Biden nominates Maloney as 6th out ambassador

by Heather Cassell

President Joe Biden’s commitment to putting LGBTQ rights at the forefront of the United States foreign policy that he announced shortly after he was sworn into office in 2021 is now gaining momentum, as seen by his recent nomination of a sixth out person to serve at the rank of ambassador.

Gay former congressmember Sean Patrick Maloney (D-New York) has been nominated to be the U.S. representative to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Biden announced Maloney’s nomination last month and officially sent it to the Senate June 1, the first day of Pride Month.

The OECD works to build better policies with the goal of fostering prosperity, equality, opportunity, and well-being for better lives for all, according to the organization’s website.

If confirmed, Maloney will succeed the current OECD ambassador, former Delaware Governor Jack Markell, whom Biden nominated to fill the coveted Italy and San Marino ambassadorship, which has been vacant for two years, reported Axios. Maloney and his husband, Randy Florke, will move to Paris, where the OECD is headquartered. The couple recently celebrated their 30th anniversary. They raised three children – Jesus, Daley, and Essie – together, according to the release and Maloney’s campaign website. The children were only identified by their first names.

Maloney did not respond to the Bay Area Reporter’s request for comment.

In 2021, Biden placed LGBTQ rights at the forefront of the United States foreign policy with a stroke of a pen. Standing at a podium, he proudly announced that he strengthened the historic memorandum protecting LGBTQ people glob- ally signed by former President Barack Obama in 2011, when Biden was vice president, with his own revised memorandum, the B.A.R. previously reported.

Who is Maloney

Maloney, the youngest of six, grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire. His father was a disabled veteran. His mother was a small business owner. She put Maloney and his brothers through college, according to his biography on his congressional campaign page. Maloney earned undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Virginia. He worked as a volunteer with the Jesuits in rural Peru between college and law school from 1988 to 1989.

Prior to serving in Congress, Maloney served as then-President Bill Clinton’s White House staff secretary, helped found a financial services software company, and worked as a partner at two global law firms, according to the White House’s May 12 news release.

Maloney was the first openly LGBTQ person elected to Congress from New York. While in Congress, Maloney authored more than 40 pieces of legislation that became law. He chaired both the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure as well as the Commodity Markets, Digital Assets, and Rural Development Subcommittee of the House Committee on Agriculture. He served as a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and was elected by his colleagues to House leadership in 2020.

Hard loss

Maloney is the former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democratic House members. He led Demo- crats to a major political upset, holding back the expected “red wave” and flipping some electoral districts from red to blue in the 2022 midterm elections last November. But that wasn’t enough to keep the GOP from regaining control of the House, albeit by a slim margin.

However, Maloney lost his own seat representing the people of the Hudson Valley in the 18th Congressional District that he held for five terms from 2013 to 2023. Under redistricting in 2022, several districts in the New York City suburbs and Hudson Valley area were redrawn, including District 17 and District 18, both represented by gay men. Maloney moved into District 17, which was held by Mondaire Jones, a gay Black man, reported The River. Jones ran for office in District 10, reported NBC News.

Maloney lost the race for District 17 to Republican Mike Lawler. Jones lost his District 10 bid to Democrat Dan Goldman.

Bitter about his defeat, Maloney, speaking with the New York Times shortly after the election, blamed the loss on redrawn district lines, Republicans pouring millions into his opponent’s smear campaign, and New York City’s aggressive media negatively spinning crime stories in New York City, scaring suburban voters.

Since November, Biden has been searching for a position for Maloney, insiders close to Biden told Axios, which broke the news 10 days before Biden’s announcement.

In March, more than two years after Biden’s pledge, the U.S. made its biggest move to protect LGBTQ people globally when it led a coalition of countries, along with the United Nations LGBTI Core Group, the U.N. LGBTQ expert, and two experts from Afghanistan and Colombia. The coalition called upon the U.N. Security Council to better integrate LGBTQ human rights under its international peace and security mandate, the B.A.R. previously reported.

