He has begun thousands of mornings with this mirror. On this day in mid-December, he is preparing for his last council meeting as a city lawmaker. The fabric he has chosen for the final knot is a tightly woven rainbow.
“To represent the diversity of Ward 1,” he quips.
In his final weeks in office, Graham is still struggling to accept his defeat in last spring’s Democratic primary, a loss he attributed to a corruption scandal that he says tarnished him unfairly with the very residents he was instrumental in bringing into the city. The newcomers who filled the apartment and condo buildings he championed in his ward were the voters who turned him out of office. He wonders, painfully, how he will be remembered after he is gone.
Graham was the council’s second openly gay member, arriving in 1998, a year after at-large council member David A. Catania. Graham had made a name for himself as an impatient activist, leading marches and directing the Whitman-Walker Clinic — now Whitman-Walker Health — during the height of the city’s AIDS epidemic.
On the council, however, it became Catania, who was first elected as a Republican and later became an independent, who led the charge for marriage equality, medical marijuana for AIDS patients and a host of other LGBT priorities.
