Three D.C.-based LGBTQ advocacy organizations released statements on April 24 announcing that highly acclaimed D.C. transgender rights advocate SaVanna Wanzer has passed away. 

Although the statements by the Human Rights Campaign, the Center For Black Equity, and Capital Pride Alliance did not disclose the date of her passing, the cause of death or her age, they recounted Wanzer’s extensive LGBTQ advocacy work over the past 20 years or longer.

 Among other things, the groups noted she is credited with being the lead founder of the D.C. Trans Pride and D.C. Black Trans Pride celebrations and events.

 “As a trailblazing transgender activist, educator, and founder of D.C. Trans Pride, D.C. Black Trans Pride, and May Is All About Trans, SaVanna created and led transformative transgender programming during D.C. Black Pride that ensured trans voices, stories, leadership, and lived experiences were centered, celebrated, and protected,” according to the statement from the Center for Black Equity, an LGBTQ organization.

“Her work was not just about representation, it was about liberation, community, and making sure Black Trans lives were honored in rooms, stages, policies, and movements that too often overlooked them,” the statement says.

In its own statement, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, called Wanzer an icon of D.C.’s Black trans community and longtime leader in many LGBTQ organizations. 

“SaVanna Wanzer was a D.C. legend,” Laurel Powell, HRC’s Director of Communications, said in the statement. “She advocated for many years for the trans community and for people living with HIV, and served with many organizations, including D.C. Black Pride, Capital Pride, and NMAC [National Minority AIDS Council],” the statement adds.

“I can say firsthand that SaVanna will not just be missed for her work, but for her sisterly wisdom and her sense of humor,” Powell said in the HRC statement.

In its own statement, Capital Pride Alliance, which organizes D.C.’s annual LGBTQ Pride events, called Wanzer a “trailblazer” in her role as founder of Capital Trans Pride, D.C. Black Trans Pride, and the May Is All About Trans events. It says she served on the Capital Pride Board of Directors 

“SaVanna was not just an advocate and community organizer but also a knowledge holder and elder voice in our movement,” the statement adds

In an undated statement on its website released before Wanzer’s passing, the D.C. group Food and Friends, which provides home-delivered meals to people in need, including people with HIV and cancer, says Wanzer had been one of its clients in the past. It says she had been living with heart problems since she was 16 and learned she had HIV in 1985 when she went to donate blood while working at the time for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It also says she had diabetes, which was under control.

Among her many involvements, Wanzer also served as a volunteer for D.C.’s Whitman-Walker Health, which provides medical services for the LGBTQ community along with other communities. In 2015, Whitman-Walker selected  Wanzer as the first recipient of its Robert Fenner Urquhart Award for her volunteer services at Whitman-Walker for more than 20 years.

The Center for Black Equity appeared to capture the sentiment of those in the LGBTQ community who knew Wanzer in the concluding part of its statement on her passing.  

“Her vision continues to guide us,” it says. “Her courage continues to inspire us. Her impact will continue to live through every person, every Pride, and every space made more possible because she dared to lead,” it says. “Rest in power, SaVanna Wanzer. Your light remains with us.”

Sunday, April 26 is Lesbian Visibility Day. It concludes Lesbian Visibility Week that started this past Monday. Originally founded back in 2008 by the National Coalition for LGBT Health — and separately by a group of American lesbian activists who ran a social media campaign called “I am a Lesbian” that same year — Lesbian Visibility Day fights lesbophobia, or hatred, discrimination, and violence toward lesbians, and the erasure of lesbians inside and outside of the LGBTQ community.

Amid the rise of anti-LGBTQ and reproductive healthcare legislation and court decisions, there has never been a better time to reflect on the intersectionality of fighting for queer people’s and women’s rights and recognizing the queer women who were integral in the feminist movement that made America what it is today. 

From the very beginning, lesbians have been critical to American liberation movements. Lesbian and queer women were key leaders and organizers of the women’s suffrage movement, including Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Jane Addams, Annie Tinker, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Molly Dewson, and Sophonisba Breckinridge. Some of these women even lived in same-sex partnerships, known as “Boston marriages,” during a time when homosexuality was illegal. 

