Local
‘Outrage’ as killer gets 12 years
Court records unsealed; gay victim shot 5 times at point-blank range
The United States Attorney’s office this week reversed an earlier decision to seal court records showing the outcome of its case against two young men charged with first-degree murder while armed for the January 2010 shooting death of gay Maryland resident Gordon Rivers in Southeast Washington.
At the request of the U.S. Attorney’s office, a D.C. Superior Court judge on Wednesday unsealed records showing that District resident William X. Wren, 18, had been sentenced on Jan. 26 to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to shooting Rivers five times at point-blank range inside Rivers’ car during a botched robbery.
Wren, who was 17 at the time of the murder, was charged as an adult.
The unsealed records show that Wren agreed to plead guilty last October in exchange for a government offer to lower the charge against him from first-degree felony murder while armed to second-degree murder while armed. Wren also agreed to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy to kidnap Rivers while armed with co-defendant Anthony Hager, 23, and conspiracy to rob Rivers while armed with a firearm. Hager was 22 at the time of the murder.
Judge Herbert Dixon also sentenced Wren to seven years on the two conspiracy charges but agreed to a request by Wren’s defense lawyer to allow the two sentences to run concurrently, limiting the total time served to 12 years.
The U.S. Attorney’s office moved to have the court records unsealed following inquires by the Washington Blade, which discovered through unsealed court records that the government dropped its case against Hager, who was also charged with first-degree murder while armed in the River’s killing.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office determined that there was probable cause to arrest Anthony Hager in the murder of Mr. Rivers,” said William Miller, a spokesperson for the office. “However, the office later concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to meet the higher legal standard that is required to obtain and sustain a conviction.”
Miller noted that at the government’s request, the court dismissed the case “without prejudice,” which allows prosecutors to reinstate charges against Hager in the future if more evidence surfaces.
“The murder case remains under investigation,” he said.
Miller declined to disclose why prosecutors chose to seal the court records in the case against Wren, saying issues surrounding the sealing of cases are considered confidential. However, knowledgeable sources familiar with criminal cases before the D.C. Superior Court said cases are often sealed when defendants agree to cooperate with the government in the prosecution of another person charged with a crime. Such cooperation could potentially place a defendant at risk for retaliation, according to the sources, and sealing a case can sometimes protect the safety of the cooperating defendant.
Victims’ rights groups have sometimes complained that the sealing of cases also prevents the public from learning whether violent criminals are being prosecuted and sentenced appropriately.
Chris Farris, former co-chair of the D.C. group Gays and Lesbians Opposing Violence, said he was “outraged” that Wren could receive just 12 years for committing a murder and that Hager could get off “completely free” in the Rivers’ murder.
“Take away the gay angle, take away the history of hate crimes against our community, take away everything else, and I just find it incredibly stunning that one person in the case of a murder of someone who was fired on at point blank range five times gets 12 years in jail,” Farris said.
Court documents filed by the government and the defense in the case show that Hager allegedly conspired with Wren to force Rivers at gunpoint to drive the two to Rivers’ house in Maryland, where they planned to rob him of his valuables and steal his two vehicles. But the documents show that that Wren shot Rivers before Hager had a chance to enter the car.
Court records also show that authorities revoked Hager’s parole from an unrelated conviction for armed robbery in 2005 after learning of his arrest in the Rivers case. Miller said the parole revocation resulted in Hager being ordered to serve two more years for the earlier conviction.
Under the D.C. criminal code, Wren faced a possible maximum sentence of 70 years in prison for second-degree murder while armed with a firearm. First-degree murder while armed carries a maximum sentence of 90 years in prison under D.C. law.
Separate sentencing memorandums submitted by the defense and the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked Judge Dixon to consider mitigating factors that would justify a sentence significantly lower than the maximum sentence provided by law. Among other things, the two pointed to Wren’s cooperation with the government in the prosecution of Hager before the U.S. Attorney’s office decided to drop its case against Hager.
