In 1992, a few hundred journalists met in San Francisco because they had nowhere else to talk shop as out reporters. Thirty-five years later, the organization they built is still arguing with itself about who it's leaving out.
The organization now known as NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists returned to San Francisco this month for its annual convention, marking 35 years since a few hundred journalists first gathered there in 1992 to found what was then the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. Leroy Aarons, a former Oakland Tribune editor, started it because out journalists at the time had nowhere to be taken seriously as professionals without also having to explain or defend their identities first.
The anniversary convention leaned hard into that origin story. A new documentary, produced by longtime member Senta Scarborough and co-producer Matt Rossetti, screened for attendees at the Hyatt Regency, built from interviews with founders, board members, and former staff. Scarborough, who heads the journalism department at East Tennessee State University, said the project came out of a realization that journalists — people whose entire job is telling other people's stories — tend to be bad at telling their own.
The founding-era stakes were real and immediate. Aarons started the organization during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when coming out at work could cost a journalist their career or their safety. The first convention still produced concrete results: The New York Times' publisher used a videotaped address to the group to commit to domestic partner benefits, and within two years nine more media companies followed. NBC adopted a nondiscrimination policy for LGBT employees the following year. None of it happened quickly or automatically — a 1995 NLGJA report found most media professionals still considered coverage of gay issues thin.
What came up repeatedly at this year's convention was how much of that same work is unfinished, just redirected. Kelsi Thorud, president of the group's Northern California chapter — the organization's oldest local chapter, and effectively where NLGJA started — pointed to a persistent visibility gap for transgender and nonbinary journalists inside a group built by and largely associated with gay men and lesbians. Bethany Grace Howe, who heads the group's strategic development committee, put it more bluntly: so much of the organization's energy still goes toward pushing back on outside political pressure that there's little bandwidth left for the kind of internal growth Thorud is describing.
The organization has grown well past its founding scale — more than a thousand members now, a bilingual LGBTQ+ stylebook, coverage awards, and a rapid-response effort aimed at inaccurate mainstream coverage. Its CONNECT program, aimed at student and early-career journalists, came up as the clearest throughline from 1992 to now: participants described it less as a formal mentorship pipeline and more as proof, in the room, that a career in journalism is possible to have and still be entirely yourself in.
Source: Kat Tran and Veronica Fernandez-Alvarado, The Sacramento Bee
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