District of Columbia
GLAA announces ratings for D.C. Council candidates
Janeese Lewis George, Robert White, Nate Fleming receive highest marks
GLAA D.C., formerly known as the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, announced on May 13 that it has awarded its highest ratings for D.C. Council candidates running in the city’s June 4 primary election to incumbent Council members Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) and Robert White (D-At-Large) and to Ward 7 Democratic candidate Nate Fleming.
On a rating scale of +10, the highest possible rating, to -10, the lowest rating, GLAA awarded ratings of +9.5 to Lewis George, + 9 to Robert White, and +8.5 to Fleming.
Fleming is one of 10 candidates running in the Democratic primary for the Ward 7 Council seat, which is being vacated by incumbent Council member and former D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, who is not running for re-election. In addition to Fleming, GLAA issued ratings for seven other Ward 7 Democratic contenders who, like Fleming, returned a required GLAA candidate questionnaire.
The remaining two Ward 7 candidates were not rated under a GLAA policy adopted this year of not rating candidates that did not return the questionnaire, the responses to which GLAA uses to determine its ratings, according to GLAA President Tyrone Hanley. A statement accompanying the GLAA ratings shows that it rated 13 D.C. Council candidates – all Democrats — out of a total of 18 Council candidates on the June 4 primary ballot.
Ballot information released by the D.C. Board of Elections shows that only one Republican candidate and one Statehood Green Party candidate is running this year for a D.C. Council seat. GOP activist Nate Derenge is running for the Ward 8 seat held by incumbent Democrat Trayon White and Statehood Green Party candidate Darryl Moch is running for the At-Large Council seat held by Robert White.
GLAA shows in its ratings statement that neither Trayon White nor Derenge nor Moch returned the questionnaire, preventing them from being rated. However, one of two Democratic candidates running against Tryon White in the primary — Salim Aldofo — did return the questionnaire and received a rating of +5.5. The other Democratic candidate, Rahman Branch, did not return the questionnaire and was not rated. Trayon White has been a supporter on LGBTQ issues while serving on the Council.
GLAA President Hanley said GLAA this year decided to limit its ratings to candidates of all political parties running for D.C. Council seats. In addition to candidates running for an At-Large Council seat and Council seats in Wards 4, 7, and 8, the June 4 primary ballot includes candidates running for the D.C. Congressional Delegate seat, the Shadow U.S. House seat, and the Shadow U.S. Senate seat. GLAA chose not to issue ratings for those races, according to Hanley. He said during mayoral election years, GLAA rates all candidates for mayor.
The Capital Stonewall Democrats, D.C’s largest local LGBTQ political organization, was scheduled to release its endorsements of D.C. Council candidates and candidates for all other local D.C. races, including Congressional Delegate and Senate and House “shadow” races, at a May 21 endorsement event. The Blade will report on those endorsements in an upcoming story.
Like in all past years beginning in the early 1970s when GLAA began rating candidates in local D.C elections, the group has not rated federal candidates, including those running for U.S. president. Thus, it issued no rating this year for President Joe Biden and two lesser-known Democratic challengers appearing on the D.C. presidential primary ballot on June 4 – Marianne Williamson and Armando Perez-Serrato.
In the At-Large Council race, GLAA gave Robert White’s sole Democratic challenger, Rodney Red Grant, who returned the questionnaire, a rating of +3.5.
“The ratings are based solely on the issues and may not be interpreted as endorsements,” GLAA says in its statement accompanying the ratings. The statement says the ratings are based on the candidates’ response to the questionnaire, the questions for which GLAA says reflect the group’s positions on a wide range of issues as stated in a document it calls “A Loving Community: GLAA Policy Brief 2024.” It sends a link to that document to all candidates to whom it sends them the questionnaire and urges the candidate to seek out the brief “for guidance and clarification” in responding to the questions. GLAA says the ratings are also based on the candidates’ record on the issues GLAA deems of importance, including LGBTQ issues.
Like its questionnaire in recent years, this year’s nine-question questionnaire asks the candidates whether they would support mostly non-LGBTQ specific issues supported by GLAA, some of which are controversial. One of the questions asks the candidates, “Do you support enacting legislation to decriminalize sex work for adults, including the selling and purchasing of sex and third-party involvement not involving fraud, violence, and coercion?”
