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Comings & Goings
Fowlkes named to D.C. Police Complaints Board
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].
Congratulations to Earl D. Fowlkes, Jr. on his appointment to the D.C. Police Complaints Board by Mayor Muriel Bowser. He said, “It is a privilege to serve on this important board particularly during this time in our District. I will work hard and be fair to ensure justice is being served to everyone who walks into the Office of Police Complaints.”
Fowlkes is president and CEO of the Center for Black Equity, Inc. Prior to that, he served for 15 years as the executive director of the DC CARE Consortium and Damien Ministries, organizations that provided services to Persons Living With HIV/AIDS in D.C. Fowlkes has worked on health, political, and LGBTQ issues in many communities for nearly 30 years. He currently serves on the Damien Ministries Board of Directors. He previously served two terms as chair of the DC Commission on Human Rights; chair of the D.C. Mayor’s GLBTQ Advisory Committee; community co-chair of the D.C. HIV Prevention Community Planning Group; and a member of the D.C. Commission on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday.
Fowlkes is committed to a progressive political agenda for the Black and LGBTQ communities, and currently serves as the Democratic National Committee LGBT Caucus Chair and on the DNC Executive Committee. He has received numerous honors and awards for his community service and was named one of three 2013 grand marshals of the Heritage of Pride (NYC Gay Pride) along with Harry Belafonte and Edith Windsor.
He earned hisbachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Congratulations also to Kristine Kippins on her new position as Deputy Legal Director for Policy with Lambda Legal. She said, “I am a fierce supporter of the LGBTQ+ community and have dedicated my life to the collective liberation of marginalized people in this country. Joining the nation’s oldest and largest legal organization advancing the civil rights of LGBTQ people and everyone living with HIV and being part of a large team of more than 30 lawyers and paraprofessionals to help guide its public policy work is a dream come true.”
Prior to this, Kippins was director of policy for the Constitutional Accountability Center, where she helped make more real the promises of the Constitution. Before that she served as a federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She has also worked for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) and Lowndes, Drosdick, Doster, Kantor & Reed, P.A., Orlando, Fla.
She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and her J.D. from William & Mary Law School.
Congratulations also to the Victory Institute’s Victory Empowerment Fellows (VEF).
This fellowship is for emerging LGBTQ leaders of color and transgender leaders who seek to expand their campaign skills and policy-making power and be part of a strong cohort of movement leaders from across the country. Fellows attend LGBTQ-specific training and the International LGBTQ Leaders Conference, and participate in a year-long mentorship program.
Fellows: Deja Alvarez, Philadelphia; Jin-Soo Huh, Chicago; Kendall Martinez-Wright, Palmyra, Miss.; Jaylin McClinton, Chicago; Adri Perez, El Paso, Texas; Rep. Taylor Small, Winooski, Vt.; Rep. Mauree Turner, Oklahoma City, Okla.; and Brandon Wolf Orlando, Fla.
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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