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LGBT Alumni Reunion Speakers

"Remembering our Past, Shaping our Future"


We are continuing to update this list of speakers.  Check back often for updates!


 

Michael Amico ’12 M.A., ’12 M.Phil

  

Michael Amico is a 5th year PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale.  His dissertation is about the love between two men in the Civil War.  He is also author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of the new book "You Can Tell Just By Looking": And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People

Thom Cantey ’00

A northeast Ohio native, Thom Cantey is a graduate of Yale University, SY '00. He has a medical doctorate from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and has completed residency training in Psychiatry having served as Chief Resident during the 2010-2011 academic year. He has also completed subspecialty fellowship training in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry/Psychosomatic Medicine, also at the University of Chicago. He is interested in medical education, having lectured in psychopharmacology and LGBT health issues at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, served on the Graduate Medical Education Committee, and completed the MERITS fellowship in medical education. He has also received a Gold Humanism in Medicine Resident Teaching Award. Thom has served on the Board of Directors of Yale GALA since 2001. He currently resides in Chicago, Illinois with his partner and their cat, and he is currently learning about music production.

 

Jesús Chapa-Malacara '04

Jesús Chapa-Malacara (MC '04, Political Science) has been involved in volunteerism since childhood, when he would volunteer at the Salvation Army with his family.  As a teen in Kansas City he worked as a peer health educator and served on a youth grant-making board of the Ewing Kauffman Foundation & on the steering committee of National Youth Service Day, for which he was featured in Parade Magazine.  At Yale, he was an LGBT Co-op Coordinator, GaYalies advisor and Women's Center volunteer.  He spent 6 years as Board Treasurer, then President, of the National Youth Advocacy Coalition and 2 years on the board of Yale GALA.  Currently, his volunteer work consists mostly of donation of services for non-profits, most recently the Lower East Side Business Improvement District, and Education Through Music.  He's spoken about volunteerism and philanthropy at the National Service Learning, Hispanics in Philanthropy, and NYAC conferences.  He currently works as a photographer in New York.

 

George Chauncey ’77, ’89 PhD


George Chauncey is the Samuel Knight Professor of History and chair of the History Department at Yale, where he is also the co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities and past chair of LGBT Studies. Every fall about 150 students take his lecture course on US Lesbian and Gay History, for which he was awarded Yale’s Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities in 2012.  The author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940  and Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality, Chauncey has served as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination in more than twenty gay rights cases, including the California Prop 8 case and the Windsor Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) case that will be heard this year by the Supreme Court.

 

Ken Demario ’64

Ken, a native Philadelphian, graduated from Yale in 1964 with a BA in History and from Penn Law School in 1967. Ken's varied legal career included a federal judicial clerkship, criminal defence for the Legal Aid Society in the 1970's and public service as Counsel to the New York City Loft Board in the early 80's. From 1987 until he retired in 2009, he served in the Real Estate Finance Bureau of the New York State Attorney General's Office, concluding his tenure as Bureau Chief for the last several years.  Ken joined Yale GALA after observing a contingent of Yalies marching in New York's Gay Pride parade in 1992 and served as president for two years toward the end of the decade. He was an at-large delegate to AYA, representing GALA from 1999 to 2001. He is currently traveling extensively, indulging passions for theater, opera, fine restaurants, baseball, and honing his culinary skills. He proudly worked as an Obama Vote Corps volunteer in Florida last fall. Ken is excited by the progress of the LGBT movement and the extraordinary changes realized during our lifetime.

 

Ejeris Dixon, ’02

Ejeris Dixon (SY ’02) is the Deputy Director, in charge of the Community Organizing and Public Advocacy Department at the New York City Anti-Violence Project.   Ejeris directs the New York City Anti-Violence Project’s local, statewide, and national advocacy, organizing, and educational initiatives on intimate partner violence, hate violence, and sexual violence within and against LGBTQ communities.  Ejeris has over 10 years of grassroots organizing and public advocacy experience working in racial justice, LGBTQ, community accountability, and economic justice movements.  Prior to joining AVP, Ejeris was the founding staff member of the Safe OUTside the System Collective at the Audre Lorde Project, a program that creates community accountability strategies for anti-LGBTQ hate violence against LGBTQ people of color communities.  Ejeris received a Bachelor’s degree in African American Studies at Yale University and a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Nonprofit Management at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service.

