Richard Rouilard, one year out of law school, co-founded in 1979 the National Gay Rights Advocates of San Francisco, which was the first public interest law firm for lesbians and gay men in the United States. In 1981, he moved to Los Angeles, and began a journalism...
Hank Plante began his journalism career as a copyboy for the Washington Post. Plante developed a love for journalism there, worked on the city desk, and became managing editor at Sentinel Newspapers. He then moved to television, in which he worked at KHJ-TV (Los...
Lisa Ben, pseudonym for the editor of the first lesbian publication. From June 1947 to February 1948, a lesbian who used the pseudonym “Lisa Ben” wrote a small newsletter in Los Angeles called Vice Versa. She relied on a laborious process at her office at the RKO...
Deb Price's debut column for The Detroit News invited readers to help her come up with a less awkward way of introducing her boss to the woman who, at the time, had shared her life for six years: “Surely, a little ingenuity will solve this problem. So tell me, America...
Ronald Gold opened a brief biography by stating that he “was born in Brooklyn in 1930, entered Brooklyn College at fifteen, and took twelve years to get a degree. By that time he had been a junkie in San Francisco and had his head shrunk in Topeka, KS.” A sharp writer...
Garrett Glaser was the first television journalist to come out of the closet to the radio and television news industry. During a 1992 speech before a large group of TV and radio executives at RTNDA's annual convention Glaser began his remarks by asking the that the...
Gail Shister is widely regarded as the first “out” reporter in mainstream news media in the United States. The groundbreaking journalist earned the distinction of being, at three separate newspapers, the news organization’s first female sportswriter. In 1974, she was...
Richard Goldstein has been writing about the intersection of politics and pop culture for more than four decades, starting by covering the 1960s rock scene for New York’s Village Voice. He became a regular contributor and, eventually, editor and executive editor....
Washington, D.C. native Jack Nichols helped found a Mattachine Society chapter in the city in 1961. In 1965, the same year he founded the Society’s Florida chapter and organized the first gay rights protest at the White House, Nichols and his partner Lige Clarke began...
At the time of Barbara Gittings’ death, she and Kay Tobin Lahusen had been together 46 years. Best known for their revolutionary work with the Daughter of Bilitis’s publication, The Ladder, the two were true pioneers of the LGBT movement. Gittings became The Ladder’s...