Similarly, during the Second Wave Feminist movement, lesbians were key activists that fought to integrate issues of LGBTQ equality into the women’s movement. 

Lesbian and queer organizers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Smith, and Rita Mae Brown fought for intersectional activism, noting how sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism intersect to keep women and other marginalized individuals down. But many of these lesbian activists faced backlash from the mainstream women’s movement, called a “lavender menace” that threatened the women’s movement’s progress.

Betty Friedan, then president of The National Organization for Women (NOW), first used this term in 1969 — ironically the same year as the Stonewall Riots — to refer to the danger that integrating lesbian issues into the mainstream women’s movement might pose to the success and timeliness of women’s rights. Friedan and other NOW members worried that intentionally including lesbians in NOW and its objectives would create the impression that the movement was full of misandrists and “a bunch of dykes.”

That same year, NOW removed the Daughters of Bilitis, the first American lesbian organization, from their list of sponsors for the First Congress to Unite Women in November 1969. 

In response, a group of lesbian radical feminists reclaimed the term during their protest at the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. The group, called Radicalesbians, along with people from the Gay Liberation Front and other allied groups, burst into the Second Congress and demanded that NOW accept and intentionally include lesbians and queer women in the feminist movement. Lesbians, queer women, and allies lined the aisles of the auditorium holding signs and shouting “We are all lesbians” and “Lesbianism is a women’s liberation plot.”

As Karla Jay, another member of the Lavender Menace who stood up in the audience, said, “Yes, yes, sisters! I’m tired of being in the closet because of the women’s movement.” 

Not only was this moment a critical challenge of the movement’s tendency to foreground white, straight women’s experiences and rights, and was applauded by feminists of color who routinely felt their voices remained unheard and experience unrepresented in the movement, but it also invited members of the feminist movement to confront their own lesbophobia. The rest of the Second Congress to Unite Women was replaced by workshops on issues lesbian women are facing and a dance hosted by the Gay Liberation Front at the Church of the Holy Apostles.

At the end of the conference, members of the Lavender Menaces shared the resolutions that they and NOW members developed in those two days of workshops to the leaders of NOW, and by 1971, NOW passed a resolution to support lesbians. However, Friedan did not acknowledge the critical contributions of lesbian women in the feminist movement until six years later at the 1977 National Women’s Conference.

Many have pointed out how Friedan and other feminists’ fear about and exclusion of lesbian and queer women in their movement is deeply connected to present opposition against including trans women in modern feminist circles. Often called TERFS or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, feminists prioritizing womanhood based solely on sex assigned at birth perpetuate the same gender policing of women’s spaces that Friedan and others did over 50 years earlier — this time, excluding not just trans women but also intersex women and denying how transphobia is a critical feminist issue. Black cis women are especially vulnerable to transphobic violence. 

Never has it been clearer that women’s liberation is lesbians’ liberation is BIPOC women’s liberation is trans women’s liberation. In fact, the fourth and fifth wave feminist movements that first emerged in the early 2000s strive to re-center the movement on collective, intersectional action rather than individual empowerment. Some feminists have even joined the trans-led Gender Liberation Movement, founded by Raquel Willis and Eliel Cruz in 2024, that fights for bodily autonomy and pushes for organizing and policy that frees all people from gendered expectations. 

Lesbophobia remains alive and well

Protecting lesbian, bisexual, and queer women’s rights has never been more timely because lesbophobia is not a thing of the past. Recent backlash to Netflix announcing that the next season of Bridgerton will feature a sapphic storyline makes it clear that lesbophobia is alive and well, even as stories featuring bisexual and gay men are receiving critical and fan praise. In fact, television shows featuring lesbian and queer women were significantly cut. In 2022, more than two-thirds of all cancelled LGBTQ shows featured queer women. Lesbophobia is alive and well sadly, along with the fetishization of lesbian and queer women online.

And just how Friedan and other NOW leaders’ fears around lesbians resonate with current TERF action against trans women, the “Lavender Scare” or systematic firing of LGBTQ employees during the McCarthy Era is making a comeback. Many of the people who were fired by the federal government during this time are still alive and have never been given an apology for how they were treated and discarded by the federal government.

