Clarence J. Fluker is a renaissance man who weaves his words and actions into the discourse on social justice, art & culture and civic engagement in the 21st Century. For several years he served in the Mayor?s Office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Affairs in Washington, DC. He worked among community organizations, government agencies and constituents to improve, transform, and ensure the delivery of culturally competent services to thousands of GLBT District residents and employees. Clarence uses his dynamic voice as a tool to advance the dialogue about issues of GLBT people of color. An accomplished writer, he served as a contributing writer to SWERV magazine and has been published in ARISE, and The Life magazines, the acclaimed anthology Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Lesbian/Gay Identity from Redbone Press, and the Journal of Intergroup Relations. Online, he has contributed to TheRootDC.com, a subsidiary of The Washington Post and the Gay Life section of About.com. On the topic of race and sexual orientation, he has been an invited speaker to several universities across the United States including Columbia University, George Washington University, Howard University and Ohio University. In September 2010 and 2011 he was as a panelist for the 105 Voices of History Diversity and Inclusion Forum addressing students from each of the 105 Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States. He has served as a panelist at the national conference for the National Black Justice Coalition and True Colors, the statewide conference for GLBT young people in Connecticut.
Ed Andrews is a psychotherapist, lecturer, and writer with extensive experience working with the LGBT Community with issues of mental health and addictions, aging and development, illness and loss. He specializes in working with the mental health and recovery issues of gay men across the lifespan usign both CBT and DBT techniques
Dr. Selma Massey is the Founding Pastor of WHOSOEVER Ministry which began 1996 as a Christian television show for the LGBT Community in Southeast Michigan. In 2003 Dr. Selma, as she is known, opened the first of two churches in Detroit, Michigan and in an area suburb.
Antonio Pineda is a case manager at Andromeda Health Clinic in northwestern Washington, D.C., where he specializes in helping clients who are living with HIV/AIDS. He is originally from El Salvador and has lived in Washington since 2001. In 2007, he was named the LGBT activist of the year by the Embassy of El Salvador.
I am currently working with the Northern Virginia Aids Ministry in Falls Church Va as a Prevention Specialist I am HIV positive since 1999. I am also a participant with the Face to Face program here at NOVAM and I speak to youth in schools and health professionals about life with HIV.
Delan Ellington (He/They) is a passionate fighter for Black Queer liberation in all forms. He recently graduated Magna Cum Laude from Howard University earning an M.A. in Public History with a thesis entitled “For Us, Serving Us, By Us: Prioritizing Black Queer Historical Spaces” based on research he’s collected leading the Rainbow History Project’s (RHP) ClubHouse Oral History Project. The Black Queer DC community now considers him one of the experts in the community’s history and the study of historical Black Queer Spaces. He’s the world’s foremost expert in The ClubHouse, a Black queer after hours disco that introduced House music to the DMV, was the center of the Black queer community between 1975 and 1990, and whose signature event is the precursor to DC’s Black Pride (the oldest and longest continuously running Black pride in the world) and the reason why it is held Memorial Day weekend.
Delan is featured in the 2022 documentary “Fierceness Serve! ENIK Alley Coffeehouse” A black queer short form documentary that world premiered at the 2022 DC International Film Festival. The CoffeeHouse is the location where the first generation of openly gay African American artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers congregated and performed. He was featured in Washington City Paper’s 2021 People’s Edition where they profile around twenty DC residents doing amazing, interesting, or important work in and around the DMV. Furthermore, he had the honor of being the youngest featured speaker at TEDx Foggy Bottom 2022, where he spoke on the importance of prioritizing Black queer historical spaces and publicly laying out a plan to begin to begin memorializing and stewarding them.
Throughout his 11-year fight for social equality and justice he’s been a member of many Black Queer Feminist organizations. Currently, he organizes with Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black Femme & Queer led abolitionist organization. During their 2021 Boycott Nellies block Parties, He was a central and consistent Presence. He has worked with BYP 100’s DC Chapter and served as chair of the board for No Justice No Pride’s 501c 3 application after organizing with them for several years. He helped lead the 2015 University of Missouri student protests that resulted in the ouster for the System president and the University’s Chancellor. For his work building and maintaining the racial, sexual, and generational coalitions that achieved their goals Delan was featured in Spike Lee’s Two Fists Up ESPN documentary, awarded the 2016 Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence Award and Mizzou 39 distinction where 39 members of the graduating class were recognized for academics, leadership, sports, volunteerism, and/or impact on the campus community.
He has served a two-year term on RHP’s board of directors where he co-chaired the programs committee created and the Black Queer History Committee. Currently, he is in the process of initiating the Memorialization Committee where he aims to lead the group successfully applying for historical queer spaces in DC to be recognized on the DC and National Register of Historic Places.
He’s considered an innovative GNC trailblazer professionally and aesthetically. Delan’s bold looks have been featured in the Blade and Metro Weekly. In the international Gay Rugby community, he’s known as the person with the audacity to wear a full face of make-up during matches as to showcase the expansiveness of GNC identities and expressions.
Delan has over a decade of public speaking and presenting experience, which has enabled him to be comfortable holding the attention and interacting with any audience. These qualities are important, as they allow connections to be made and growth to be shared, and learning to occur. It’s important for him to give back to the community and spread knowledge about important events in queer history, especially those that center Black people and other intersectionally marginalized communities within the queer population.