 

Rabbi Megan Doherty

 

Rabbi Megan is a Reconstructionist Rabbi who lived for three years in Israel. She reads, writes and teaches poetry, advises the QueerJews group, and will be leading Slifka's 2013 service trip in partnership with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.  Her wife, Lital Ruderman, is a psychologist doing research at Yale.  Their daughter, Netta, was born in June 2012. 

Mark Dollhopf ’77

Mark is the Executive Director of the Association of Yale Alumni and is responsible for the alumni affairs of Yale University, including the support and sponsorship of 187 domestic and international Yale Clubs, all Yale Class efforts, including reunions, continuing education, and travel programs, and the work of over 100 alumni associations affiliated with the arts, athletics, religious and ethnic groups, cultural and political organizations, and the Yale graduate and professional schools.  Prior to his appointment at Yale, Mark was founder and President of Janus Development, counseling global nonprofit institutions in strategic planning, leadership and board development, capital campaign management, major gift formation, donor research, and direct marketing. In 2001 Yale awarded Mark the Yale Tercentennial and the Yale School of Music Tercentennial Medals, and in 2004 awarded him The Yale Medal, the highest honor bestowed by Yale for volunteer service.  He graduated from Yale, and attended Harvard Business School.

 

 

Andrew Dowe, ’08, PhD ’16

Andrew Dowe (BK ’08) is a graduate student in the Department of African American Studies and Programs in American Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University and Assistant Director of the Yale University Office of LGBTQ Resources. His current research focuses on the relationship between representations of Afro-Caribbean queer subjectivities and the lived experience of sexual minorities in the Caribbean and its diaspora in the US, Canada and Western Europe. He previously taught ninth- and tenth-grade Social Studies in New York City Public Schools and holds a M.A. in Secondary Social Studies Education.

 

Eve Ellis, '80

Eve Ellis (ES '80) is a wealth advisor and Principal of The Matterhorn Group at Morgan Stanley and portfolio manager of The Parity Portfolio.  She is one of fewer than 200 Chartered Advisors in Philanthropy™ in the nation, offering investment advisory services to non-profit organizations, endowments and private foundations as well as to philanthropic individuals and families. Active in alumni activities of Friends' Central School in Philadelphia and Yale University, she is engaged in many charities, including the Ms. Foundation for Women (board member and investment committee member), Susan G. Komen for the Cure NYC (former board member), American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science, New Dramatists, NYC Principal for a Day Programs, the Mann Center for the Performing Arts (her grandfather was the philanthropist, Fredric R. Mann), the Investment Committees of the Jewish Women’s Archive and Congregation Rodeph Sholom, the Philanthropy Committee of 100 Women in Hedge Funds,  the Advisory Network of Galeforce Capital, and Maccabi USA/Sports for Israel.

James Esseks '87

James D. Esseks is Director of the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & AIDS Project.  James started with the Project as Litigation Director in 2001 and has been Director since 2010.  In those positions, he has overseen legal, policy, and legislative advocacy around the country that aims to ensure equal treatment of LGBT people by the government; equal protections for LGBT couples and families; protection from discrimination in jobs, schools, housing, public places and government programs; and fair treatment of people living with HIV. James graduated from Yale College (1987) and Harvard Law School (1991), where he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.  He clerked for the Honorable Robert L. Carter, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York, and the Honorable James R. Browning, United States Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit.

Yale GALA is pleased to present James Esseks with our LGBT Activism Award for his work on behalf of the LGBT community at the ACLU.  James is currently leading the ACLU LGBT & AIDS Project in serving as co-counsel in United States v. Windsor, a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, currently pending before the United States Supreme Court, which has prompted the Department of Justice to stop defending DOMA. He has also led the Project in numerous cases to protect the relationship & family recognition, employment, and free speech rights of LGBT people and people with HIV.
 