Another question asks if the candidates would support decriminalizing illegal drug use by supporting “removing the criminal penalties for drug possession for personal use and increasing investments in health services.” Other questions ask whether candidates would address “concentrated wealth in the District by raising revenue through taxing the most wealthy residents,” would they support funding for “harm reduction and overdose prevention services to save lives,” and would they support a Green New Deal for Housing bill pending before the D.C. Council that would “Socialize Our Housing” to address putting in place city subsidized housing for those in need.
One of the questions that might be considered LGBTQ specific asks whether candidates would support sufficient funding for the D.C. Office of Human Rights to ensure the office has enough staff members to adequately enforce the city’s nondiscrimination laws and to end a discrimination case backlog that the office sometimes encounters.
Some activists have criticized GLAA for not including more LGBTQ-specific questions in its questionnaire. Others have defended the questionnaire on grounds that D.C. long ago has passed a full range of LGBTQ supportive laws and most if not, all serious candidates running in D.C. for public office for the past 20 years or more have expressed strong support for LGBTQ equality. They argue that LGBTQ voters, while weighing the depth of support candidates have on LGBTQ issues, most of the time base their vote on a candidate’s record and position on non-LGBTQ issues when all candidates in a specific race are LGBTQ supportive.
Hanley told the Washington Blade GLAA believes the current questionnaire addresses the issues of importance to the largest number of LGBTQ D.C. residents.
“My response is that we care about whatever issues are impacting queer and trans people,” Hanley said. “We can’t isolate the challenges we are experiencing as queer and trans people to things that are specifically related to our identity as queer and trans people because they are all interconnected,” he said.
“So, how will I tell a Black trans woman we care about her not being discriminated against at her job for being trans, for being Black, or for being a woman, but we don’t care that she doesn’t have housing? Hanley asked. “To me, that seems like a very inhumane way of thinking about human beings because we are whole human beings,” he said, some of whom, he added, face a wide range of issues such as homelessness, drug issues, and “struggling to make ends meet.”
The GLAA statement that accompanies its ratings, which is posted on its website, includes links to each of the candidates’ questionnaire responses as well as an explanation of why it gave its specific rating to each of the candidates. In its explanation section GLAA says all the candidates expressed overall support for the LGBTQ community and expressed support for the concerns related to the issues raised by the questions even if they were not at this time ready to back some of the issues like decriminalization of sex work.
Following are the GLAA ratings given to 12 Democratic D.C. Council candidates and one “unknown” candidate that Hanley says submitted their questionnaire but did not reveal their identity on the questionnaire:
DC Council At-Large
Robert White: +9
Rodney Red Grant: +3.5
DC Council Ward 4
Janeese Lewis George: +9.5
DC Council Ward 7
Ebony-Rose Thompson: +4.5
Ebony Payne: +5
Kelvin Brown: +2.5
Nate Fleming: +8.5
Roscoe Grant Jr.: +3.5
Veda Rasheed: +5
Villareal VJ Johnson II: +4
Wendell Felder: +2
DC Council Ward 8
Salim Aldofo: +5.5
Unknown: +2
The full GLAA ratings, a breakdown of the ratings based on a GLAA rating criteria, the candidate questionnaire response, and GLAA’s explanation for each of its candidate ratings can be accessed at the GLAA website.
District of Columbia
Gay priest credited with boosting church support for LGBTQ Catholics
Fr. Tom Oddo’s biographer speaks at Dignity Washington event
The author of a biography of a U.S. Catholic priest said to have advocated for support by the Catholic Church of gay Catholics in the early 1970s has called Father Thomas ‘Tom’ Oddo a little known but important figure in the LGBTQ rights movement.
Tyler Bieber, author of the recently published book “Against The Current: Father Tom Oddo And the New American Catholic,” told of Oddo’s life and work on behalf of LGBTQ rights at a March 22 talk before the local LGBTQ Catholic group Dignity Washington.
Among Oddo’s important accomplishments, Bieber said, was his role as a co-founder of the national LGBTQ Catholic group Dignity U.S.A. in 1973 at the age of 29.
But as reported in the prologue of his book, Bieber presented details of the sad news that Oddo died in a fatal car crash in 1989 at the age of 45 in Portland, Ore., where he was serving as the highly acclaimed president of the University of Portland, a Catholic institution.
“He was a major figure in the gay rights movement in the 1970s, an unsung hero of that movement,” Bieber told Dignity Washington members, who assembled for his talk in a meeting room at St. Margaret Episcopal Church near Dupont Circle, where they attend their weekly Catholic mass on Sundays.
“And Dignity U.S.A. saw intense growth in membership and visibility” during its early years under Oddo’s leadership, Bieber said. “The story of Father Tom and his contemporaries is a story largely untold in the history of the gay rights movement, but one worth knowing and considering,” he said.
