"D.C.'s Harvey Milk": D.C. activists are still reeling weeks after lesbian pioneer Wanda Alston was found brutally murdered.

Wanda Alston touched D.C. In March she was cut down years before her time, allegedly by a neighbor looking for money to buy crack cocaine, and her death leaves a hole in district politics, in district activism, in district friendships, and in the heart of her longtime partner, Stacey Long, who found her body in their apartment that brutal Wednesday.

Alston was the director of D.C. mayor Anthony Williams's Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Affairs, a position she created as a liaison in 2001, which was then elevated to a cabinet-level post last September. Alston was an advocate for GLBT populations, for women of color, and for the city itself.

"She has been a rock in our community," says a longtime friend, the Reverend Dyan McCray, who organized a memorial for Alston that drew everyone front D.C.'s political elite to her friends and neighbors, packing the pews of a downtown church. "She will be missed so much," McCray notes.

Alston hailed from Newport News, Va., coming from a large family, and moved to Washington in the 1980s. She battled cocaine addiction and helped friends fight those demons as well. "She was part of the gay community, feminist community, and recovery community," says friend Sheila Alexander-Reid, founder of Women in the Life, a magazine for lesbians of color. "She had turned her life around and rose far beyond her wildest dreams." Alexander-Reid, like others from Alston's life, talks about how Alston would push everyone around her to live and work to the fullest: "She raised my profile. She insisted that everyone around her raise their game, and I mean insisted--it wasn't a suggestion. She would constantly suggest other things I could do to further empower the lesbian community." Alexander-Reid remembers that Alston wanted her to create Women in the Life organizational chapters around the country, using the National Organization for Women's structure as a template.

Alston worked at NOW in the early to mid 1990s. Very quickly after she joined, then-president Patricia Ireland saw her potential and took her on as her executive assistant. She was quickly organizing marches and feminist conferences, eventually coleading the NOW delegation to Beijing for the Fourth World Conference on Women.

Alston was in the midst of planning a massive first-time citywide GLBT conference, set for April 30.

"She invited people to get involved," says another friend, longtime D.C. activist Everett Hamilton. "She had no problem asking people to do things, [and] she had a rare ability to bring people together around issues. She was the go-to person."

Washington is a liberal city, Hamilton notes, "open and accommodating to the GLBT community." Nevertheless, he continues, "what Wanda saw was the very subtle form of exclusion that takes place in this city." And she fought it. "For instance," Hamilton says, "you don't see gay people at the center of the baseball controversy and that economic windfall or the building boom or education.... She was starting to [work] on subtle and fine lines to make sure there was gay inclusion."

Hamilton, at Alston's urging, now serves on the board of D.C.'s Housing Finance Agency, which issues bonds for affordable housing. Alston placed gay people, as Hamilton explains it, "at the center of decision-making in this city."

"She was feisty," he says. "She raised hell. She was oftentimes difficult. She was a fighter, verbally or physically. She would not stand for discrimination." He finally finds the words he is looking for. "She really is our Harvey Milk. She was the face of D.C. politics."

Alston didn't tolerate niceties, her friends and colleagues all say: Instead she made people live their best lives, which she lived right next to them.

She and Long were to be married next June. "Stacey is ... beat down a little bit and is now sort of rising up," says Alexander-Reid. "It's like being the first lady and the president has been trilled." And Long is walking around in her grief with a diamond solitaire on her hand, symbolizing that love.

Wildman is The Advocate's Washington correspondent.