Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle traveled to Washington D.C. earlier this month for the annual International LGBTQ Leaders Conference, which brings together more than 500 LGBTQ elected officials, leaders and advocates from across the world for a conference of networking and skills building.

“It’s a really awesome gathering of elected officials,” Lavelle said on The Aaron Keck Show last week. “That look at issues and look at elections and look at how we can get our priorities passed through the lens of also being LGBTQ.”

The LGBTQ community saw several big wins on Election Day earlier this year. Perhaps the largest of which was Democratic Rep. Jared Polis winning his bid to become Colorado’s next governor and, in turn, became the country’s first openly gay governor.

“So there were a lot of stories kind of told of efforts to oust these people, or to stymie them from being reelected,” Lavelle said. “And how the communities rose up and supported these leaders.”

At the conference, Danica Roem, a transgender state legislator from Virginia, shared a story about a newspaper that ran an article when she was running for office. The article discussed Roem’s goal to fix the gridlock on state Route 28 within Virginia, but the headline of the story labeled her as ‘trans candidate’ instead of referring to her by name.

“And so these stories of, yeah there certainly are lots of areas where candidates, kind of come out and run hesitatingly with people understanding their personal life,” Lavelle said. “But more and more empowering stories every year, and so it’s really encouraging.”

Listen to the complete interview with Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle on The Aaron Keck Show:

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