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Meet our Board of Directors
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Gabi Clayton; Olympia, WA ~ FUAH co-founder &
president |
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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 of
Youth Guardian Services which runs email
support lists for glbt and straight ally youth - and currently she is the 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 active in
PFLAG-Olympia (Parents, Families and
Friends of Lesbians and Gays) - she is their web
designer and on the chapter board.
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. See her
personal website 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.
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Carolyn Wagner,
Waldron, AR ~ FUAH co-founder & vice-president |
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Carolyn is the mother of a hate
crime victim. In December 1996 her 16 year old son William was
assaulted in a vicious anti-gay bashing at school. He survived but
with lasting injuries,
The Wagners filed a complaint with
the Office For Civil Rights that the Fayetteville School
District was in violation of their son's title lX rights and
succeeded in convincing the OCR that GLBT students are
covered by Title lX. The Supreme Court upheld Title lX
rights for students, regardless of gender of victim or
harasser or sexual orientation/gender identity.
Carolyn is a long time progressive activist.
She is a former Vice-President elect of PFLAG (Parents and Friends
of Lesbians and Gays) and co-founder of Arkansas Equality Network,
created to coordinate and advocate with individuals and
organizations based on the pursuit of equality for all.
See
MAKING MEN: The Boy Who Doesn't Fit In and Letter
from Fayetteville.
Read Carolyn's
article
From 1974
to 1976 Carolyn was a volunteer lay therapist for S.C.A.N.
(Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect) of Fort Smith, Arkansas.
In 1979 she founded Fulfill A Dream, Inc. (an organization
to assist families with limited income/resources meet needs
and or fulfill dreams for children with catastrophic and or
terminal diseases). It merged in 1993 to form Make A Wish
Foundation and moved its offices to Memphis, TN.. In 1983
Carolyn founded Camp Rainbow for children in AR, OK, MO, TN,
and LA, MS who had cancer and at the time could not attend
other camping facilities. The camp's mission was to provide
normal living experiences for children experiencing abnormal
living conditions and their siblings as well as to give
parents/caregivers a week of respite. It merged to form C.O.C.A. (children's oncology camps of America).
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Listen to an interview on
11/12/06 by FUAH board member Ethan St. Pierre
with FUAH co-founders Carolyn Wagner & Gabi Clayton -
click
here.
(Opens in new window --
interview is broken into three parts -- see left side of
window.)
Also on the
site is a great interview Ethan did with Carolyn's son William
on 1/10/07, and many other folks too.
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Alec Clayton;
Olympia, WA ~ FUAH secretary |
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Alec is the father of a hate crime
victim and married to FUAH co-founder Gabi Clayton (see
above). He is an artist and freelance writer. He writes
art and theater reviews for various publications in Seattle
and Tacoma, including regular columns in the Weekly Volcano
and The News Tribune.
Alec 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 served on the
board of Stonewall Youth, a glbt youth center in Olympia.
See his website
Alec
Clayton: Art & Writing and his blog
South Sound Arts etc.. |
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Jason Hungerford,
Ithaca, NY ~ FUAH treasurer |
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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.
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Steve Schalchlin,
Los Angeles, CA |
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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.
His landmark blog, called
Living in the Bonus Round was one of the first online
diaries.
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. |
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Courtney Sharp;
Metairie, LA |
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Biography coming soon. |
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Betsy Stephens;
Denver, CO |
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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. |
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Ethan St. Pierre; Haverhill,
Massachusetts
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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.
You can reach Ethan by email at:
radicalguy@gmail.com Phone: (978) 373-8898
Podcast
~
My Space
~
Remembering Our Dead Project
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Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz,
Washington, DC. |
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Lisa
has a degree in Women's Studies and Political Science from
Wheaton College in Norton, MA where she began her social
justice activism as a student organizer. She has been
working across movements for social justice as an organizer
and trainer, with an extensive background in anti-oppression
training and education, workers rights, LGBTI issues,
organizational development and coalition building. In 2002,
she was published in an anthology entitled Colonize This!
Young Women of Color and Feminism as well as in Fireweed
Magazine's Mixed Race Issue.
She lives in Washington, DC
with her partner, and is the capacity building director for
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, where she works in
partnership with statewide LGBT organizations to help
strengthen their capacity at the grassroots level.
Lisa is
one of the founders of BustingBinaries, launched in an effort to
build a community of resistance by addressing the binaries
in our movements with opportunities for organizers, writers
and artists to learn about, dialogue and actively challenge
binary thinking and action. |
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