Nominating LGBTQ ambassadors has been a slower process. According to the American Foreign Service Association’s tracker, there were a total of 194 positions as of May 16. Of those, 46 of Biden’s 2022 and 2023 nominees were entering the Senate confirmation process or are at various levels of the Senate confirmation hearings. Of the 46 pending nominations, 24 offices are vacant. Some of those vacant offices are very important, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the African Union and many African countries, like Uganda; the United Arab Emirates, and the United Nations/Deputy Representative, to name a few.

Other empty or pending appointments are in coveted destinations like the aforementioned Italy and San Marino and Colombia.

In 2021, the Washington Blade questioned if Biden was missing an opportunity “to exhibit America’s LGBTQ community overseas through its first-ever appointment of a lesbian and transgender ambassador” after he passed his first 100 days in office. t

A longer version of this column is online at ebar.com.

He is also planning to take part in the Pride in the Plaza event the agency is hosting Saturday, June 17.

As for taking part in the Bay Area’s largest LGBTQ celebration, the San Francisco Pride Parade on Sunday, June 25, Carlson doesn’t plan to have his own contingent this year. He told the B.A.R. he may inquire about marching with the Ducal Council contingent.

“There is a lot going on,” Carlson noted of this year’s Pride Month. “I am not sure what my schedule will allow.”

In an email to his constituents inviting them to the county supervisors’ Pride observance in its chambers, Carlson noted the significance of the moment due to his breaking through a political glass ceiling in last year’s election.

“As the first openly gay member of the board, I recognize that my role and this moment wouldn’t be possible without those who came before me,” wrote Carlson, who served nearly a decade on the Pleasant Hill City Council.

He added, “I look forward to continuing to fight for more inclusivity and acceptance in our community and across our country. Inclusivity starts in our community. I encourage you to attend Pride Events throughout Contra Costa County to support your neighbors.”

From page 4 participant, which we conceded, and acted with reckless indifference.”

Demeester added that the medical testimony regarding the sickle-cell disease asserted it was high doses of an opioid medication that led to nullified culpability.

“What was shown in evidence was that Fantasy was in the hospital for some days – as late as the afternoon of July 14 – and she was given intravenously heavy doses of pain medication, Dilaudid, and that’s way up there in terms of pain medication, and a number of attending physicians

East Bay native Carlson grew up in Concord until his family moved to Pleasant Hill in the early 1970s. His grandfather, James Moriarty, was a county supervisor in the 1970s.

As the B.A.R. noted when Carlson announced his supervisor bid in 2021, he is believed to have been the first out LGBTQ candidate to seek a seat on the five-person board overseeing the sprawling East Bay county. Today, he is the only known out supervisor serving in the nine-county Bay Area region outside of San Francisco County, which now has three gay men on its Board of Supervisors.

“Of course it has been great. I get to work with some great folks,” Carlson told the B.A.R. during a recent phone interview to discuss his being the first out supervisor on his county board. “The staff have been tremendous, and my other board members have been great. There hasn’t been a hint of negativity.”

One issue he has been working on is if LGBTQ concerns will be part of the purview of the county’s Office of Racial Equity and Social Justice that it is establishing. In meetings he has had with LGBTQ advocates, it is one issue that has been brought up.

“Where will the LGBTQIA representation be in that organization and testified about the treatment she received in the week leading up to July 16, when Mr. French was killed,” Demeester said.

Decuir’s attorney Mark Iverson told the B.A.R. that “the legal defense of unconsciousness we presented on behalf of Ms. Decuir involved the interaction of the extreme pain Ms. Decuir experienced during that time from her sickle-cell disease and the large amounts of opiates prescribed and administered to her to relieve her pain. Her ability to manage this medical crisis and her withdrawal from opiates was severely compromised by her intellectual disability.”

Iverson said no expert “testified that will there be someone specific to our community who will have input and say on what goes on in that office,” Carlson said are some of the questions he has asked about the new office.

Another area he believes the office should be focused on is access to LGBTQ culturally competent health care in the county, as it runs its own health system. Carlson told the B.A.R. it has been an ongoing concern, particularly around the health needs of transgender youth.