Joe Fischel

Joe Fischel is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.  He received his PhD from the Political Science Department of the University of Chicago in 2011, and spent the 2011-2012 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University.   His research interests are in normative political theory, feminist and queer studies, public law, and the legal regulation of sex/gender/sexuality. He is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first, titled Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent, interrogates how the figures of the child and the sex offender, and figurations of consent, organize contemporary understandings of sexual harm and freedom in the United States. The second, titled Selling Sex (and Justice) in Orleans Parish, examines the political campaign to declassify sex work as sex offense in Louisiana from multiple perspectives: ethnographic, queer theoretic, race critical, and sociolegal.  He is a committed fan of yoga, beaches, and mediocre legal television series.

 

Stuart Gaffney, '84

Stuart Gaffney (CC ‘84) and his partner of 25 years, John Lewis, are newlyweds -- legally married as a result of being plaintiffs in the California lawsuit for equal marriage rights, decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. Stuart and John are longtime marriage equality leaders, and Stuart serves as the Media Director with the nationwide grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA. Stuart has been making films and videos about HIV/AIDS and his Asian, Hapa and queer identities since 1994. His work has been screened by the Guggenheim Museum as part of the "Fever in the Archive" program of AIDS Activist Video, and that work is now part of the Royal S. Marks AIDS Activist Video Collection of the New York Public Library. Stuart is a Policy Analyst at the University of California, San Francisco's Center for AIDS Prevention Studies.

 

Kimberly Goff-Crews ’83, ’86 JD

  

Kimberly Goff-Crews is Secretary and Vice President for Student Life at Yale University.  She serves as Secretary of the Yale Corporation, supports institutional governance, oversees the University Chaplaincy, and ensures the alignment of University-wide policies and procedures to maximize support for all students.  She is also responsible for the conduct of official University functions, including Commencement.  She served as one of the four alumni on Yale’s Advisory Committee on Campus Climate.  She is a member of the board of United Educators, an insurance company that serves educational institutions, as well as of the board of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. 

 


Dorothy Greenfeld

 
Dorothy A. Greenfeld, LCSW, is Director of Psychological Services of the Yale Fertility Center and Clinical Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences in the Yale University School of Medicine.  She has counseled infertile couples in the Yale program for more than 20 years, and has published a number of articles addressing the psychological aspects of reproductive medicine. These include the topics of egg donation, sperm donation, gestational surrogacy, and reproduction in same sex couples. Her current area of research is on gay men seeking fatherhood through surrogacy and egg donation. 

 

 

Gregg Gonsalves, '11

Gregg Gonsalves is a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and the Co-Director of the Yale Law School/Yale School of Public Health Global Health Justice Partnership. He's a graduate of Yale College and a current candidate for a PhD degree at Yale in the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. Gregg has worked in HIV/AIDS for over 20 years, first with ACT UP New York, then the Treatment Action Group (and is featured in the current documentary How to Survive a Plague by David France), Gay Men's Health Crisis and the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. He was the 2008 inaugural recipient of the John M. Lloyd Foundation AIDS Leadership Award and a 2011-2012 Fellow with the Open Society Foundations. 

 

 

Joseph Gordon ’78 PhD

Dean Gordon is the Dean of Undergraduate Education for Yale College. After serving as acting master of Pierson College, Joe Gordon joined the Dean’s Office in 1988 as associate dean and was named dean of undergraduate education in 1997 and deputy dean of Yale College in 1998. He has special charge of new undergraduate courses and new majors. In addition to managing academic program reviews, he has represented the Dean’s office in efforts to revise or improve academic support technology and digital arts media, health policy, facilities planning, and emergency preparation and crisis response.  A member of the Yale English department since 1976, he teaches courses in 19th- and 20th- century British fiction and expository writing. He was instrumental in creating both the Writing Center and the Center for Language Study. He is a member of the Provost’s Committee on Lesbian and Gay Studies and has served as chair of that committee. 
 

