Local
Activist, writer John Stephen Hunt dies at 85
U.S. Correspondent for Out! New Zealand Magazine
John Stephen Hunt, 85, writer and global human rights activist based in Chicago, died March 17, of natural causes in Chicago.
Hunt came out as a 20-year-old gay man during his U.S. Army Service. For years he was a resourceful link and activist-connector for American and emerging worldwide LGBT rights movements. He lived at The Malden Lakefront Property group, on Chicago’s north side.
He was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Aug. 20, 1935. He traveled to and lived in Canada, Mexico, UK, France, Germany and Dominican Republic and took special interest in post-apartheid South Africa. He was U.S. Correspondent for Out! New Zealand Magazine. In 2000 he helped champion and sponsor the early development of Our World Center in Lugansk and Kiev, Ukraine. His first lover, Marine A. Perez-Minino and a later lover, Harry Gregory of Minneapolis, who succumbed to AIDS, each had posts in diplomacy (Dominican Republic, Turkey).
Hunt was generous with his skills and speaking time during a years-long successful recovery he made through New Town Alano Club, Chicago. He also gave contributions and media counsel to Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, He was a co-founder of Lambda Resource Center for the Blind, a program of Horizons, Chicago. Hunt frequently encouraged younger writers, reporters, and artists. He fostered four children of Hindu faith in Kancheepuram, India.
Apart from his global travel, over the course of his life, he made his home in Michigan, West Virginia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon, North Carolina, Washington D.C., Colorado, New Mexico, Indiana, New York, California, and Massachusetts, settling in Chicago in spring, 1971. Hunt was an associate member of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, attended Unity in Chicago, and was a student of Religious Science under Dr. Carleton Whitehead at Water Tower Place. He was an early graduate of The Phoenix Project, a national grief-healing group process. As a senior, he benefited as a counselee of CJE, Chicago. A trained direct psychic counselor, he was recognized by American Association of Professional Psychics.
He especially identified with the spiritual teaching of ancient Egypt, the Great Tradition. Hunt once said, “I am grateful my lifetime occurred during a period in human history when the essential meanings of our spiritual and cosmic situation were even more fully unfolding on the planet.”
Hunt was educated at University High School (Ann Arbor), George Washington University, and the University of Exeter (UK), University of California/Berkeley, with a summer at Harvard University. He wrote published sonnets and read widely, encouraging others. He enjoyed gardening as an avocation and was a beekeeper. He was known and loved for his short witticisms and hoped to be remembered for his sense of humor and for being a cybernaut news-bringer and an encourager of others.
Memorial services are pending. Following cremation, he requested his ashes be scattered by friends and reconciled church members in the High Peony Garden, University of Michigan Arboretum, Ann Arbor.
He knew the Arboretum as a boy and first saw the Northern Lights there—lights that as an adult he internalized following spiritual quest, peak experiences, and enlightenment.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be given to the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, gerberhart.org. Arrangements by Cremation Society of Illinois, cremation-society.com.
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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