“Even I know our community is more comfortable going to Planned Parenthood to get access to health care as opposed to other health care systems, and that can include the county health care system as well,” said Carlson. “How can we address that is what I see the Office of Racial Equity and Social Justice being about.”

Allotted a certain number of seats on county commissions and boards to fill – his recommended appointees must be approved by the supervisors – Carlson told the B.A.R. he is being cognizant of the need to have LGBTQ people on the oversight bodies.

“For example, we have a housing and homelessness commission, and a mental health commission. We need people to apply to serve on them,” noted Carlson.

Improving his own communication with his constituents has been another

Ms. Decuir was unconscious at the time of the shooting of Mr. French because such opinions are not legally permitted.” focus of Carlson’s during his first six months on the board. He is an infrequent user of Instagram and isn’t active on Twitter, where he doesn’t have an official profile as supervisor. His personal page still lists him as a Pleasant Hill council member, with his last post made in late March 2022.

“Rather, the jury heard from a variety of doctors and nurses about what it is like to suffer from sickle-cell disease generally and specifically the course the disease took with Ms. Decuir during the month of July 2017 and how medically opiates were the only viable way to alleviate her severe pain throughout the month of July 2017,” he continued.

‘He loved this city’ Higginbotham said he’s made 75 different court appearances. The couple had been together for over 30 years.

He does post to his official Facebook page throughout the week, but not daily – or multiple times a day – like some other politicians. Carlson also sends out an emailed newsletter usually twice a week and has worked to make it more personal, as he had been advised to do by his campaign manager.

“Within a month or two, he told me, ‘OK, you are getting there.’ But I was told to get more out there and show you are doing more, and to share more of what you want to do,” recalled Carlson, who included a photo of his being at Clayton Pride in his June 6 newsletter.

Being out front on issues, particularly those related to the LGBTQ community, whether in the press or on social media, doesn’t come naturally for him, explained Carlson, who did do a recent interview with the Bay Area’s NBC affiliate, KNTV-TV, to mark Pride Month.

“Part of it is me. I lived in the closet a longtime,” said Carlson, who was raised Mormon and had three daughters with his ex-wife.

Earlier this year, Carlson learned of

“I met him in 1989,” Higginbotham recalled. “We met here; some club south of Market. He was a very interesting guy. It’s so outrageous; that Sunday morning he had $50,000 to come in the next day to invest in something. He was so excited. He’s a lifelong San Franciscan – born by the Zuni restaurant on Market, grew up in the North Bay, Petaluma, but got out of there quickly. In 1979, he moved down here after all the Harvey Milk stuff was happening.”

Lorrie French said that “they didn’t just take away my brother. They took my best friend, my buddy. He was such a good, caring person.” She described her late brother as “Mr. San Francisco.” several students being bullied due to their race or gender identity and attended a rally held at a local middle school to show them his support. More recently, after being connected through a friend of a friend, Carlson met with the mother of a transgender student who was being bullied at their middle school in Concord, though he lamented that as a supervisor, he has “no leverage over” how the school district has handled the matter.

With his being a gay county leader and retired police officer, Carlson had expected he would field press requests for comment when news broke this spring about racist and homophobic text chains involving 45 Antioch police officers. Several people arrested by the police have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, and the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation of the police department. Because the county’s district attorney has also been involved, Carlson said he has been paying attention to the scandal. As part of the balanced budget the supervisors approved last month, they budgeted an extra $2.1 million for the county’s D.A. and public defender to bring on five new employees each to review cases handled by the implicated Antioch officers.

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“One time we took our nephew and niece from Washington to the California Street cable car,” Lorrie French said. “As we went down, he was telling the kids the buildings, and when we got off at the end of the line the people behind us asked ‘Can we go with you?’ because they were listening, getting the history of San Francisco. He loved this city. He really loved this city, but that’s the city that took him.”

The next hearing in the case is scheduled for July 7 at 9 a.m. in Department 22 at the Hall of Justice. t