Andrew Hendricks, ’14  

 

Andrew Hendricks ’14 is a Senior Air Force ROTC cadet and an Applied Mathematics major.  He was featured in an Associated Press article on the return of ROTC to the Ivies after the repeal of DADT, and served as the Cadet Wing Commander during the first year of ROTC’s return to Yale.  Upon graduation later this year, he will be the first 2nd Lieutenant commissioned from Yale’s ROTC program in over 40 years.  Andrew plans to pursue a career in the Air Force in Cyber Operations.

Brian Hughes, '00

Brian Hughes (TC '00) enlisted in the Army after leaving Yale. He served as a line infantryman with the elite Ranger Regiment, including three combat deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. After his enlistment, he was active in the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He is the Secretary of the Yale Veterans Association, an alumni Shared-Interest Group under the umbrella of the AYA.

Alex Kent ’01

Alex Kent is proud to call herself a Professional Homosexual. After years of volunteer work (including several terms as co-coordinator of Yale’s LGBT Co-op), she obtained an MPA in nonprofit management from NYU and “went pro.” She has spent over five years doing direct programming work with the LGBT community, including work Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) and New York’s LGBT Center. Committed to enhancing the network of people working professionally in the LGBT movement, she founded and continues to run the popular “How to Become Gay for Pay” workshop and “Profo Homo Reception” at NGLTF’s annual Creating Change conference.  On campus, Alex also sang with The New Blue and created/directed the musical “Songs We Sing” (more commonly known as “The Lesbian Show”).  She spent her post-college years in New York City and recently relocated to Columbia, Maryland with her partner and young son.

 

Dr. Robert Klitzman, '85 MD

Robert Klitzman, M.D., is a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Director of the Masters of Bioethics Program at Columbia University. He co-founded and for five years co-directed the Center for Bioethics, and directed the Ethics and Policy of the HIV Center for 10 years. He has published over 100 articles, and seven books, examining ethical, policy, and related issues concerning LGBT health, HIV, assisted reproductive technologies, genetics, physician-patient communication, research ethics, and other areas. His books include, Am I My Genes?: Confronting Fate and Family Secrets in the Age of Genetic Testing, Being Positive: The Lives of Men and Women with HIV, Mortal Secrets: Truth and Lies in the Age of AIDS (with Ronald Bayer), When Doctors Become Patients, A Year-long Night: Tales of a Medical Internship. He has received several awards for his work, including fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Aaron Diamond Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund and others. He is a gubernatorial appointee to the NYS Stem Cell Commission; and a member of the US Dept. of Defense Research Ethics.

 

Billy Kolber, '86 

 

Billy Kolber ’86 graduated from Yale with a B.S. in biology. In his senior year, he was elected Business Manager of the Whiffenpoofs, and organized their traditional round-the-world tour.  Upon his return, he started a career in travel, managing the American Express travel agency in New Haven, Connecticut and serving on the Pan American World Airlines Travel Agency Advisory Board.  He left American Express to co-found OUT&ABOUT, the ground-breaking gay travel newsletter and website, which he sold to PlanetOut.com in 2000. In 2012, He founded ManAboutWorld, a gay iPad travel magazine for the WiFi generation. A true renaissance man and entrepreneur, he has worked as a commercial photographer, chocolatier, top-selling Avon Representative, author and guest experience consultant. He is a recreational baker, and the only person to have twice won the Water Island Pie Contest (with his Banana Cream Pie).  Billy has visited 50 countries, but still lives in Manhattan, where he was born. 

 

Sharon M.K. Kugler 

 

Sharon M.K. Kugler became the seventh University Chaplain to Yale in July of 2007. She came to New Haven from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where she had served as the University Chaplain since 1993.  Sharon has over two decades of experience in ministry in higher education, interfaith collaboration, pastoral and social ministry. Her main focus at Yale is to further cultivate a chaplaincy for students, faculty and staff which defines itself by serving the needs of the richly diverse religious and spiritual traditions on campus allowing for deeper dialogue, increased accessibility, personal growth, creative educational opportunities and pastoral leadership.  Together with the Associate Chaplains, the Chaplain’s Office staff and the members of Yale Religious Ministry she is cultivating an inclusive sense of community within a religiously plural population. 

