Last Month, the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists (NLGJA) brought 700 journalists together in San Francisco to celebrate its 35th anniversary.

Originally founded as the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association in 1992, the group is credited with revolutionizing queer journalism and, as the Sacramento Bee put it, with helping to “shape the careers and lives of past, present and future LGBTQ+ journalists from across the nation.”

---

---

The Bee delved into the history of the organization, quoting a 1992 interview featuring founder Leroy Aaron declaring that queer journalists “insist on being seen as professionals who have been in this business for years and years doing excellent jobs with high professional journalistic standards and that does not end just because you come out and be totally who you are.”

Elizabeth Mangelsdorf, a founding member of the organization and the founding president of the first chapter, located in Northern California, described the first-ever convention as “a huge event where we could be ourselves and meet people and gather and just enjoy each other.” 

This year’s convention included a new documentary about the group’s founding. The director and producer, lifetime NLGJA member Senta Scarborough, said the film was in part “a way that we could help humanize people in our profession, so they understand us better and can appreciate the importance of journalism. Also appreciate the importance of diversity journalism and minority journalism, which is desperately needed in this country.”

While a lot has changed over the decades since the group launched, a lot has also stayed the same, such as the need for more representation. Right now, that means more trans and nonbinary journalists. 

But it’s a challenge to focus on internal growth, said head of the Strategic and Development Committee Bethany Grace Howe, when LGBTQ+ journalists must spend so much time on the defensive.

“Here’s the truth: I’m a transgender woman, and I will meet people who identify as intersex or gender queer, and I screw it up because that, to me, is something I’m not familiar with,” Howe told the Bee. “I don’t understand the reality of those identities, and I want to, and I hope we get back to a time when we can focus on taking care of ourselves instead of just saving ourselves.”

But the organization has nonetheless had an incredible impact on LGBTQ+ media and representation of LGBTQ+ people in mainstream media. With over a thousand members today, it provides scholarships, mentorship opportunities, networking events, and more, including a rapid-response task force that calls out mainstream media for biased or inaccurate reporting about LGBTQ+ people.

“This is something that we can see ourselves doing because we’ve seen them doing it,” said Eliot Faine, a student at Peralta Community College District in NLGJA’s multimedia CONNECT program. “And for as long as our paths are geared towards journalism, it’s great to see [mentors] working with us.”