Defense attorney Spencer Hecht also states in his sentencing memorandum that Wren recounted that Rivers paid him for sexual encounters at Rivers’ house in Brandywine, Md., during a one-year period prior to the murder. Hecht’s sentencing memo says the sexual encounters began when Wren was 16.
“While the defendant unequivocally accepts responsibility for his extremely serious and dangerous conduct, and is extremely remorseful for taking the life of another, he offers the nature of his relationship with the decedent in mitigation,” Hecht says in his sentencing memo.
“The decedent was someone who preyed on the defendant’s youth, immaturity, and impressionability for a substantial period of time,” the memo says. “On frequent occasions, the decedent would contact the defendant and pay him to perform sex acts upon him. This is nothing less than child sexual abuse and rape – offenses which carry significant prison sentences.”
Hecht provides no evidence or substantiation of the alleged sexual encounters between Rivers and Wren other than Wren’s claim that they occurred. The sentencing memo doesn’t say where the two met or under what circumstances, only that the two met after Wren’s mother kicked him out of her home “because her live-in girlfriend believed the defendant a troublemaker.” His estrangement with his mother resulted in his having no fixed address, the memo says.
“It was during this period of time that the defendant began using and selling drugs and committing robberies of known drug dealers to support himself,” according to Hecht’s sentencing memo. “It was also during this period of time that the defendant met the decedent Gordon Rivers (aka ‘Mr. G’), when he (‘Mr. G’) propositioned him (the defendant) for paid sex,” it says.
The memo also states that Wren moved into a row house where his girlfriend lived at 2409 S St., S.E., seven months prior to the murder, saying his girlfriend’s residence provided him with a stable home. It says he has two children with his girlfriend, Breana Smith, with whom he had been in a relationship for two years at the time of the murder.
Gay activists have long complained that defendants who target gay men for assault, robbery and murder have often claimed, after being charged with such crimes, that the victim made a sexual pass at them that prompted them to assault or kill the victim in self-defense. Gay rights attorneys, who describe such a claim as the “gay panic defense,” have said prosecutors often lack the training or understanding to adequately contest this defense tactic.
Hecht did not return calls to his office seeking comment on the case and on his client’s allegations of sexual encounters between Wren and Rivers.
Miller, the spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office, said he could not comment on whether his office considered Hecht’s allegations in the sentencing memo as an attempt to invoke the gay panic defense.
In its own sentencing memorandum, the U.S. Attorney’s Office recommended that the court sentence Wren to the “middle range” of sentences available to a court for the offenses to which Wren pleaded guilty. The government sentencing memo recommends that Dixon sentence Wren to some jail time but doesn’t object to the defense recommendation that he be sentenced under the D.C. Youth Rehabilitation Act.
The act allows judges to waive a required minimum sentence of five years in jail for a conviction or guilty plea to second-degree murder while armed. The memo adds, “The government does not oppose a motion by the defendant for a downward departure under the sentencing guidelines.”
In his sentencing order, Dixon did not indicate that he approved the defense request for a Youth Rehabilitation Act sentence.
The government’s sentencing memo describes Rivers as “an accomplished, well-loved man with family and friends who dearly miss him.” It says he was born in Alabama and was a retired veteran of the U.S. Navy who, at the time of his death, worked as an executive assistant with Raytheon Corporation in Arlington, Va., in a job he held for five years.
The government sentencing memo says Wren’s effort to express remorse over his action and the prospects that he could turn around his life in the future don’t offset the consequence of his behavior toward Gordon Rivers.
“The defendant preyed upon Mr. Rivers by taking advantage of the trust they shared, however inappropriate the foundation of the relationship,” the memo says. “And it was the defendant, not Mr. Hager, who got in the car, put the gun to Mr. Rivers, and pulled the trigger five times.”
