Anna Jinkerson – Photo: Courtesy Capital Pride Alliance
As the year nears its end, the Capital Pride Alliance today announced that it will be retooling ahead of 2026.
CPA, which brings numerous LGBTQ Pride events to Washington and the region – most notably the annual Capital Pride Festival and Parade, along with World Pride 2025 – is moving from a president/vice-president leadership model to an executive committee of board chair, treasurer, and secretary leading the board of directors.
CPA also announced the incoming officers who will step into their roles in December. Notably, the new executive committee is the first in the organization’s history composed entirely of women.
Anna Jinkerson, a board member since 2022, will serve as board chair. She brings executive experience to the position as president, CEO, and chief of staff for the nonprofit Living Cities, whose mission is to “close the racial wealth gap using the collective power of philanthropy, financial institutions and local governments.”
As treasurer, Kim Baker brings a finance, security, and risk-management résumé to the board, as a retired, disabled U.S. Army veteran with more than 20 years of service. Taylor Lianne Chandler, who will serve as secretary, joined the CPA board in 2019, and will be the first intersex and trans-identifying member of the executive committee.
“Being the first woman to chair the Capital Pride Alliance, I know the importance of lifting voices in our community who don’t often have one,” said Jinkerson in the CPA announcement.
Added Ryan Bos, the Capital Pride Alliance’s CEO, “I am grateful for the leadership, dedication, and commitment shown by our former executive officers – Ashley [Smith], Natalie [Thompson], Anthony [Musa], and Vince [Micone] – who have been instrumental in CPA’s growth and the exceptional success of World Pride 2025. I look forward to collaborating with Anna in her new role, as well as Kim and Taylor in theirs, as we take on the important work ahead, prepare for Capital Pride 2026, and expand our platform and voice through Pride365.”
The changes come as the organization has secured an independent firm to investigate a “claim” against Smith, who stepped down as president in October. Jinkerson, meanwhile, has been serving as interim board president.
While Bos’s position has evolved from executive director to CEO amid the recent changes, June Crenshaw’s position in leadership remains unchanged as deputy director.
"It's a great first opera," Patrick Dupre Quigley says of Dido and Aeneas, currently in the midst of its Opera Lafayette debut. "And it's an opera that has survived in reasonably constant performance since it was first done in the 17th century."
The English Baroque work, composed by Henry Purcell with a libretto by Nahum Tate, runs a brisk, intermissionless 65 minutes. "It has one of the most well-known English-language arias of all time," Quigley notes.
That aria -- "When I Am Laid in Earth" -- is sung by Dido over "what we call a ground bass, which means it's basically a bassline that repeats over and over and over again, and different music is placed on top of it for the three and a half minutes of the aria," Quigley says.
New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is facing backlash after a photo resurfaced showing him alongside a Ugandan politician described as the "architect" of that country's law criminalizing homosexuality.
Mamdani, who defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by more than 12 points in the final round of ranked-choice primary voting in June, now leads a three-way race against Cuomo, running as an independent, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, the citizen patrol group once famous for policing New York's subways.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that cisgender students may repeatedly and intentionally misgender transgender classmates, invalidating an Ohio school district's policies that sought to stop the practice.
In a 10-7 decision, the court found that Olentangy Local School District's prohibition on using "gendered language they know is contrary to the other student's identity," including pronouns and honorifics, infringes on the rights of students who believe there are only two genders.
The challenged policies include an anti-harassment rule prohibiting "discriminatory harassment" or bullying based on gender identity and other protected traits that "places a student or school employee in reasonable fear of harm," interferes with education or work, or disrupts school operations, according to The Associated Press.
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