Arts & Entertainment
Best of Gay D.C. 2017: COMMUNITY
Winners from the Washington Blade’s annual poll
Best Art Gallery
Phillips Collection
A Washington institution founded in 1921. Last yearās runner-up in this category.
1600 21st St., N.W.
Editorās choice: LongView Gallery
Best Adult Store
Bite the Fruit
Second consecutive win in this category!
1723 Connecticut Ave., N.W.
Editorās choice: Lotus Blooms
Best Car Dealership
DARCARS
New and used cars at locations in Suitland, Temple Hills, Silver Spring, Md. et. al.
Editorās choice: BMW of Fairfax
Best Apartment/Condo Building
Atlantic Plumbing
Second consecutive win in this category!
2112 8th St., N.W.
Editorās choice: F1RST Residences
Best Doctor/Medical Provider: Dr. Robyn Zeiger
Runner-up: Dr. Ray Martins, Whitman-Walker Health
Dr. Robyn Zeiger is a licensed clinical professional counselor in D.C., Maryland and West Virginia specializing in LGBT issues and pet loss.
Zeiger, who is married to Best Real Estate runner-up Stacey Williams-Zeiger, deals with issues surrounding homophobia, coming out, grief and addictions. She also has begun focusing on servicing the transgender community.
She says being able to relate with your therapist gives a familiarity that makes it easier to be vulnerable in sessions.
āYou walk into a therapistās office and you know they are also LGBT so you donāt have to explain anything. You donāt have to teach them. You can just be yourself and you donāt have to justify anything,ā Zeiger, runner-up in this category last year, says.
In addition to counseling, Zeiger is an adjunct senior lecturer at University of Maryland where she teaches in the Department of Family Science. She also teaches her self-created course, āExploring Homophobia: Demystifying LGBT Issues,ā for the Honors College. (MC)
Dr. Robyn Zeiger
10300 Sweetbriar Pkwy.
Silver Spring, Md.
Best Fitness or Workout Spot
Soulcycle
A Best of Gay D.C. surprise win ā VIDA Fitness won the seven previous consecutive years.
2301 M St., N.W.
601 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.
1935 14th St., N.W.
Editorās choice: VIDA Fitness
Best Gayborhood
Shaw
Second consecutive win in this category!
Editorās choice: Logan Circle (last yearās runner up)
Best Hardware Store
Logan Ace Hardware
1734 14th St., N.W.
Editorās choice: Annieās Ace Hardware
Best Home Furnishings
Miss Pixieās Furnishings & Whatnot
Also won this award 2012-2015. Snags it back this year from Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams.
1626 14th St., N.W.
Editorās choice: Room & Board
Best Home Improvement Service
Case Design
āFull-service home remodelers building your dreams.ā
Editorās choice: The Organizing Agency
Best Hotel
The W
Third consecutive win in this category!
515 15th St., N.W.
Editorās choice: Dupont Circle Hotel
Best House of Worship
Empowerment Liberation Cathedral
Third consecutive win. Foundry United Methodist had dominated the category for several previous years.
633 Sligo Avenue, Silver Spring
240-720-7605
empowermentliberationcathedral.org
Editorās choice: All Souls Unitarian (also last yearās runner-up)
Best Lawyer
Glen Ackerman
Ackerman Brown PLLC
2101 L St., N.W., no. 440
Runner-up: Michele Zavos
Best LGBT Social Group
Stonewall Sports
Editorās choice: Impulse D.C.
Best LGBT Support Group
SMYAL
Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders
Third consecutive win in this category!
410 7th St., S.E.
Editorās choice: The D.C. Center
BestĀ LGBT Sports League
Stonewall Kickball (last yearās runner-up)
Editorās choice: D.C. Frontrunners
Best LGBT-Owned Business
Three Fifty Bakery and Coffee Bar
Editorās Choice: Best Bus
Three Fifty Bakery is, in a word, darling. In 2014, just after it opened, owner Jimmy Hopper said in a Washington Blade interview that some day that heād ālike to win a readersā poll prize for the bakery.ā
So, congratulations, Jimmy ā and itās a well-deserved honor. The bright space has become a neighborhood favorite in just a scant few years, serving up smaller quantities of freshly baked goods, from cinnamon-laced bundt cakes drizzled with icing to coma-inducing fudgy brownies to zucchini bread.
