on the National Mall as well as other protests that came in the decades that followed, Rustin’s work in the civil rights movement also helped inspire and influence much of the tactics and approaches taken in the fight for fair treatment and equal rights of LGBTQ people—from building coalitions with other civil liberties groups to seeking publicity for their actions. In 1986, Rustin declined the opportunity to contribute to In The Life: A Black Gay Anthology. “While I have no problem with being publicly identified as homosexual,” Rustin wrote at the time, “I fundamentally consider sexual orientation to be a private matter.” Even without Rustin, the anthology was a groundbreaking collection of essays, journal entries, short fiction and poetry by black gay men edited by Joseph F. Beam, who died from complications due to AIDS just two years after publication. 1960s Beam’s lover Essex Hemphill PRE-STONEWALL would go on to complete his planned sequel, 1991’s Brother LGBTQ PICKETS to Brother: New Writings by & PROTESTS Black Gay Men, which garnered a In addition to Lavender Scare Lambda Literary Award. “I live in legal challenges, the Mattachine a town / where everyone is afraid Society of Washington also raised / of the dark,” writes Hemphill awareness about LGBTQ rights in one stanza of his provocative by initiating the practice of poem “Family Jewels” about the pickets outside federal agencies, nation’s capital, which the poem’s with the White House the first protagonist holds accountable for target in 1965. (“Russia, Cuba the racism and homophobia he’s and the United States Unite to faced. Raised in Southeast D.C., Persecute Homosexuals,” read Hemphill once described his one sign at the protest.) New York’s Mattachine Society and the largely autobiographical poetry as lesbian Daughters of Bilitis would “sexually political and politically sexual,” and the work retains soon join and expand the list its power and relevance today, of targets to include the United although much of it remains Nations and Philadelphia’s woefully out of print. Before Independence Hall. This he died from complications same coalition of activists and with AIDS in 1995 at the tender organizations also helped spread age of 38, Hemphill gained the concept of pride, and June as further attention by virtue of the pride month, by joining the cause prominent inclusion of his poetry to commemorate Stonewall. in two acclaimed documentaries about the black experience from Marlon Riggs, 1989’s Tongues Untied and 1992’s Black Is… Black Ain’t, as well as Looking for Langston, the 1989 documentary exploring the gay undercurrent of the Harlem Renaissance by British filmmaker Isaac Julian, who called Hemphill “a modern black Genet.” Nearly a decade after Hemphill’s death, Wanda Alston, an AfricanAmerican lesbian, opened the doors to D.C.’s first Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs under the administration of Anthony Williams. This was a small but not insignificant sign of the political progress the local LGBTQ community had made in the 40 years since Kameny came to prominence. The office has lived on through several mayoral administrations since— yet sadly Alston hasn’t, the victim of a senseless homicide in 2005, not even a year into her tenure. A native of Newport News, Va., who had overcome a tumultuous childhood and struggles with drug addiction, Alston is now remembered by her namesake house and foundation, Page 32
Essex Hempill, Author
Wanda Alston, Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs
located in Northeast’s Deanwood neighborhood, providing transitional living and support services to the city’s homeless and at-risk LGBTQ youth. Instrumental in Alston’s appointment as director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs was Jim Graham, who was the second out member elected to the Council of the District of Columbia (after David Catania’s election in 1997). Graham served as the city’s Ward 1 representative from 1999 to 2015. Graham arguably left an even bigger mark on gay Washington in his work prior to becoming a council member. During the worst of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, he led the Whitman-Walker Clinic, the LGBTQcentered health care organization now known as Whitman-Walker Health (and named after Walt Whitman and fellow Civil War-era D.C. resident and women’s activist Dr. Mary Edwards Walker). “[Graham] was a leader who put together a community response to fight back and resist and push down stigma and discrimination and fear, and drove a community response through community and political activism,” Whitman-Walker Health’s Chief Executive Officer Don Blanchon told Metro Weekly in the wake of Graham’s death in June of 2017. Jim Graham, DC Councilman shhhOUT