Topics he can speak and present on include Black Queer Feminism, Black Queer History, Queer History, Black Queer Spaces, DC Queer History, History of Black queer organizations, Black queer luminaries, nationally recognized historic queer spaces, inclusion in organizations, mental health in the queer community (from personal experiences), and History of Dance music and how Black and queer people were central in its creation and longevity.
IG @ decultured84 https://instagram.com/decultured84?igshid=MWI4MTIyMDE=
Dr. Cheryl Healton is an academic, educator, researcher, and public health visionary. As the founding president and CEO of Legacy, a national public health foundation devoted to keeping teens from smoking and helping all smokers quit, Dr. Healton has been the driving force behind effective and award-winning national campaigns that help save lives. Her passion for tobacco prevention and cessation is deeply personal. She lost her mother and other loved ones to tobacco-related disease, and she herself waged a 25-year battle ? ultimately successful ? to overcome her own addiction to nicotine. The award-winning truth? youth-smoking prevention campaign is just one example of Dr. Healton?s public health successes. Eighty percent of smokers start smoking before age 18, and choosing to smoke is often a mark of rebellion as teens grow into adulthood. Recognizing this distinction within behavioral research, Dr. Healton challenged conventional thinking about tobacco prevention by changing its approach: instead of chastising young people, truth? focused on providing information to teens by tapping into their naturally rebellious feelings, enabling them to make their own informed choices about smoking. As the campaign celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2010, a growing body of research has validated the campaign?s approach; a 2009 study found that during the first four years of the campaign, truth? was found to be directly responsible keeping 450,000 from starting to smoke. In 2007, Dr. Healton led the call to action demanding a new cigarette brand be taken off the market. Camel No. 9 featured slick packaging marketed toward young women and was advertised in magazines popular with the same demographic. Dr. Healton rallied more than 45 public health groups to jointly call for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to remove its Camel No. 9 cigarettes from stores nationwide. As a result of these efforts, R.J. Reynolds announced its decision in late 2007 to discontinue print advertising of its cigarette brands in 2008. The fight continues, as Dr. Healton and others continue to monitor industry marketing activities closely with a focus on youth, and young women. She has also been a leading advocate for removing gratuitous smoking in Hollywood films. Dr. Healton has also worked to realize her vision of a national public-private partnership to help smokers quit. For the past three years, a number of state and national organizations have aligned to create a unified voice in educating Americans about smoking cessation through a national quit smoking campaign called EX, which first launched in 2008. EX is designed to help smokers ?re-learn? life without cigarettes, taking an innovative approach to help the 46 million Americans who smoke to quit. The program includes a multi-media advertising effort, a Web site with a quit smoking community feature and grassroots effort support implemented by member groups and states. Currently, more than 220,000 smokers have signed up to Become an EX. Dr. Healton frequently appears in the media, conducts guest lectures, and speaks at conferences and events ? all to further educate Americans about the debilitating toll tobacco use continues to take on our society, killing more than 400,000 Americans each year.
Aaron Anson is an inspirational writer and new thought coach who is married and lives in Washington, DC with his partner Oliver. He has appeared on several radio shows and spoken at a number of literary events around the country. Raised a black devout christian in the south and endeavoring to uphold instilled beliefs, he married and fathered two children before accepting that he was inherently a gay man. His fascination with the arts, world cultures, and all of humanity has led him to travel six continents. He has participated in relief efforts around the world and several missions that address homelessness.
I am a second generation South Asian, raised in the Washington DC metropolitan area. As a principal and co-founder of Vega Mala Consulting, my partner, Vega Subramaniam, and I provide consulting, coaching, and training services to nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurial businesses, and government agencies. In addition to speaking engagements, I?m available to facilitate workshops and meetings, conduct trainings, and provide organizational consultation. My experience comes from years of community building and organizational leadership – from co-founding Trikone-Northwest, an organization serving South Asian LGBTQ community in the Pacific Northwest, and serving on the founding leadership teams for Rainbow Dragon Fund, the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, and the Queer South Asian National Network. I?ve also served on local, statewide, and national boards (Equal Rights Washington, the City of Seattle Women?s Commission, Seattle PFLAG, NQAPIA), and advocated on issues impacting people with disabilities, LGBTQI, and predominantly people of color communities.
Sapna Pandya, MPH is former Director of Programs for the South Asian Health Initiative (SAHI) at Center for Immigrant Health (CIH) of the New York University School of Medicine, which serves to help South Asian immigrants navigate barriers to health care in New York City through community-based participatory research and outreach programs. She recently relocated to Washington DC, where she is furthering her work by expanding to advocacy and capacity-building activities, including trainings and talks in the area of immigrant health. Sapna is also a co-Founder of two unique initiatives: 1) Jeena Circle, a giving circle-style foundation dedicated to raising funds for under-served South Asian immigrant communities in the United States; and 2) Humsafar International, a collective of trainers on sexual health, sexual identity and health access issues. She is actively involved in several of the area’s API LGBT communities and is passionate about addressing socio-political and economic determinants of health, particularly for marginalized communities globally. Her research and programmatic work on HIV/AIDS and gender, done over the last 10 years in India and Pakistan is ground-breaking and is something she remains firmly connected to. Sapna has a M.P.H. from the George Washington University and is an Alumni of the CORO Immigrant Leadership Training Program.