People recommended me,” Lawson said, “yet the committee’s president called me. He said four people who held the purse strings wouldn’t come to my interview. They weren’t ready for a Black rabbi.”

Of course, there’s still homophobia now. But most progressive congregations don’t think much, if anything, about it now – if they have a lesbian, gay or bisexual rabbi, Lawson said.

“It’s different for transgender rabbis,” Lawson added, “they face much more severe discrimination.”

But in the 1990s, queer rabbis who applied for jobs encountered homophobia. Training was put in place and queer people were put in leadership positions to combat the homophobia, Lawson said.

Black and brown rabbis need to be put in leadership positions, Lawson said, so that Jews of color who are rabbis don’t seem to be a novelty.

Just because you’ve read an anti-racist book or taken a class doesn’t mean that your struggle against racism has ended. One day one of Lawson’s friends called her. “She’s a white woman – a rabbi in Ferguson, Missouri – an ally. She said people asked her, ‘how can we be anti-racist?,’” Lawson said. “She told them, ‘Undoing white supremacy is hard work. It’s daily – day in and day out.’”

Lawson is creating an inclusive, non-profit, online-only (for now) congregation. Its name is “Kol HaPanim,” she told the Blade, “Hebrew for ‘all the faces.’”

Judaism is a religion of doing, Lawson said, “believing comes later.”

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Memorial for groundbreaking bisexual activist set for May 2

Loraine Hutchins remembered as a ‘force of nature’

Published

3 weeks ago

April 23, 2026

Emma Cieslik

Loraine Hutchins died last year. (File photo courtesy of Hutchins)

The Montgomery County Pride Center will host a celebration honoring the life and legacy of Loraine Hutchins, Ph.D., on May 2. People are invited to attend the onsite memorial or a livestream event. The on-site event will begin at 10 a.m. with a meet-and-greet mixer before moving into a memorial service around the theme “Loraine a Force of Nature!” at 11 a.m., a panel talk at 12 p.m., break out sessions for artists, academics, and activists to build on her legacy at 1 p.m. and a closing reception at 2 p.m.

Attendees are encouraged to register for the on-site memorial gathering or the livestreamed memorial. The goal of this event is also to collect stories and memories of Loraine. Attendees and others can share their stories at padlet.com.

An obituary for Hutchins was published in the Bladelast Nov. 24, where people can learn more about her activism in the bisexual community. A private service for friends and family was held in December but this memorial service is open to all.

Alongside her groundbreaking work organizing for U.S. bisexual rights and liberation including co-editing “Bi Any Other Name: BIsexual People Speak Out” (1991), she also integrated faith into her sexual education and advocacy work. Her 2001 doctoral dissertation, “Erotic Rites: A Cultural Analysis of Contemporary U.S. Sacred Sexuality Traditions and Trends,” offered a pointed queer and feminist analysis to sex-neutral and sex-positive spiritual traditions in the United States. Her thesis was also groundbreaking in exploring the intersections between sex workers and those in caregiving professionals, including spiritual ones.

In an oral history interview conducted by Michelle Mueller back in August 2023, Hutchins described herself as a “priestess without a congregation.” While she has occasionally had a sense of community and feels part of a group of loving people, she admitted that “I don’t feel like we have the shape or the purpose that we need.”

“I’ve often experienced being the Cassandra in the room, the Cassandra in the community. Somebody who’s kind of way out there ahead, thinking through the strategic action points that my community hasn’t gotten to yet, and getting a lot of resistance and hostile responses from people who are frightened by dissent and conflict and not ready for the changes we have to make to survive,” she said.

“For somebody who’s bisexual in an out political way and who’s been a spokesperson for the polyamory movement in an out political way, it’s very exposing. And it’s very important to me to be able to try to explain and help other people understand the connection between spirituality and sexuality,” she explained citing how even as a graduate student she was “exploring how to feel erotic and spiritual, and not feel them in conflict with each other in my own spiritual contemplative life and my own sensual body awareness of being alive in the world.”

