Local
Crew Club plans to reopen in existing 14th Street building
Owners decide not to sell; new business partners to help operate club
The Crew Club, D.C.’s gym, sauna and bathhouse for gay men that has been closed since the city’s COVID-19 related restrictions were put in place over a year ago, “hopes” to reopen possibly as soon as later this month, according to its founder and co-owner DC Allen.
Allen told the Washington Blade that he and his husband Ken Flick, the other co-owner, have decided not to sell the Crew Club building at 1321 14th St., N.W., near Logan Circle after placing it on the market for sale last fall.
He said he and Flick are in the process of taking on new partners to help operate the club now that coronavirus restrictions have been lifted for city gyms, health clubs and similar establishments.
“We are reopening soon…hopefully late July 2021,” a message posted last week on the Crew Club’s website says.
“We are getting the place ready,” the message says. “Cleaning up, replacing things, and getting ready to open (hopefully) late July!” the message adds. “Get ready…”
Allen said negotiations were under way and he was not at liberty to say whether the new partners are the same ones that he announced last February were going to operate the Crew Club after he reversed an earlier decision to permanently close the club and sell the building to the Douglas Development Company, the city’s largest real estate development firm.
Allen told the Blade last February that the sale to Douglas Development fell through and he and Flick arranged to take on new partners to operate the club indefinitely. But Allen told the Blade last October that the arrangement with the new partners “fell apart” when the coronavirus pandemic hit the city in full force, forcing the club to remain closed for an undetermined length of time. That prompted him and Flick to once again put the building on the market for sale or lease.
At that time, he said it would be up to the building’s new owner or leaseholder to decide whether to continue to operate the Crew Club or a similar club with a different name at the 14th Street building. “It is unlikely the club will reopen,” Allen said last October.
But now, he said, he is “hopeful, and hope is the biggest word in there,” that the Crew Club will reopen under an arrangement with new partners.
Prior to its closing last year, the Crew Club had been operating at the 1321 14th St., N.W. building for just over 25 years.
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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