The memo notes that Wren was “no newcomer to armed robberies,” referring to his own admission that he committed armed robberies against drug dealers in the months prior to his arrest in the Rivers case.
Virginia
LGBTQ rights at forefront of 2026 legislative session in Va.
Repeal of state’s marriage amendment a top priority
With 2026 ramping up, LGBTQ rights are at the forefront of Virginia politics.
The repeal of Virginia’s constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between a man and a woman is a top legislative priority for activists and advocacy groups.
The Virginia Senate on Jan. 17 by a 26-13 vote margin approved outgoing state Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria)’s resolution that would repeal the Marshall-Newman Amendment. The Virginia House of Delegates earlier this month passed it.
Two successive legislatures must approve the resolution before it can go to the ballot.
The resolution passed in 2025. Voters are expected to consider repealing the amendment on Nov. 3.
The Virginia General Assembly opened with an introduction of a two-year budget — Virginia’s budget runs biannually.
In 2024 some funding was allocated to LGBTQ causes, and others were passed over. This year’s proposed budget leaves room for funding for a host of LGBTQ opportunities. One specific priority that Equality Virginia is promoting would ensure the state budget expands healthcare for LGBTQ individuals and extending gender affirming care.
Equality Virginia Communications Director Reed Williams told the Washington Blade the organization is also focused on passing three main budget amendments, and ensuring “LGBTQ+ students and their teachers have resources to navigate and address mental health challenges in K-12 schools.”
Along with ensuring school training, the organization wants funding in hopes of “establishing enhanced competency training for Virginia’s 988 Lifeline counselors and support staff to provide affirming care for LGBTQ+ youth.” This comes after the Trump-Vance administration shut down the specific hotline for LGBTQ young people that callers could previously reach if they called 988.
On a federal level, protections and health care access for LGBTQ people has taken a hit, as the Trump-Vance administration has continued to issue executive orders affecting the health care system. LGBTQ people no longer have federal legal health care protections, so local and state politics has become even more important for LGBTQ rights groups.
Equality Virginia has urged its supporters to call their local senators and stress the importance of voting to expand health care protections for LGBTQ people. The organization also plans to hold information sessions and a lobby day on Feb. 2.
Equality Virginia is tracking bills on its website.
District of Columbia
Faith programming remains key part of Creating Change Conference
‘Faith work is not an easy pill to swallow in LGBTQ spaces’
The National LGBTQ Task Force kicked off the 38th annual Creating Change conference in D.C. this week. This year, as with years past, faith and interfaith programming remains a key part of the conference’s mission and practice.
For some, the presence of faith work at an LGBTQ+ conference may seem antithetical, and Creating Change does not deny the history of harm caused by religious institutions. “We have to be clear that faith work is not an easy pill to swallow in LGBTQ spaces, and they’re no qualms about saying that we acknowledge the pain, trauma, and violence that’s been purported in the name of religion,” Tahil Sharma, Faith Work Director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, said.
In fact, several panels at the conference openly discuss acknowledging, healing from, and resisting religious harm as well as religious nationalism, including one scheduled today titled “Defending Democracy Through Religious Activism: A panel of experts on effective strategies for faith and multi-faith organizing” that features local queer faith activists like Ebony C. Peace, Rob Keithan, and Eric Eldritch who are also involved in the annual DC Pride Interfaith Service.
Another session will hold space for survivors of religious violence, creating “a drop-in space for loving on each other in healing ways, held by Rev. Alba Onofrio and Teo Drake.”
But Sharma and others who organized the Creating Change Conference explained that “a state of antipathy” towards religious communities, especially those that align with queer liberation and solidarity, is counterproductive and denies the rich history of queer religious activism. “It’s time for us to make a call for an approach to LGBTQ+ liberation that uses interfaith literacy as a tool rather than as a weapon against us,” Sharma explained.