“Every religion has a sense of sacred sexuality. It’s just they put a lot of boundaries and regulations on it, and if we have a spiritual practice that is totally affirming of women’s priesthood and of gay people, queer people’s ability to minister to everyone and to be ministered to be everyone, what does that do to the gender of God, or our understanding of how we practice our spirituality and our sexuality in community and privately?”

“There’s no easy answer,” she concludes, and she continued to grapple with these questions throughout her life, co-editing another seminal text, “Sexuality, Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual, Pansexual, and Polysexual Perspectives,” published in 2012. Her work blending spiritual and queer liberation remains groundbreaking to this day.

Rev. Eric Eldritch, a local community organizer and ordained Pagan minister with Circle Sanctuary who has worked for decades with the DC Center’s Center Faith to organize the Pride Interfaith Service, is eager to highlight this element of her legacy at the memorial service next month.

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Queery: Meet artist, performer John Levengood

Modern creative talks nightlife, coming out, and his personal queer heroes

Published

4 weeks ago

April 16, 2026

Staff reports

John Levengood (Blade photo by Michael Key)

John Levengood (he/him) describes himself as a modern creative with a wide‑ranging toolkit. He blends music, technology, civic duty, and a sharp sense of wit into a cohesive artistic identity. Known primarily as a recording artist and performer, he’s also a self‑taught music producer and software engineer who embodies a generation of creators who build their own lanes rather than wait for one to appear.

Levengood, 32, who is single and identifies as gay and queer, is best known as a recording artist who has performed at Pride festivals across the country, including the main stages of World Pride DC, Central Arkansas Pride, and Charlotte Pride.

“Locally in the DMV, I’m known for turning heads at nightlife venues with my eye-catching sense of style. When I go out, I don’t try to blend in. I hope I inspire people to be themselves and have the courage to stand out,” he says.

He’s also known for hosting karaoke at Freddie’s Beach Bar in Arlington, Va., on Thursday nights. “I like to create a space where people feel comfortable expressing themselves, building community, and showcasing their talents.”

He also creates social media content from my performances and do interviews at LGBTQ+ bars and theatres in the DMV. Follow the Arlington resident @johnlevengood.

How long have you been out and who was the hardest person to tell?

I have been fully out of the closet since 2019. My parents were the hardest people to tell because my family has always been my rock and at the time I couldn’t imagine a world without them. Their reactions were extremely positive and supportive so I had nothing to fear all along.
I remember sitting on the couch with my mom, dad, and sister in our hotel room in New Orleans during our winter vacation and being so nervous to tell them. After I finally mustered up the nerve and made the proclamation, I realized my dad had already fallen asleep on the couch. My mom promised to tell him when he woke up.

Who’s your LGBTQ hero?

My LGBTQ heroes are Harvey Milk for paving the way for gays in politics and Elton John for being a pioneer for the fabulous and authentic. My local heroes in the DMV are Howard Hicks, manager of Green Lantern, and Tony Rivenbark, manager of Freddie’s Beach Bar. Both of them are essential to creating spaces where I’ve felt welcome and safe since moving to the DMV.

What’s Washington’s best nightspot, past or present?

Trade tops the list for me because of the dance floor and outdoor space. It’s so nice to get a break from the music every once and a while to be able to have a conversation.

We live in challenging times. How do you cope?

I’m still figuring this out. What is working right now is writing music and spending time with family and friends. I’ve also been spending less time on social media going to the gym at least three times a week.

What streaming show are you binging?

After “Traitors” Season 4 ended, I was in a bit of a show hole, but “Stumble” has me in a laughing loop right now. The writing is so witty.

What do you wish you’d known at 18?

At 18, I wish I would have known how liberating it is to come out of the closet. It would have been nice to know some winning lottery numbers as well.

What are your friends messaging about in your most recent group chat?

We are planning our next trip to New York City. If you can believe it, I visited NYC for the first time in 2025 for Pride and I’ve been back every quarter since. Growing up in the country, I was subconsciously primed to be scared of the city. But my mind has been blown. I can’t wait to go back.

