Gabi Clayton; Olympia, WA ~ FUAH co-founder &
president
Gabi
is
the mother of a hate crime
victim. Her younger son Bill came
out to the family as bisexual when he was 14 years old.
Three years later in 1995 he was assaulted in a hate crime
based on his sexual orientation and he committed suicide a
month later. Gabi learned web design so she could publish
his story on the internet.
See
Bill's Story.
She works with the
Safe
Schools Coalition as their webspinner and a trainer. She is on the board of
directors of Youth Guardian Services which runs email
support lists for glbt and straight ally youth - currently she is the YGS board
chair. She is a member of
Unity in the Community,
an Olympia-based coalition dedicated to organizing positive pro-diversity
educational events and appropriate community responses to the growing hate group
presence in the Olympia area. She is on the board of
PFLAG-Olympia (Parents, Families and
Friends of Lesbians and Gays).
From 1973 to 1977 she was a
staff member at
Everything for Everybody in New York
City -
this is where she met Alec. The organization provided
crisis counseling and referral services, ran an emergency
shelter, soup line, food co-op, free school, day care
center, and community-based alternative weekly newspaper
which Alec edited. Then from 1977 to 1981 she and Alec ran
Persons Service in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Alec's hometown. They provided
crisis counseling, referral services, emergency housing,
free meals and clothing to people in need. They organized a
food co-op, and helped to establish a statewide coalition of
battered women's shelters. They also established
Persons Publishing which ran from 1977 to 1985, publishing a
weekly alternative newspaper then a monthly magazine and
finally a statewide quarterly arts and literary magazine.
Alec Clayton, Olympia, WA ~ FUAH secretary
Alec is the father of a hate crime
victim and married to FUAH co-founder Gabi Clayton (see
above). He is
active in the Olympia, Washington chapter of PFLAG (chapter president and editor
of the chapter newsletter). Alec is a member of
Unity in the Community.
He
also worked as a program assistant for
Oasis, a glbtq youth center in Tacoma, and he once served on the
board of Stonewall Youth in Olympia.
Alec
is a freelance writer and artist. He writes art and theater reviews for various
publications in Seattle and Tacoma, including regular columns in the Weekly Volcano, The News Tribune
and The Olympian.
Alec has written and published
a book of art criticism and five novels so far.
See his website
Alec
Clayton: Art & Writing and his blog
Jason is the founder of
Youth Guardian Services, a youth-run non-profit
organization that provides support services to gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, straight, and questioning youth
through peer-operated Internet-based programs. He served as
Executive Director for the first eight years and continues
to serve on the organization's Board of Directors.
Jason is
currently the Co-Chair of the
Ithaca Lesbian Gay Bisexual
Transgender Task Force in Ithaca, New York, where he and
his partner of eight years, also named Jason, live. In 2004
"The Jasons" -- along with 24 other
same-sex couples from the Ithaca area sued the City of
Ithaca and the New York Department of Health for denying
them the right to marry. In July 2006 the New York State
Court of Appeals ruled that the New York State Constitution
does not compel the state to recognize their commitments.
Despite this, the couples are determined to work with state
lawmakers to pass a law that would extend marriage rights to
same-sex couples. Professionally, Jason works as a web
developer and Internet technology consultant and owns his
own company
Blue Argo which provides web hosting and
other Internet services to small businesses and non-profit
organizations.
Catherine Dawdy;
Olympia, WA
Biography coming.
Steve Schalchlin,
Los Angeles, CA
Steve Schalchlin, like many others on this board, was also
the victim of a hate attack when a gang of youths wielding
baseball bats attacked him and a group of friends leaving a
gay bar in Dallas back in the 1970s. Though no one was
seriously hurt, he realized then and there how quickly and
anonymously something like that can happen.
Steve is a songwriter, actor,
blogger & peace activist with two off-Broadway hit shows to
his credit,
THE LAST
SESSION about a conservative Christian homophobe who
encounters a gay man in a recording studio. And
THE BIG
VOICE: GOD OR MERMAN?, a musical about his marriage to
his partner, playwright/actor Jim Brochu.
