AMERICAblog Gay was created by John Aravosis, one of America's top LGBT rights advocates, who is a former writer for the Economist with a joint law degree/masters from Georgetown and over twenty years experience working in national politics in Washington, DC. At AMERICAblog, we don't just link to LGBT news, we make the news - while at the same time giving you an insider's look at what's important and why.
AMERICAblog Gay, launched in 2009, is part of the larger AMERICAblog family of sites, including AMERICAblog News (2004) and AMERICAblog Elections (2011), with monthly traffic of over 1 million page views and 400,000 unique readers (Google Analytics). In addition to analyzing the day's news, we've taken the lead on a number of high-profile LGBT stories, including:
* Conservative White House reporter Jeff Gannon exposed as male prostitute.About our writers:
* Obama defends DOMA in federal court. Says banning gay marriage is good for the federal budget. Invokes incest and marrying children.
* Obama tells AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay that he's "evolving" on gay marriage.
* Microsoft drops support for gay rights legislation (they subsequently supported us again after our campaign against them).
* Ford Motor Company drops support for gay rights legislation, gay groups, after AFA threatens them (they subsequently supported us again after our campaign against them).
* Nissan, Comcast, FedEx, AT&T on verge of getting gay/trans rights law pulled in Nashville.
John Aravosis is a Washington, DC-based writer and political consultant, specializing in using the Internet for politics. He is the editor-in-chief of AMERICAblog, AMERICAblog Gay, and AMERICAblog Elections: The Right's Field.John has a degree in rhetoric from the University of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana), a diploma from the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and a joint law degree and masters in foreign service from Georgetown University. John's writing experience includes working as a stringer for both the Economist and RADAR, and having been published in the New Republic and New York Daily News, among others. Washingtonian magazine’s annual “50 Best Journalists” issue named John one of “journalism's rising stars, those likely to have a major impact in coming years.” John has also been honored as one of the “Out 100,” and by the Advocate as one of the fifty “most powerful gay men and women in America.”
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| John talks gay marriage on CNN |
1998: Campaign on behalf of Timothy McVeigh, a sailor outed by America Online.John has been honored as one of the “Out 100,” and by the Advocate as one of the fifty “most powerful gay men and women in America.”
1998: Launched and coordinated the online response to the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard by creating "Matthew Shepard Online Resources."
2000: John and a small group of friends launched a boycott of the number two conservative talk radio diva of the time, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who had referred to gays and lesbians as "biological errors," among other things. That effort, organized via the StopDrLaura.com Web site, was called the first effective boycott ever of a TV show, and resulted in 180 advertisers leaving the program before it was canceled.
2004: In response to President George Bush's announcement that he would push for a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, John launched a pressure campaign against Mary Cheney, the openly-lesbian daughter of then- Vice President Dick Cheney. The campaign was centered on a Web site, DearMary.com, where concerned citizens could leave notes asking Mary Cheney to weigh in on the issue with her father. The effort garnered considerable media attention.
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| Le Parisien profile of John |
John is also a frequent TV pundit, and has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball with Chris Matthews, ABC News, Nightline, CNN's Reliable Sources, MSNBC and more. John speaks five languages (has worked and done interviews in French, Spanish and Italian), and has visited or worked in 29 countries, including conducting lectures and trainings about the Internet and politics in France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Greece, Morocco, Indonesia and Cote d'Ivoire.
Follow John on Twitter: @aravosis
Joe Sudbay is a DC-based political consultant with over twenty-five years of experience at both the state and federal level. He is the deputy editor of AMERICAblog and AMERICAblog gay.Joe has managed political operations and legislative efforts for both candidates and issues-based organizations. For seven years, he was the Director of State Legislation at Handgun Control, Inc. He served as that organization's first Political Director during the 2000 cycle. Joe has appeared on numerous national and local television and radio shows including the Diane Rehm Show, CNN's Crossfire (when Lynne Cheney was the co-host), and even Hannity and Colmes.
Joe was one of five political bloggers invited to the White House to interview President Obama in October of 2010, making him the first member of the LGBT press to interview the President since being sworn into office. It was during Joe's questioning of the President that we learned the President was "evolving" on the issue of gay marriage.
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| Joe talks DADT on CNN |
Follow Joe on Twitter: @joesudbay
Liz Newcomb is an attorney by day and committed LGBT activist by night and weekend. She has worked as a researcher at the Williams Institute. While in law school at UCLA, she was Articles Editor of the LGBT law journal. Liz lives in West Hollywood with her wife, Lynne. They are one of the 18,000 California same-sex couples who got married during the summer before proposition 8 passed. Liz has lived in California for over 20 years and brings a left coast perspective to AMERICAblog.
Gabriel Arana is the Assistant Web Editor at The American Prospect in Washington, D.C. His pieces have appeared in The Nation, Slate, The Advocate, the Daily Beast, and other publications. He is a graduate of Yale University and a native of Nogales, Arizona.
Paul Hogarth is a lawyer at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic in San Francisco, having worked there since 2000. He has a Bachelors in Political Science from UC Berkeley, and a J.D. from Golden Gate University. Paul made his first run for public office at the age of 22, when he was elected to the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board. After one term, he moved to San Francisco where he is actively involved in local politics. In 2006, Paul was hired as the Managing Editor of Beyond Chron, a blog published by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic that was voted "Best Local Website" in 2008 by the SF Bay Guardian. He is active in the netroots (cross-posting at Daily Kos, Open Left, Huffington Post, Calitics and is now writing at AMERICAblog.) Paul was voted "Best State and Local Blogger" at the Netroots Nation conference in 2010.
Nick Seaver blogs on civil rights and equality issues for the gay community at both Leave it to Seaver and AMERICAblog Gay. Born and raised in Maine, he moved to Washington, DC for college, where he studied political communication. He has lived in the District since. He began writing extensively on gay rights during the ballot initiative in Maine that overturned a bill that legalized same-sex marriage. He writes about a variety of issues, ranging from marriage equality to issues facing LGBT youth, while occasionally covering broader political issues.
Timothy Beauchamp is from Oklahoma.
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