Katherine Lofton

Kathryn Lofton is the Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Yale. Her research investigates the inseparability of religion and its cultural constructions and, likewise, the extent to which culture itself is embedded in religious histories. Her first book, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011) used the example of Oprah Winfrey to explore the formation of religion in modern America. She is currently working on several projects, including a study of an early twentieth-century fundamentalist minister who was accused of sodomy; an analysis of parenting practices in twentieth-century America; and a religious history of Bob Dylan.  In 2010 she was awarded Yale’s Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching and named one of the nation’s 100 Top Young Historians by the History News Network. 

 

Michael Losak, '09

Michael Losak (PC, '09) is a current second-year student at Harvard Medical School.  He just finished a year as co-President of LGBT and Allied Harvard Medical Students (LAHMS), which is currently working with faculty to implement several initiatives to include discussions of sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity in the HMS curriculum.  Prior to beginning medical school, Michael worked as a recruiter and program manager at DE Shaw Research.  He graduated from Yale with a degree in Biomedical Engineering.  At Yale, he was also a member of the polo team and a tour guide.

 

Brian Manning, '10 

 

Brian Manning ’10 is Communications Manager at Circle Surrogacy, a surrogate parenting agency based in Boston. His work focuses on educating prospective parents, surrogates, and egg donors about the surrogacy process.  Brian worked in Circle’s legal department before taking over the agency's communications efforts last year.  He is particularly committed to removing barriers to parenthood for same-sex couples and LGBT individuals. 

 

Col. Scott E. Manning 

 

Col. Scott E. Manning is Professor Adjunct of Aerospace Studies at Yale University and the Commander of Air Force ROTC Detachment 009 at Yale. He is a Command Pilot with 3,700 hours in the F-16C/CJ, A-10A, AT-38B, and T-38A aircraft. Colonel Manning’s distinguished career began in the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, where he earned his commission in the United States Air Force. He holds a Master of Arts in International Relations/Defense Studies from King’s College, University of London, and a Master of Strategic Studies from the Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

 

Bradley Milam, '10

Bradley Milam graduated from Yale in 2010 with a BA in history. A West Virginia native, for his senior essay Bradley wrote a history of gay and lesbian life in West Virginia, which won the Gala Prize that year. Bradley served as the first executive director of Fairness West Virginia, the statewide LGBT advocacy organization, during which time he led the push for an anti-bullying policy that the WV Board of Education passed unanimously, which became the first statewide law or policy to include LGBT-inclusive enumeration. During his tenure, Fairness clinched endorsements from the WV AFL-CIO and United Mine Workers of America for an LGBT-inclusive EHNDA and witnessed the first civil unions bill be introduced in the WV Legislature. Bradley currently attends a premedical post-baccalaureate program and hopes to practice medicine in his home state.

Katie Miller, '12

Katie Miller works at the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress. A Truman scholar, Miller graduated in 2012 from Yale University with a B.A. in political science. She began her undergraduate education at the U.S. Military Academy, where she ranked eighth out of her class of more than 1,100 cadets. However, she could not square her honor as an aspiring Army Officer with the daily half-truths required from her under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. In 2010 she publicly announced resignation from the academy on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” and was honorably discharged from the military. She immediately joined the founding board of OutServe— the association of actively serving LGBT military members—and served as a spokesperson in several major media interviews. Miller is currently chair of the board policy committee at OutServe-SLDN and an associated editor at OutServe Magazine.

 

Scott Loren Moore '06

Scott Moore teaches teachers as an Instructional Fellow at Relay Graduate School of Education in New York City and independently facilitates workshops on identity and cultural responsiveness. He joined the Teach For America corps in 2006 and taught 6th grade English full-time at a Title I public school in Brooklyn for four years. After that, as a Manager of Professional Recruitment on TFA's Recruitment Team, Scott led the LGBT affinity group, helped to establish the first RT Diversity & Inclusiveness Committee, and created a monthly Spotlight Series focused on social identity. During that time, he taught 8th graders through the Liberty LEADS program at Bank Street School of Education and graduate students as an adjunct at Teacher U at Hunter College. His writing about LGBT issues in schools appears in several publications, including Rethinking Schools and the anthology Homofiles.