The fact that Three Fifty doesnāt overproduce means that each bite really does taste fresh, and that makes all the difference when youāre indulging in a treat. Working out is overrated, but freshly-baked coconut cake is not. (KH)
Three Fifty Bakery and Coffee Bar
1926 17th St., N.W.
Most LGBT-friendly Workplace
Whitman-Walker Health
1525 14th St., N.W.
Editorās choice: Town, Trade and Number Nine
Best LGBT Event
Capital Pride Celebration
Editorās choice: SMYAL Fall Brunch
Best Museum
National Museum of African-American History and Culture
1400 Constitution Ave., N.W.
Editorās choice: Hirshorn
Best Non-Profit
SMYAL
Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders
410 7th St., S.E.
Editorās choice: Latino GLBT History Project
Best Private School
Maret School
A coed, K-12 independent school founded in 1911.
3000 Cathedral Ave., N.W.
Editorās choice: Barrie
Best Pet Business
Doggy Style Bakery, Boutique & Pet Spa
1642 R St., N.W.
Editorās choice: Dogma Day Care
Best Place to Buy Second-hand Stuff
Miss Pixieās Furnishings and Whatnot
Third consecutive win in this category!
1626 14th St., N.W.
Editorās choice: Buffalo Exchange (last yearās runner-up)
Best Movie Theater
Landmark Theaters Atlantic Plumbing
New releases plus indie fare, foreign and avant garde.
807 V St., N.W.
Editorās choice: Landmark Theaters E Street Cinema
Best Rehoboth Business
r Squared Design
39 Baltimore Ave.
Rehoboth Beach, Del.
Editorās choice: Blue Moon
Best Salon/Spa
Logan 14
Second consecutive win in this category!
1314 14th St., N.W.
Editor’s Choice: Salon Quency
Best Short-Term Car Service
Car2Go
Editorās choice: Zip Car
Best Staycation Getaway
MGM National Harbor
101 MGM national Ave.
Oxon Hill, Md.
Editorās choice: Discover Easton
Best Tattoo Parlor
Tattoo Paradise
2444 18th St., N.W.
Editorās choice: Fattyās Tattoos
Best Theater
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Third consecutive win in this category!
2700 F St., N.W.
Editor’s Choice: Studio Theatre
Best Theater Production
āWig Out!ā at Studio Theatre
Editorās Choice: āHedwig and the Angry Inchā at the Kennedy Center
Best Vet
CityPaws Animal Hospital
Third consecutive win in this category!
1823 14th St., N.W.
Editor’s Choice: District Veterinary Hospital
To see winners in other categories in the Washington Bladeās Best of Gay D.C. 2017 Awards, click here.
The new LGBTQ venue Crush held a party for friends, family and close supporters on Tuesday.Ā For more information on future events at Crush, go to their Instagram page @crushbardc.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
a&e features
What to expect at the 2024 National Cannabis Festival
Wu-Tang Clan to perform; policy discussions also planned
(Editor’s note: Tickets are still available for the National Cannabis Festival, with prices starting at $55 for one-day general admission on Friday through $190 for a two-day pass with early-entry access. The Washington Blade, one of the event’s sponsors, will host a LGBTQIA+ Lounge and moderate a panel discussion on Saturday with the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs.)
With two full days of events and programs along with performances by Wu-Tang Clan, Redman, and Thundercat, the 2024 National Cannabis Festival will be bigger than ever this year.
Leading up to the festivities on Friday and Saturday at Washington, D.C.’s RFK Stadium are plenty of can’t-miss experiences planned for 420 Week, including the National Cannabis Policy Summit and an LGBTQ happy hour hosted by the District’s Black-owned queer bar, Thurst Lounge (both happening on Wednesday).
On Tuesday, the Blade caught up with NCF Founder and Executive Producer Caroline Phillips, principal at The High Street PR & Events, for a discussion about the event’s history and the pivotal political moment for cannabis legalization and drug policy reform both locally and nationally. Phillips also shared her thoughts about the role of LGBTQ activists in these movements and the through-line connecting issues of freedom and bodily autonomy.
