LGBTQ+ Journalists Hall of Fame

Jim Buzinski and Cyd Zeigler founded Outspots.com in 1999. At first, the blog primarily covered the N.F.L., but soon became a hub for sports news related to LGBTQ people. Since its founding, Outsports has reported on countless coming out stories, milestones and...

Linda Villarosa is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, where she covers race, inequality and health. For several years, she edited the health pages for The New York Times, working on health coverage for Science Times and for the newspaper at large....

Jim Buzinski and Cyd Zeigler founded Outspots.com in 1999. At first, the blog primarily covered the N.F.L., but soon became a hub for sports news related to LGBTQ people. Since its founding, Outsports has reported on countless coming out stories, milestones and...

Lilli Vincenz is a path-breaking journalist and pioneer of the gay rights movement beginning in the early 1960s. Born in 1937 in Germany, she lived there throughout World War II before coming to the U.S. with her family at the age of twelve. She joined the Mattachine...

Kara Swisher is an award-winning business journalist and is recognized as one of the nation’s most respected writers on the business of technology. In a 2016 profile headlined, "Kara Swisher is Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist. How Does That...

Steve Rothaus worked at the Miami Herald for over 30 years, covering LGBTQ issues for two decades. During his time there, he was part of news teams awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. In 2014, he...

The late Dudley Clendinen was a national reporter and editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times, frequently known for his writings on gay life, societal inequality, addiction and illness. Clendinen explored gay life in...

Hilton Als is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, critic and social commentator. His work surrounding identity and queerness has earned him the praise of the nation’s leading literary and cultural institutions. He is currently a staff writer and theatre critic at The New...

Armistead Maupin is the treasured author of nine best-selling novels, including six Tales of the City which were originally collected from the daily serials he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle beginning in 1976. A young man of the South and a Vietnam veteran,...

An award-winning author and journalist, as well as an NLGJA founding board member and the second president of the New York Chapter of the NLGJA, Charles Kaiser has been practicing his craft since 1971, when he began writing for The New York Times while still an...

A prize-winning reporter for the nation’s oldest LGBT news publication, The Washington Blade, Lou Chibbaro, Jr. first took up his pen in 1976 under the pseudonym Lou Romano. Fast forward four decades, Chibbaro has covered almost everything for the Blade, including the...

Alan Bell has been an indelible, vibrant presence within LGBT journalism for almost 40 years. Beginning in 1977 when he founded Gaysweek, New York City’s first mainstream lesbian and gay newspaper, and continuing with BLK and Blackfire, Bell has been a pioneer of LGBT...

Alison Bechdel, the creator of the Bechdel Test for gender bias in works of fiction, has been writing for and about the LGBT community since 1983 when she began producing and self-syndicating Dykes to Watch Out For, a comic chronicling the lives, romances, and...

Randy Alfred may be best known for his detailed 1980 probe of the biased and unfair portrayal of San Francisco’s gay community inCBS Reports’ “Gay Power, Gay Politics,” an investigation that ultimately resulted in CBS making a rare public apology for its failed...

Donna Cartwright, born in 1947, served as a highly respected copy editor for The New York Times for three decades, and was a member and officer of The Newspaper Guild before retiring from the Times in 2006. She also has been a longtime transgender, LGBT and labor...

Lisa Keen has been reporting news for LGBT audiences for over 35 years and is frequently considered the dean of gay political reporting in America. She served as the top editor of one of the nation’s most respected gay publications, The Washington Blade, for 18 years....

Tracy Baim, born in 1963, began her career at Gay Life newspaper in 1984, a month after graduating from Drake University. She cofounded Windy City Times in 1985 and Outlines newspaper in 1987. Lambda Publications, the parent company of Outlines, bought Windy City...

Mark Allan Segal, born in 1953, founded Philadelphia Gay News as a monthly in 1976, after being inspired by Frank Kameny when they met in 1970. Segal has been publisher of the now-weekly newspaper ever since. Today, PGN, as it’s often known, is one of the two oldest...

Charles Gervin Hayden Jr., who in 1967 legally changed his name to his then-pseudonym Randolfe Hayden Wicker, was born February 3, 1938, in Plainfield, New Jersey. He discovered the homophile movement as a University of Texas at Austin undergraduate, and he spent the...

Jill Johnston was born in London, England on May 17, 1929, and was raised in Little Neck, New York. She attended college in Massachusetts and Minnesota, then earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina. In 1958, she married Richard John Lanham, whom she...

Michelangelo Signorile hosts his eponymous radio show on Sirius XM Radio's OutQ channel (SiriusXM 108) weekdays 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. EDT. On satellite radio, streamed on the Internet and to Android, BlackBerry and iOS handheld devices, his show is available to 20+ million...

In 1976, Don Michaels was in Buffalo, where he was Mattachine Society president and a self-described “full-time gay activist” managing a gay community center and editing a small gay newsletter, when he and his partner, John Yanson, decided to move to Washington, D.C....

William Dorr Lambert Legg (1904—July 26, 1994), was trained as a landscape architect at the University of Michigan, then was a landscape architecture professor at what is now Oregon State University by 1935. In the 1940s, he moved back to Michigan to care for his...

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...

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...

Jim Kepner began writing extensively for ONE Magazine under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms in April 1954. With assistance from others nationwide, he documented the 1950s witch hunts, exposing the police and liquor control tactics that targeted gay people and...

In 1992, Marlon Riggs wrote about the questions the approaching 21st century raised. The challenges to the "cozy myths by which America has been ritually defined…In the next century, can we even continue to speak (could we ever?) of a collective 'we?'" For the longest...

Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin founded The Ladder, a legendary publication that, according to historian John D'Emilio, “offered American lesbians, for the first time in history, the opportunity to speak with their own voices.” The two journalists, who also were — and...

Don Slater was a leader among the gay men who, in 1953, founded ONE magazine. Slater saw that act as essential to the effort to secure rights for gay men and lesbians. A social movement has to have a voice beyond its own members,” he said. For the first time, ONE gave...

The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) was not particularly welcoming to its lesbian and gay members before Thomas Morgan III was elected as the association's president in 1989. Many doubted that they existed — sometimes openly referring to homosexuality...