Michael Morand, '83, '93 MDiv

 

Michael is deputy chief communications officer of Yale. The Office of Public Affairs & Communications directs media relations, internal communications, and social media for Yale. He was Yale’s associate vice president for New Haven & state affairs from 2000 to 2010.  He has been active in the public and nonprofit sectors, serving as a New Haven alderman, on the Connecticut Judicial Selection Commission, Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, and the national Urban Libraries Council, and was recently board chair of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce. He was the first openly gay person elected to public office in Connecticut and was a founding board member of the New Haven Pride Center. 

 

Karen Nakamura, '01 PhD

Karen Nakamura is an Associate Professor of Anthropology & East Asian Studies at Yale University.  She is a cultural and visual anthropologist whose research focuses on disability, sexuality, and other minority social movements.  In 2006, she published _Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity_, an ethnography of sign language and deaf social movements in contemporary Japan. This book was awarded the John Whitney Hall Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. She has recently completed a book and two films on schizophrenia and mental illness in contemporary Japan which will be published by Cornell University Press in April 2013. Currently she is working on the intersections of sexuality and disability in Okinawa.

Cynthia Nixon

Emmy and Tony Award-winner Cynthia Nixon has been a critically acclaimed and sought-after actress since the age of twelve. Nixon has just been seen in World Without End, a miniseries on REELZ channel based on Ken Follett’s novel of the same title, as Petranilla. She also recently appeared on Broadway in the Manhattan Theatre Company’s production of Wit. In 2011, Nixon appeared in the film Rampart, with Anne Heche and Woody Harrelson, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.  For six seasons Nixon starred as Miranda Hobbes in HBO's much-celebrated series, Sex and the City, a role that garnered her an Emmy Award in 2004 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, two other Emmy nominations, and four consecutive Golden Globe nominations. Nixon was honored with the 2001 and 2004 SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series. She has most recently appeared on network television in guest roles on Law & Order: SVU, a role which earned her an Emmy Award for Guest Actress in a Drama Series. Additional appearances include House, ER, and Papa's Angels. In 2009, Nixon was awarded a Spoken Word Grammy for her recording of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Born and raised in New York City, Nixon attended Hunter College High School and has a degree in English Literature from Barnard College. She and her wife Christine live in New York City with their daughter, Samantha, and sons, Charlie and Max.

Yale University’s LGBT Community will honor Ms. Nixon for her commitment and activism for LGBT rights and marriage in a special tribute evening of music and song.  The concert will take place on Friday, February 8, 2013 at Woolsey Hall and is co-sponsored by Yale GALA: Yale’s LGBT Alumni Association, LGBT Studies at Yale University, the LGBT Coop at Yale, and the Association of Yale Alumni.  The inaugural Artists for Equality Award will be presented at the concert to Ms. Nixon.  This award will be presented annually to artists distinguished in their field who have demonstrated a strong commitment to the LGBT community.

Bruce Payne, '65 MA

Bruce Payne has led the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation in New York City since 2006. Current projects include an international campaign for safe buildings, a hospital in western Nepal, and a new non-profit providing personalized music to Alzheimer’s patients.  Earlier, Payne taught ethics and public policy, leadership, documentary studies, and philanthropy at Duke University, and he directed “Leadership and the Arts: A Duke Semester in New York City,” from 1995 through 2005.  A civil rights activist in Mississippi in the 1960’s and an early opponent of the US role in Vietnam, he maintains a lively interest in politics; and he is currently at work on a study of the myths of Plato’s Republic.