Recognizing a local queer faith icon
Along with the panels, fighting religious nationalism and fostering communion with aligned faith activists and communities is at heart of this year’s faith work. As Sharma shared, “the person that we’re honoring this year for the faith award is Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt, and Dr. Betancourt is an amazing leader and someone who really stands out in representing UUs but also representing herself unapologetically.”
Based in the Washington, D.C. area, Dr. Betancourt has more than 20 years of experience working as a public minister, seminary professor, scholar, and environment ethicist, and public theologian. Her activism is rooted in her lived identities as a queer, multiracial, AfroLatine first-generation daughter of immigrants from Chile and Panama, and has been a critical voice in advancing the United Universalism towards anti-racist and pluralistic faith work.
Creating a faith-based gathering space
Sharma also said that faith fosters a unique space and practice to encounter grief and joy. For this reason, Sharma wants to “create a space for folks to engage in curiosity, to engage in spiritual fulfillment and grounding but also I think with the times that we’re in to lean into some space to mourn, some space to find hope.” The Many Paths Gathering Space serves this purpose, where visitors can stop for spiritual practice, speak with a Spiritual Care Team member, or just take a sensory break from the bustle of the conference.
This also means uplifting and foregrounding queer religious ephemera with an ofrenda to honor those who have passed, a display of nonbinary Korean American photographer Salgu Wissmath’s exhibition Divine Identity, and the Shower of Stoles, a collection of about 1,500 liturgical stoles and other sacred regalia representing the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people of faith.
The Shower of Stoles
The collection was first started in 1995 by Martha Juillerat and Tammy Lindahl who received eighty stoles that accompanied them and lent them solace as they set aside their ordinations from the Presbyterian Church. The whole collection was first displayed at the 1996 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in New Mexico. The stoles, according to the Task Force, “quickly became a powerful symbol of the huge loss to the church of gifted leadership.”
Each stole represents the story of a queer person who is active in the life and leadership of their faith community, often sent in by the people themselves but sometimes by a loved one in their honor. About one third of all the stoles are donated anonymously, and over three-quarters of the stoles donated by clergy and full-time church professionals are contributed anonymously.
The collection shows “not just the deep harm that has been caused that does not allow people to meet their vocation when they’re faith leaders, but it also speaks to how there have been queer and trans people in our [faith] communities since the beginning of our traditions, and they continue to serve in forms of leadership,” Sharma explained.
Explicit interfaith work
Along with creating a sacred space for attendees, hosting workshops focused on faith-based action, and recognizing DC’s rich queer religious history, Creating Change is also hosting explicitly faith services, like a Buddhist Meditation, Catholic Mass, Shabbat service, Jummah Prayer Service, and an ecumenical Christian service on Sunday. Creating Change is also welcoming events at the heart of queer religious affirmation, including a Name/Gender/Pronoun/Identity Blessing Ritual and a reading and discussion around queer bibles stories with Rev. Sex (aka Rev. Alba Onofrio).
But along with specific faith-based programs, Sharma explained, “we’re looking to build on something that I helped to introduce, which was the separation of the interfaith ceremony that’s happening this year which is a vigil versus the ecumenical Christian service which is now the only thing that takes place on Sunday morning.”
This includes an Interfaith Empowerment Service this evening and an Interfaith Institute tomorrow, along with “Sing In the Revolution,” an event where folks are invited “to actually engage in the joy and rhythm of resolution and what that looks like,” Sharma said. One of the key activators behind this work is Rev. Eric Eldritch, an ordained Pagan clergy person with Circle Sanctuary and a member of the Pride Interfaith Service planning committee.
Affirming that queer faith work is part of liberation
The goal for this year, Sharma noted, alongside holding space and discussions about faith-based practice and liberation and intentional interfaith work–is to move from thinking about why faith matters in queer liberation spaces to “how is interfaith work the tool for how we’re engaging in our understanding of de-escalation work, digital strategies, navigating a deeper visioning that we need for a better world that requires us to think that we’re not alone in the struggle for mutual abundance and liberation,” Sharma explained.
