It’s been a busy month for Victory Fund President Chuck Wolfe.
The organization raised more than $450,000 in a D.C. fundraiser, helped elect Pennsylvania’s first openly gay state legislator and announced that South Dakota has its first out public official.
“Angie, I think she’s been thinking about it for a while, and then she was finally ready to come out — she used our Coming Out Project to assist her, counsel her, guide her through that,” Wolfe told the Blade, referring to newly out, bisexual state Sen. Angie Buhl. “I think being a coach to our candidates is probably one of the things that people know the least about what we do. They know we endorse candidates and they know that we make contributions to candidates, but the time spent coaching candidates, helping them hire a team around them, helping them design their mailings and their field plans is a lot of what we do. And that also includes helping people in the closet come out.”
Buhl is the latest LGBT official to be listed as out on Victory Fund’s site. She joins openly gay lawmakers recently identified in North Dakota, Kansas, Mississippi and West Virginia. The group says it has, for the first time, identified openly LGBT elected officials in all 50 states, and has listed the names of openly LGBT officials in 49, saying that it has also identified a local official in Alaska whose name will be made public soon.