As stated in his book, Bieber told the Dignity Washington gathering Oddo was born and raised in a Catholic family on Long Island, N.Y., and attended a Catholic high school in Flushing Queens. It was at that time when he developed an interest in becoming a priest, according to Bieber.
After studying at the University of Notre Dame and completing his religious studies he was ordained as a priest in 1970 and began his work as a priest in the Boston area, Bieber said. It was around that time, Bieber told the Dignity Washington audience, that gay Catholics approached Oddo to seek advice on how they should interact with the Catholic Church. It was also around that time that Oddo became involved in a group supportive of then gay Catholics that later became a Dignity chapter in Boston.
In a development considered unusual for a Catholic priest, Bieber said Oddo in 1973 testified in support of gay rights bill before a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature and collaborated with then Massachusetts gay and lesbian rights advocate Elaine Noble.
In 1982, at the age of 39, Oddo was selected as president of the University of Portland following several years as a college teacher in the Boston area, Bieber’s book states. It says he was seen as a “vibrant and capable administrator who delivered real results to his campus,” adding, “His magnetism was obvious. One student described him as ‘John Kennedyesque’ to the university’s student newspaper.”
Bieber said that although Oddo was less active with Dignity U.S.A. during his tenure as UP president, he continued his support for gay Catholics and what is now referred to as LGBTQ rights.
“For those that knew him prior to his term at UP, though, he represented something greater than an accomplished university administrator and educator,” Bieber’s book states. “He was a new kind of priest, a gay man living and ministering in a world set loose from tradition by the Second Vatican Council,” the book says.
It was referring to the Vatican gathering of worldwide Catholic leaders from 1962 to 1965 concluding under Pope Paul VI that church observers say modernized church practices to allow far greater participation by the laity and opened the way for sympathetic consideration of gay Catholics.
District of Columbia
HRC to host National Rainbow Seder
Bet Mishpachah among annual event’s organizers
The 18th National Rainbow Seder will take place at the Human Rights Campaign on Sunday.
The sold out event is the country’s largest Passover Seder for the Jewish LGBTQ community.
Organizations behind the event include 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 is “Liberation For All Who Journey: Remembering, Resisting, Rebuilding.” Rabbis Atara Cohen, Koach Frazier, and Avigayil Halpern will lead it.
The Seder will honor 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.
District of Columbia
Trans Day of Visibility events planned
Rally on the National Mall scheduled for Saturday
The Christopher Street Project has a number of events planned for the 2026 Trans Day of Visibility, including a rally on the Mall and an “Empowerment Ball” at the Eaton Hotel. Plenaries, panel discussions and meetings with members of Congress are scheduled in the three days of programming.
Announced speakers include N.H. state Rep. Alice Wade; Commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago Precious Brady-Davis; activist and performer Miss Peppermint (“RuPaul’s Drag Race”); Lexington, Ky. Councilwoman Emma Curtis; Rabbi Abby Stein; D.C. activist and host Rayceen Pendarvis; Air Force Master Sgt. Logan Ireland; among other leaders, advocates and performers.
Conference programming on Thursday and Friday includes an educational forum and a Capitol Hill policy education day. Registration for the two-day conference has closed.
The “Trans Day of Visibility PAC Reception” is scheduled for Thursday, March 26 from 7:30-9 p.m. at As You Are (500 8th St., S.E.). Special guests include Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nevada) and Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.). Tickets are available at christopherstreetproject.org starting at $25.
The National Council of Jewish Women and the Christopher Street Project host a “Trans Day of Visibility Shabbat” on Friday, March 27 from 7-8 p.m. at Sixth & I (600 I St., N.W.). The service is to be led by Rabbi Jenna Shaw and Rabbi Abby Stein.
The “Now You See Me: Trans Empowerment Social & Ball” is scheduled for Friday, March 27 from 6-11 p.m. at the Eaton Hotel (1201 K. St., N.W.). The trans-themed drag ball is hosted by the Marsha P. Johnson Institute with support from the D.C. Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs, the Capital Ballroom Council, the Christopher Street Project, the Center for Black Equity, Generation for Common Good, and Parenting is Political. RSVP online at christopherstreetproject.org.
The National Transgender Day of Visibility Rally is scheduled for Saturday, March 28 on the National Mall at 11 a.m. The rally will include speakers and performances. Following the rally, attendees are encouraged to participate in the “No Kings” rally being held at Anacostia Park.
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