P.O. Box 75265
Washington, D.C. 20013
For Release:
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Contact: Rick Rosendall
202-667-5139
GLAA Announces 2010 Distinguished Service Awards
The Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, D.C., is pleased to announce its 2010 Distinguished Service Award recipients. GLAA presents awards to local individuals and organizations that have served the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community in the national capital area. The awards will be presented at GLAA’s 39th Anniversary Reception, which will be held on Tuesday, April 20 from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. at the Washington Plaza Hotel, 10 Thomas Circle, NW.
GLAA’s 2010 Distinguished Service Award recipients are:
- Brian Moore
- Brian K. Flowers
- Michael Crawford
- Mark Levine
- Nick McCoy
- Rev. Monique Ellison
- Sultan Shakir
- DC Clergy United for Marriage Equality
- Joan E. Biren
- Sean Bugg
- Lou Chibbaro
- David Mariner
Eight of this year’s honorees contributed toward our city’s historic passage of the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009. (We note that these are individuals or organizations not previously honored by GLAA; several key contributors to the marriage victory were previously honored with Distinguished Service Awards, including activist Bob Summersgill and D.C. Council members David Catania and Phil Mendelson.) In no particular order:
Brian Moore, legislative counsel for the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, played a leading role in perfecting the bill and prepared a masterful, comprehensive committee report, in addition to prior legislative work protecting domestic partners and their children.
Brian K. Flowers performed key legal work as General Counsel to the D.C. Council, including superb testimony and briefs against several proposed anti-gay ballot measures.
Michael Crawford, co-chair of DC for Marriage, led an aggressive grassroots organizing effort for the bill.
Mark Levine, counsel for the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, assisted both in crafting the bill and in defending it before the Board of Elections and Ethics and with court briefs.
Nick McCoy, even before being hired by the Human Rights Campaign, did extensive voter canvassing, while he and
Rev. Monique Ellison did outreach and advocacy at community meetings around the city as co-leaders of the ANC Action Team.
Sultan Shakir provided extensive support for the bill on behalf of HRC, including assistance in organizing the Campaign for All D.C. Families.
DC Clergy United for Marriage Equality, co-chaired by Pastors Dennis Wiley, Christine Wiley, and Rob Hardies, organized a broad spectrum of affirming clergy in defense of marriage equality and demonstrated the true diversity of support for this landmark legislation.
We selected these honorees as exemplars from a much larger population to emphasize the variety of contributions by people and groups involved in this coalition effort that brought to fruition one of GLAA’s longstanding goals.
Joan E. Biren (JEB) is an internationally recognized documentary artist who has chronicled the lives of LGBT people for more than three decades. Her works include the film No Secret Anymore: the Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon; the official video of the 1993 March on Washington, A Simple Matter of Justice; and two groundbreaking volumes of photography, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979) and Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front (1987). She is president of Moonforce Media, a non-profit video production company that specializes in serving progressive communities, and has worked with the Mautner Project for Lesbians with Cancer and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her videos have been broadcast on public television and her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University, and the Academy of Arts in Berlin, Germany.
Sean Bugg, Co-Publisher and Senior Contributing Editor of Metro Weekly, has eloquently and accessibly chronicled the gay experience and upheld a standard of quality for the magazine. He created Metro Weekly’s Next Generation Awards to honor local LGBT men and women under the age of 30 who are making a difference. Prior to his years at the magazine, Sean was a member of ACT UP and was a leading organizer on the protest events Hands Around the Capitol and Hands Around the White House. At Whitman-Walker Clinic he spearheaded the Male Sex Industry Project and Gay Men’s Outreach Education. At the National Society of AIDS Directors (NASTAD), he traveled the country training public health departments in developing effective HIV prevention programs.
Lou Chibbaro is the standard bearer for gay-focused journalism in the District of Columbia. For more than three decades, most of that time with the Washington Blade, he has been working his extensive Rolodex and sticking his tape recorder in newsmakers’ faces, chasing down leads to get to the bottom of all manner of stories related to the LGBT community. As an indication of his standing, last year he was given a front-row seat at a presidential news conference on healthcare policy. Twenty-six boxes of his notes and files form the Washington Blade Lou Chibbaro Senior Reporter Files at George Washington University's Gelman Library.
David Mariner has provided energetic and innovative leadership as executive director of the DC Center. He has steered the Center through a challenging period that saw hundreds of thousands of expected public grant dollars vanish with the economic downturn. He oversees a diverse array of programs including CenterArts; Career Development; the Crystal Meth Working Group; DC for Marriage; the Elder Think Tank; GLOV; the HIV Working Group; the OutWrite Author Series; the Research, Advocacy, and Education Project (REAP) on HIV/AIDS research; and the Tobacco Working Group. Embracing a model of identifying unmet needs and having the Center address them, Mariner has set an admirable standard for community service.
A list of previous award winners can be found on the GLAA website at www.glaa.org/resources/awardshistory.shtml.
Founded in 1971, the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington (GLAA) is an all-volunteer, non-partisan, non-profit political organization that defends the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgenders in the Nation’s Capital. GLAA lobbies the DC Council, monitors government agencies, educates and rates local candidates, and works in coalitions to defend the safety, health, and equal rights of gay families. GLAA remains the nation's oldest continuously active gay and lesbian civil rights organization.