It may surprise people to learn that faith work has intentionally been part of the National LGBTQ+ Task Force since its beginning in the 1980s. “We can really credit that to some of the former leadership like Urvashi Vaid who actually had a sense of understanding of what role faith plays in the work of liberation and justice,” Sharma said.
“For being someone who wasn’t necessarily religious, she certainly did have a clear understanding of the relationship between those folks who are allies, those folks who stand against us, and then those folks who sit in between–those folks who profess to be of religious and spiritual background and also are unapologetically LGBTQ+,” he continued.
This year’s faith programming builds on this rich history, thinking about “a way to kind of open doors, to not just invite people in but our people to go out into the general scene of the conference” to share how faith-based work is a tool, rather than a hindrance, to queer liberation work.
Virginia
McPike prevails in ‘firehouse’ Dem primary for Va. House of Delegates
Gay Alexandria Council member expected to win 5th District seat
Gay Alexandria City Council member Kirk McPike emerged as the clearcut winner in a hastily called Jan. 20 “firehouse” Democratic primary for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates representing Alexandria.
McPike, who was one of two gay candidates running in the four-candidate primary, received 1,279 votes or 60.5 percent, far ahead of gay public school teacher Gregory Darrall, a political newcomer who received 60 votes or 3 percent.
Former Alexandria City School Board member Eileen Cassidy Rivera came in second place with 508 votes or 24 percent and Northern Virginia criminal law defense attorney Chris Leibig finished in third place with 265 votes or 12.5 percent.
Each of the candidates expressed strong support for LGBTQ-related issues.
With less than a week’s notice, Democratic Party officials in Alexandria called the primary to select a Democratic nominee to run in the Feb. 10 special election to fill the 5th District House of Delegates seat being vacated by state Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker (D-Alexandria).
Bennett-Parker won the Democratic nomination for the Virginia State Senate seat being vacated by gay state Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria), who is resigning from his seat to take a position in the administration of Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who took office on Jan. 17.
Bennett-Parker won the nomination for Ebbin’s state Senate seat in yet another firehouse primary on Jan. 13 in which she defeated three other candidates, including gay former state Del. Mark Levine.
McPike, a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate, first won election to the Alexandria City Council in 2021. He has served for 13 years as chief of staff for gay U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and has remained in that position during his tenure on the Alexandria Council. He told the Washington Blade he will continue as chief of staff until next month, when he will resign from that position before taking office in the House of Delegates.
He received the endorsement of Ebbin, U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), and the LGBTQ Victory Fund in his race for the 5th District Va. House seat. Being an overwhelmingly Democratic district, virtually all political observers expect McPike to win the Feb. 10 special election.
He will be running against Republican nominee Mason Butler, a local business executive who emerged as the only GOP candidate running for the delegate seat.
“Thank you to the voters of Alexandria for choosing me as the Democratic nominee in the House of Delegates District 5,” McPike said in a statement released shortly after the vote count was completed. “It is an incredible honor to have the opportunity to fight for our community and its values in Richmond,” he said.
“I look forward to continuing to work to address our housing crisis, the challenge of climate change, and the damaging impacts of the Trump administration on the immigrant families, LGBTQ+ Virginians, and federal employees who call Alexandria home,” he stated.
He praised Ebbin for his longstanding support for the LGBTQ community in the Virginia Legislature and added, “If elected to the House of Delegates in the Feb. 10 general election, I will continue to fight to protect the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ+ Virginians from my new position in Richmond.”
Gay candidate Darrall’s campaign website said he is a “proud progressive, lifelong educator, and labor leader running to put people first.” It says he is a political newcomer “with more than 20 years in the classroom” as a teacher who played a key role in the successful unionization of Fairfax Public Schools.
“He is a proud member and staunch supporter of the LGBTQIA+ community,” his website statement said.
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