Local
Police list vandalism of Blade boxes as suspected hate crime
Distribution points have been subjected to an ongoing series of incidents
‘There’s a loss of property. This is our product. It’s being destroyed,’ said Blade publisher Lynne Brown. (Washington Blade photo)
D.C. police last week opened an official investigation into newly discovered damage to at least four distribution boxes belonging to the Washington Blade and Metro Weekly, according to a police report filed on Dec. 11.
The publishers of both publications have said their respective distribution boxes have been subjected to an ongoing series of incidents over the past two years in which many of them have been soiled with human excrement and emptied of all of the papers in an apparent attempt to prevent readers from obtaining them.
The police report says that four boxes belonging to the Blade or Metro Weekly were found on Dec. 11 to be vandalized by someone who used spray paint to write the world “PIG” on the boxes. The report lists the incidents as an offense of defacing public or private property and classifies the offense as a suspected anti-gay hate crime.
According to the report, at least one of the vandalized boxes is located at 18th and T St., N.W.
However, Blade editor Kevin Naff said an officer with the department’s Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit told him at least two other Blade boxes associated with this incident were found to be defaced – one at 16th and Q St., N.W. and the other at 17th and R St., N.W.
The report says Assistant D.C. Police Chief Diane Groomes and Capt. Edward Delgado were “notified and responded to the scene” of the damaged box at 18th and T, N.W., which is where the Lauriol Plaza Restaurant is located. Delgado heads a police division that oversees the Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit.
Blade publisher Lynne Brown has said employees with a local distribution company that delivers the Blades takes the boxes that an as yet unidentified perpetrator soils on the inside with excrement to a warehouse where they are steam cleaned and returned to the street. In recent months, the perpetrator or perpetrators have targeted the same boxes again, forcing the distribution company to repeat the process of cleaning them.
In other cases, Brown has said someone has been breaking the Plexiglas window on the boxes and ripping off a clip that holds one of the papers against the window. The cost of repeatedly repairing the boxes is adding up, Brown said.
“We restock and clean as fast as we can,” she said. “But there’s a loss of property. This is our product. It’s being destroyed.”
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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