Why Washington?

It’s the closest metropolitan area to my family, but not too close. I love the museums, the diversity, the history, and the proximity to the beach and mountains. It’s also nice to live in a city with public transportation.

a&e features

Project GLOW celebrates LGBTQ acts

D.C.’s electronic music festival set for May 30-31

Published

4 weeks ago

April 16, 2026

Evan Caplan

A scene from last year’s Project GLOW. (Photo courtesy organizers)

Aging RFK Stadium has come down, but the RFK grounds are still getting lit up. Welcome back to the stage Project GLOW, D.C.’s homegrown electronic festival, on May 30-31. Back for its fifth year on these musically inclined acres, Project GLOW returns with an even more diverse lineup, and one that continues to celebrate LGBTQ antecedents, attendees, and acts.

Project GLOW 2026 headliners include house and techno star Mau P, progressive house legend Eric Prydz, hard-techno favorite Sara Landry, and bass acts Excision b2b Sullivan King, among the lineup of trance, bass, house, techno, dubstep, and others for the fifth anniversary year.

President & CEO Pete Kalamoutsos — born and raised in D.C. — founded Club GLOW in 1999. In 2020, GLOW entered into a partnership with global entertainment company Insomniac Events to produce live events like Project GLOW, which kicked off in 2022.

As in past years, Project GLOW not only makes space, but is intentionally inclusive of the LGBTQ community, one of its most dedicated fan bases. The festival’s LGBTQ-focused Secret Garden stage blooms again — a more intimate dance area that stands on the strength of DJs and musicians who draw from the LGBTQ community. D.C.’s LGBTQ nightlife mastermind Ed Bailey is the creative mind behind Secret Garden again. He joined Project GLOW in 2023.

“Kalamoustos says that “he’s proud of his partnership with Ed Bailey, along with Capital Pride and [nightlife producer] Jake Resnikow. It’s amazing to collaborate with Bailey at the Secret Garden stage, especially after the curated lineup we worked on at Pride last year.”

The Secret Garden will be a bit different from other stages: Eternal (“At the Eternal stage, time stands still. Lose yourself in the dance of past, present, and future, surrendering to the eternal rhythm of the universe”) and Pulse (“Feel the rhythm of the beat pulse through your veins as the heartbeat of the crowd synchronizes into one. Here, every moment vibrates with life as it guides you through a new dimension of euphoria”). The Secret Garden stage is in the round, surrounded by 16 shipping containers. The containers play canvas to muralists from around the world, who are coming in to paint them in a vibrant garden-style vibe. “We gave this stage some extra love with this layout,” K says, “ we finally cracked the code.”

K says that this will be the biggest lineup yet for the Secret Garden, featuring Nicole Moudaber b2b Chasewest, Riordan b2b Bullet Tooth, Ranger Trucco, Cassian, Eli & Fur, Cosmic Gate and Hayla. The stage is also the largest yet, featuring an expanded dance floor and 360-degree viewing.

Across all stages, K says that his goal for the fifth anniversary is “More art and fan interactive experience, more like a festival, strive to be like a Tomorrowland, as budget grows to add more experience.” Last year’s Project GLOW alone drew 40,000 attendees over two days.

K, however, was not satisfied with one festival this spring. GLOW recently announced a “pop-up” one-day event. Teaming up with Black Book Records, GLOW is set to throw a first-of-its-kind dance-music takeover of Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., headlined by electronic music star Chris Lake. Set for April 18, this euphoric block party will feature bass and vibes blocks from the White House. Organizers expect as many as 10,000 fans to attend. Beyond music, there will be food, activations, and plenty of other activities taking place around 6th St and Pennsylvania Ave NW – a location familiar to many in the LGBTQ community, as this sits squarely inside the blocks of the Capital Pride party that takes place in DC every June.

Over the past two decades, Club GLOW has produced thousands of events, from club nights to large-scale festivals including Project GLOW, Moonrise Festival, and more. Club GLOW also operates Echostage.