After D.C. residents voted to approve Initiative 71 in the fall of 2014, she said, adults were permitted to share cannabis and grow the plant at home, while possession was decriminalized with the hope and expectation that fewer people would be incarcerated.
“When that happened, there was also an influx of really high-priced conferences that promised to connect people to big business opportunities so they could make millions in what they were calling the ‘green rush,'” Phillips said.
“At the time, I was working for Human Rights First,” a nonprofit that was, and is, engaged in “a lot of issues to do with world refugees and immigration in the United States” ā so, “it was really interesting to me to see the overlap between drug policy reform and some of these other issues that I was working on,” Phillips said.
“And then it rubbed me a little bit the wrong way to hear about the ‘green rush’ before we’d heard about criminal justice reform around cannabis and before we’d heard about people being let out of jail for cannabis offenses.”
“As my interests grew, I realized that there was really a need for this conversation to happen in a larger way that allowed the larger community, the broader community, to learn about not just cannabis legalization, but to understand how it connects to our criminal justice system, to understand how it can really stimulate and benefit our economy, and to understand how it can become a wellness tool for so many people,” Phillips said.
“On top of all of that, as a minority in the cannabis space, it was important to me that this event and my work in the cannabis industry really amplified how we could create space for Black and Brown people to be stakeholders in this economy in a meaningful way.”
“Since I was already working in event production, I decided to use those skills and apply them to creating a cannabis event,” she said. “And in order to create an event that I thought could really give back to our community with ticket prices low enough for people to actually be able to attend, I thought a large-scale event would be good ā and thus was born the cannabis festival.”
D.C. to see more regulated cannabis businesses ‘very soon’
Phillips said she believes decriminalization in D.C. has decreased the number of cannabis-related arrests in the city, but she noted arrests have, nevertheless, continued to disproportionately impact Black and Brown people.
“We’re at a really interesting crossroads for our city and for our cannabis community,” she said. In the eight years since Initiative 71 was passed, “We’ve had our licensed regulated cannabis dispensaries and cultivators who’ve been existing in a very red tape-heavy environment, a very tax heavy environment, and then we have the unregulated cannabis cultivators and cannabis dispensaries in the city” who operate via a “loophole” in the law “that allows the sharing of cannabis between adults who are over the age of 21.”
Many of the purveyors in the latter group, Phillips said, “are looking at trying to get into the legal space; so they’re trying to become regulated businesses in Washington, D.C.”
She noted the city will be “releasing 30 or so licenses in the next couple of weeks, and those stores should be coming online very soon” which will mean “you’ll be seeing a lot more of the regulated stores popping up in neighborhoods and hopefully a lot more opportunity for folks that are interested in leaving the unregulated space to be able to join the regulated marketplace.”
National push for de-scheduling cannabis
Signaling the political momentum for reforming cannabis and criminal justice laws, Wednesday’s Policy Summit will feature U.S. Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate majority leader.
Also representing Capitol Hill at the Summit will be U.S. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) — who will be receiving the Supernova Women Cannabis Champion Lifetime Achievement Award — along with an aide to U.S. Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio).
Nationally, Phillips said much of the conversation around cannabis concerns de-scheduling. Even though 40 states and D.C. have legalized the drug for recreational and/or medical use, marijuana has been classified as a Schedule I substance since the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1971, which means it carries the heftiest restrictions on, and penalties for, its possession, sale, distribution, and cultivation.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services formally requested the drug be reclassified as a Schedule III substance in August, which inaugurated an ongoing review, and in January a group of 12 Senate Democrats sent a letter to the Biden-Harris administration’s Drug Enforcement Administration urging the agency to de-schedule cannabis altogether.
Along with the Summit, Phillips noted that “a large contingent of advocates will be coming to Washington, D.C. this week to host a vigil at the White House and to be at the festival educating people” about these issues. She said NCF is working with the 420 Unity Coalition to push Congress and the Biden-Harris administration to “move straight to de-scheduling cannabis.”
“This would allow folks who have been locked up for cannabis offenses the chance to be released,” she said. “It would also allow medical patients greater access. It would also allow business owners the chance to exist without the specter of the federal government coming in and telling them what they’re doing is wrong and that they’re criminals.”