 

Lola Pellegrino, YSN '12

Lola Pellegrino, RN MSN WHNP-BC ANP-BE is a women’s and adult nurse practitioner living in Brooklyn. From New York originally, she returned home to practice after graduating from Yale School of Nursing in 2012. She is committed to advancing reproductive justice, sexual health, harm reduction approaches, and increasing access to care, especially for youth, those involved with the sex trade, and LGBTQI* individuals. She is a board member of Nursing Students for Choice and a co-founder of PERSIST, a grassroots health organization that is working to create direct health services for those involved in the sex trade in NYC. Passionate about driving very fast and the triumph of good over evil, she is a staff writer at Rookie Magazine and frequent contributor to the Hairpin.

Roberto Saldaña ’14 JD

Roberto Saldaña is a second-year law student at Yale Law School (YLS). He hails from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Broadly, he is interested in law, politics, and social justice. At YLS, Roberto is co-chair of the Latino/a Law Students Association, a director of the 2013 Rebellious Lawyering Conference, and he recently joined the Worker and Immigrant Rights Clinic. He graduated from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2011 with a double concentration in Psychology and Sociology. This past summer Roberto served as a legal intern with the Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund in San Antonio, TX. This upcoming summer, he will serve as a summer associate with Paul, Weiss in Washington D.C. He plans to settle somewhere on the East Coast.

Peter Salovey ’86 PhD

Peter Salovey, Provost and President-Elect, is the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology. He holds secondary faculty appointments in the Schools of Management and Public Health and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He was appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2003, Dean of Yale College in 2004, and Provost in 2008. As Provost, he facilitates strategic planning, long-term decision making, and the allocation of resources in order to promote academic excellence in all parts of the University. In addition, he oversees design and implementation of policies affecting faculty and students throughout the University.

Yale GALA is pleased to present President-Elect Peter Salovey with our LGBT Allies Award for his life-long commitment to the LGBT community.  Salovey’s support for the LGBT community extends back to his undergraduate days at Stanford where he staffed the school’s suicide hotline and worked with many LGBT people who were in need of vital assistance.  At Yale, Salovey has been a stalwart supporter of the LGBT community, most recently as the Yale University Officer assigned to the LGBT Staff Affinity Group, where he successfully assisted the group in their efforts to secure tax assistance for LGBT couples who are federally taxed on their health benefits for partners and health benefits for Trans employees (including gender-confirming surgeries).  As Provost, Salovey has supported the expansion of LGBT Studies including the hiring of the program’s first tenure track professor and the promotion of prominent LGBT faculty to positions of leadership.


Dr. Mark Schuster, '81

Dr. Schuster (CC ’81) is William Berenberg Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Chief of General Pediatrics and Vice Chair for Health Policy in the Department of Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. He conducts federally-funded research on child, adolescent, and family health issues, including sexual health, racial/ethnic health disparities, quality of health care, children with HIV-infected parents, family leave laws, and obesity prevention.  He served on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on LGBT Health Issues, and his speech, “On Being Gay in Medicine,” was reprinted by multiple media outlets.  He co-authored Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They’d Ask).  Dr. Schuster won the Nemours Child Health Services Research Award and the Academic Pediatric Association Research Award for career achievement.  He received his BA from Yale, MD and MPP from Harvard, and his PhD from the Pardee Rand Graduate School.  He is President-Elect of the Academic Pediatric Association.


Mark Sexton, '81

Mark M. Sexton (BK '81) is a tax lawyer and has been active in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender philanthropy since 1985.  He has served on the boards of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force Foundation, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force Action Fund and the Stonewall Community Foundation, as well as on the governance committee of the NYC Anti-Violence Project.  Mark and his partner of more than 25 years, Kirk Wallace ('83), have sponsored the Wallace-Sexton LGBTQ Fund at Yale since 2009.  He is a graduate of Yale College, with a law degree from the University of Chicago ('85) and a Masters of Law in taxation from New York University ('90).

