Meet our Board of Directors

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		We mourn the death and celebrate the life of Carolyn Wagner Families United Aganst Hate's co-founder. Carolyn died on January 18, 2011. See our memorial pages about her for more information.
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). Gabi is a mental health counselor with a small private practice. She and her husband Alec run ClaytonWorks doing web design, graphic design, desktop publishing and editing. THey also run ClaytonWorks Publishing. See her personal website including this essay about her cultural heritage, and her blog Inside the outsider ... 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 retired 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 articles in ThurstonTalk. 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 South Sound Arts etc. He is co-owner of ClaytonWorks, doing web design, graphic design, desktop publishing and editing.
Jason Hungerford, Ithaca, NY ~ FUAH treasurer
		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.
Vanessa Edwards Foster, Houston, TX
		Biography coming.
Betsy Stephens; Denver, CO
		Betsy was 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.
Steve Schalchlin; New York, NY
		Singer and songwriter Steve Schalchlin (SHACK-lin) is an award winning singer/songwriter and composer of two hit Off-Broadway musicals. Steve's sudden disappearance in 1993 led many to believe he had died. In fact, he was hospitalized with end stage AIDS and given a short time to live. Barely able to sit up, Steve wrote songs of musical healing which became the cult Off-Broadway rock gospel musical, The Last Session, (book by Steve's partner Jim Brochu). Steve also established, early in 1996, the world's first AIDS blog/diary and the first website for an (eventual) Off-Broadway musical -- all from his "deathbed" as his health had begun to fail again. Awarded Internet Pioneer status by GeoCities/Yahoo, he used his innovative site to educate health care professionals all over the world, as he went through therapy after therapy, getting weaker and weaker until he was on a I.V. 14 hours a day. During this time he found Gabi's website about Bill, and inspired her to write more of his story which began thier friendship. Rescued at the last minute by the new AIDS drugs, Steve began touring as guest health care advocate "lecturer at the piano," singing and playing for colleges and universities across the country, including Harvard, Stanford, Penn State and UCLA. In 2005, he and Jim returned to Off-Broadway in their autobiographical musical, The Big Voice: God or Merman?,  (book by Steve's partner Jim Brochu) which this time got them the Best Musical by the L.A Ovations and Best Musical Score from the L.A. Drama Critics Circle and Best Lead Actor in a Musical nomination. He most recent work is a choral/orchestral song cycle for peace called New World Waking! inspired by his experience playing John Lennon's IMAGINE piano at the Clayton's home on the anniversary of Bill Clayton's suicide, which debuted at Davies Symphony Hall in 2009 by the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus and Community Women's Orchestra. He donates his time as Resident Composer at Christ Church Bay Ridge, Episcopal church, working with one of the great musical directors/musicians in New York, Mark Janas.  To this day, Steve maintains his website/blog, Living in the Bonus Round, where he says funny stuff and continues to report on the state of his health.
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 was the founder and creator of the TransFM internet broadcasting network and very active in the Remembering Our Dead Project. Read this article about Ethan: Transgender equality now by Mark Puleo, published on September 8, 2009 in Metro. You can reach Ethan by email at: radicalguy@gmail.com Phone: (978) 518-1835.

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