Phillips added, however, that de-scheduling cannabis will not “suddenly erase” the “generations and generations of systemic racism” in America’s financial institutions, business marketplace, and criminal justice system, nor the consequences that has wrought on Black and Brown communities.
An example of the work that remains, she said, is making sure “that all people are treated fairly by financial institutions so that they can get the funding for their businesses” to, hopefully, create not just another industry, but “really a better industry” that from the outset is focused on “equity” and “access.”
Policy wonks should be sure to visit the festival, too. “We have a really terrific lineup in our policy pavilion,” Phillips said. “A lot of our heavy hitters from our advocacy committee will be presenting programming.”
“On Saturday there is a really strong federal marijuana reform panel that is being led by Maritza Perez Medina from the Drug Policy Alliance,” she said. “So that’s going to be a terrific discussion” that will also feature “representation from the Veterans Cannabis Coalition.”
“We also have a really interesting talk being led by the Law Enforcement Action Partnership about conservatives, cops, and cannabis,” Phillips added.
Cannabis and the LGBTQ community
“I think what’s so interesting about LGBTQIA+ culture and the cannabis community are the parallels that we’ve seen in the movements towards legalization,” Phillips said.
The fight for LGBTQ rights over the years has often involved centering personal stories and personal experiences, she said. “And that really, I think, began to resonate, the more that we talked about it openly in society; the more it was something that we started to see on television; the more it became a topic in youth development and making sure that we’re raising healthy children.”
Likewise, Phillips said, “we’ve seen cannabis become more of a conversation in mainstream culture. We’ve heard the stories of people who’ve had veterans in their families that have used cannabis instead of pharmaceuticals, the friends or family members who’ve had cancer that have turned to CBD or THC so they could sleep, so they could eat so they could get some level of relief.”
Stories about cannabis have also included accounts of folks who were “arrested when they were young” or “the family member who’s still locked up,” she said, just as stories about LGBTQ people have often involved unjust and unnecessary suffering.
Not only are there similarities in the socio-political struggles, Phillips said, but LGBTQ people have played a central role pushing for cannabis legalization and, in fact, in ushering in the movement by “advocating for HIV patients in California to be able to access cannabis’s medicine.”
As a result of the queer community’s involvement, she said, “the foundation of cannabis legalization is truly patient access and criminal justice reform.”
“LGBTQIA+ advocates and cannabis advocates have managed to rein in support of the majority of Americans for the issues that they find important,” Phillips said, even if, unfortunately, other movements for bodily autonomy like those concerning issues of reproductive justice “don’t see that same support.”
Sports
Brittney Griner, wife expecting first child
WNBA star released from Russian gulag in December 2022
One year after returning to the WNBA after her release from a Russian gulag and declaring, āIām never playing overseas again,ā Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner and her wife announced they have something even bigger coming up this summer.
Cherelle, 31, and Brittney, 33, are expecting their first child in July. The couple shared the news with their 715,000 followers on Instagram.
āCanāt believe weāre less than three months away from meeting our favorite human being,ā the caption read, with the hashtag, #BabyGrinerComingSoon and #July2024.
Griner returned to the U.S. in December 2022 in a prisoner swap, more than nine months after being arrested in Moscow for possession of vape cartridges containing prescription cannabis.
In April 2023, at her first news conference following her release, the two-time Olympic gold medalist made only one exception to her vow to never play overseas again: To return to the Summer Olympic Games, which will be played in Paris starting in July, the same month āBaby Grinerā is due. āThe only time I would want to would be to represent the USA,ā she said last year.
Given that the unrestricted free agent is on the roster of both Team USA and her WNBA team, itās not immediately clear where Griner will be when their first child arrives.
The Griners purchased their āforever homeā in Phoenix just last year.
āPhoenix is home,ā Griner said at the Mercuryās end-of-season media day, according toĀ ESPN. āMe and my wife literally just got a place. This is it.ā
As the Los Angeles Blade reported last December, Griner is working with Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts ā like Griner, a married lesbian ā on an ESPN television documentary as well as a television series for ABC about her life story. Cherelle is executive producer of these projects.
Next month, Grinerās tell-all memoir of her Russian incarceration will be published by Penguin Random House. Itās titled “Coming Home” and the hardcover hits bookstores on May 7.
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