The current administration’s attempts to terminate anyone working in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, disband LGBTQ employee resource groups, and earlier this month, requesting access to the medical records of millions of federal workers, retirees, and their family members, recall another history of excluding LGBTQ people.

As CNN reported earlier this month, a notice that was sent to insurers that offer Federal Employees Health Benefits of Postal Service Health Benefits plans this past December asks them to provide “service and cost data,” which the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) argues will be used to ensure “competitive, quality, and affordable plans.”

Michael Martinez, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, told CNN earlier this month that OPM has given no insight into how they would use and protect this information, and warns that it could be used to target people who have sought or had abortions or those who have had or are inquiring about gender affirming care, again tying together trans liberation with women’s liberation and the protection of bodily autonomy.

So as we celebrate Lesbian Visibility Week, it is critical to acknowledge how lesbian women calling for intersectionality (along with Black, Indigenous, and Latina women who have done this work for centuries), fundamentally changed the trajectory of the feminist movement —and how their call for intersectionality is still timely and important. 

Emma Cieslik is a museum worker and public historian.

Six prominent LGBTQ community leaders and elders, including a beloved drag performer, talked about their role in advancing the rights of LGBTQ people and their thoughts on how the upcoming generation of LGBTQ youth should get ready to join the movement participated in an April 23 “Living History” panel discussion at Freddie’s Beach Bar.

The event was organized by Dorothy Edwards, who plans to open Friends of Dorothy Café in Alexandria. She said the café will be an LGBTQ community “intergenerational space” that will host events like the one she organized at Freddie’s Beach Bar.

“It will be a space for connection, storytelling, and belonging, especially for LGBTQ+ youth and community members who don’t always have places like that,” she said in a statement announcing the event at Freddie’s.

The six panelists at the Freddie’s event included Kierra Johnson, president of the D.C.-based National LGBTQ Task Force; Freddie Lutz, owner of Freddie’s Beach Bar located in the Crystal City section of Arlington, Va.; Donnell Robinson, who for many years performed in drag as the icon Ella Fitzgerald; Taylor Chandler Walker, a local transgender rights advocate, author and public speaker; Heidi Ellis, coordinator of the D.C. LGBTQ Budget Coalition; and Leti Gomez, an LGBTQ Latino community advocate and chair of the board of the American LGBTQ+ Museum.

Dr. Ashley Elliott, an LGBTQ community advocate and clinician who also goes by the name Dr. Vivid, served as moderator of the panel discussion, asking each of the panelists a serious of questions before opening the event to questions from the audience.

Among the issues discussed by the panelists was who was “centered” and who was excluded in the earlier years of LGBTQ organizing. Elliot also asked the panelists to address topics such as racism within queer spaces, gender dynamics, and strategies for coalition building between the LGBTQ community and other movements, including civil rights, feminism, and immigrant rights.

Each of the panelists expressed various thoughts on how the LGBTQ rights movement can make changes in response to the questions: “What can we do better?” and “Who is being left out?”

“I’m overwhelmed and so thankful that everyone on this panel said yes and agreed to come,” Edwards told the Washington Blade at the conclusion of the event. “I think every one of those people, including the moderator, was so brilliant and has done such good work for this community,” she said.

Edwards noted that each of the panelists, who have been involved in LGBTQ advocacy work for many years, talked about how they interact with younger LGBTQ people who are just beginning to become involved in activism.

“Truly, it’s an intergenerational conversation, and their wisdom and their words and their experiences can be disseminated to younger generations and people who want to do this work, people who want to fight for our community,” Edwards said.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” Lutz said. “I thought it was a good turnout, and everybody was very enthusiastic and engaged,” he said. “And I think it was great and fabulous.”     

Lutz has operated Freddie’s Beach Bar for more than 25 years and has hosted numerous LGBTQ events. A sign above the front entrance door to the popular LGBTQ bar and restaurant says, “Straight Friendly Gay Bar.”

Edwards said the April 23 event was recorded and she will make arrangements for the recording to be released for others to view it. The Blade will post the link in this story when it becomes available.