Steve wrote "William's Song (Five Big Guys)"
about
Carolyn and William Wagner. Listen to it on
the memoial pages about Carolyn.
Steve is very proud to have
"discovered" Gabi Clayton on the Internet in 1996,
convincing her to upload the story of her son, Bill Clayton.
He is also honored to have played John Lennon's piano for
the
IMAGINE Piano Peace Project headed by George Michael and
his life partner, Kenny Goss.
Steve Schalchlinwrote "Will It Always be
Like This? (Gabi's Song)" which he sang in public for the first
time at a national PFLAG conference in Washington
DC in 2000.
Betsywas the
co-founder and past president of PFLAG Durango, and was part
of the team that provided support to Pauline Mitchell in the
weeks and months following the murder of Fred Martinez Jr.
in Cortez, Colorado. As a direct result of those events,
Betsy and others were inspired to improve the school
experience for GLBT youth in Southwest Colorado by creating
the Four Corners Safe Schools Coalition.
Currently residing
in Denver, Betsy has continued to champion the rights of
glbtqi youth through her involvement with
PFLAG Denver,
where she currently serves on the board, and the Colorado
Coalition of PFLAG Chapters, where she assists with
organizing Safe Schools conferences and trainings. She
is currently working at the
Colorado Foundation for Families
and Children as a project assistant for the Bullying
Prevention Initiative.
Ethan St. Pierre; Haverhill,
Massachusetts
Ethan St. Pierre is the nephew of a
hate crime victim. On May 15, 1995 his aunt, Debbie Forte,
who was a transgender woman, was brutally murdered by
Michael Thompson. Debbie was strangled, (he broke every bone
in her neck), she was beaten to the point that she was
unrecognizable, and stabbed ten times in the chest. Thompson
hid from the police and then turned himself in two weeks
later only to be let out on bail. One year and four
months later he plea bargained with the district attorney
receiving a sentence of 15 years for manslaughter. Michael
Thompson never stood trial for the murder of Debbie Forte.
Ethan is a FtM transsexual gender activist. In 1999 he
learned of the transgender movement and began to lobby
Congress on behalf of hate crime victims and survivors. He
is a board member of the National Transgender Advocacy
Coalition, He works with the Remembering Our Dead Project as
coordinator of The International Transgender Day of
Remembrance and investigates and updates the statistics of
those who are murdered as a result of anti-transgender
violence or hatred.
Ethan is the founder and creator of
the TransFM
internet broadcasting network a place where all LGBTQI
people have a voice and are welcome to use it.
Read this article about Ethan:
Transgender equality now by
Mark Puleo, published on September 8,
2009 in Metro.
Weiner-Mahfuz has worked in several movements for social justice with a
particular emphasis on building grassroots political power across movements,
issues, identities and communities. As a capacity builder, movement builder,
cultural worker and writer Weiner-Mahfuz has dedicated much of her organizing
life to challenging oppression at the intersections of race, class, gender,
sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.
From 2005-2010, she
served as the director of capacity building for the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. As the first staff person to be
hired into this role, she actively embedded racial, economc and disability
justice work into building stronger movement organizations. Today she continues
to be at the forefront of developing inclusive approaches to organization and
movement building.
Weiner-Mahfuz's writings can be found in
Colonize
This! Young Women of Color and Feminism (Seal Press, 2002), Fireweed
Magazine's "Mixed Race Issue" (Issue 75), and through on a web-based project
titled
BustingBinaries (no longer online)
which she co-authored with Ana Maurine Lara.
Prior to joining the staff
of the Task Force, she was the senior field organizer for lesbian rights for the
National Organization for Women, the pension plan organizer for the National
Organizers Alliance, and Midwest regional organizer for the national office of
Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
Weiner-Mahfuz is a
graduate of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., where she majored in women's
studies and political science, and minored in anthropology. She currently lives
in Silver Spring, Md., with partner Lisbeth Melendez Rivera.