 

Susan Sommer, '83, '86 JD

Susan Sommer is Director of Constitutional Litigation and Senior Counsel at Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national legal organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of LGBT people and people with HIV.  Sommer handles groundbreaking litigation and also oversees the work of several attorneys in all areas of Lambda Legal's work, including fighting for equal recognition of same-sex relationships, the rights of lesbian and gay parents and anti-LGBT discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, law enforcement and foster care.  She played a key role in Lawrence v. Texas, Lambda Legal's landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down Texas' "Homosexual Conduct" law.

 

Brynn Tannehill

Brynn Tannehill graduated from the Naval Academy in 1997 with a B.S. in computer science.  She served 10 years on active duty, two in the reserves, and completed four deployments to the Middle East as a Naval Aviator and Analyst. She obtained her M.S. in Operations reseach from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 2008, and has worked in private industry as a researcher and analyst since. Since transitioning in early 2012 she has been active in the LGBT community as a writer for OutServe-SLDN, Queer Mental Health, and Huffington Post Gay Voices.  She currently lives in Xenia, OH with Janis, her wife of 13 years, and their three children.

 

Maxim Thorne, '89, '92 JD


Maxim Thorne is a Senior Executive, lawyer, activist and philanthropist.  Maxim was appointed the Senior Vice President and Chief Development and Communications Officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 2008.  Prior to his role at the NAACP, Maxim was the Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Human Rights Campaign and Human Rights Campaign Foundation. He serves on the Yale Board of Governors, the Executive Committee of the Yale Law School, National Board of GLAAD, The Yale Black Alumni Association and the North Star Fund. 

 

Maria Trumpler ’91 PhD

Maria Trumpler is the Director of Yale’s Office of LGBTQ Resources that offers support, education and outreach on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity for students, staff and faculty.  Maria also teaches courses on the History of Sexuality and Women, Food and Culture in the WGSS program.  She received her PhD from Yale in 1991.  She lives with her wife, two dogs and a cat in Branford.

 

 Jonathan Weinberg ’78 

 

Jonathan Weinberg ’78 is the author of Male Desire: the Homoerotic in American Art; Ambition and Love in Modern American Art; and Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and the First-American Avant-Garde.  He has taught at Bennington College, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Yale University.  He has been an artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Center and the Addison Gallery of American Art.  He has been a recipient of many fellowships including a 2002 Guggenheim, and most recently, a 2009 grant from Creative Capital to write the book Pier Groups: Art Along the New York City Waterfront in the 1970s and 80s. A retrospective of Weinberg’s paintings will be on view at the Leslie Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York in November 2010. He was appointed Critic at the School of Art in 2009.  After graduating from Yale in 1978 with his BA, he earned a Ph.D. in 1990 from Harvard University. 

 

Seth Weintraub, ’11

 

Seth Weintraub ’11, better known as Spud, who majored in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies while at Yale. After graduating, she moved to Brooklyn and found a job at the Center for Reproductive Rights, proving to her grandmother than you can get a job with a WGSS degree, thank you very much. She currently enjoys spending her time "discovering" all of the hole-in-the-wall restaurants in NYC that every other frugal post-grad also frequents.

 

Evan Wolfson '78

Evan Wolfson is founder and president of Freedom to Marry, the campaign to win marriage nationwide.  During the 1990's he served as co-counsel in the historic Hawaii marriage case that launched the ongoing global movement for the freedom to marry, and has participated in numerous gay rights and HIV/AIDS cases. He earned a B.A. in history from Yale College in 1978; served as a Peace Corps volunteer in a village in Togo, West Africa; and wrote the book, Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry.  Citing his national leadership on marriage and his appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale, the National Law Journal in 2000 named Evan one of "the 100 most influential lawyers in America." Newsweek/The Daily Beast dubbed Evan "the godfather of gay marriage" and Time magazine named him one of "the 100 most influential people in the world."  In 2012, Evan received the Barnard Medal of Distinction alongside President Barack Obama.

Yale AIDS Memorial Project

Richard Espinosa '10, Serena Fu UCLA '09, Charles Gariepy '09, Michael Linares, '09, Nicholas Robbins '10, Ilana Seager '12, Max Walden '11 PhD '18 are the leaders behind the Yale AIDS Memorial Project (YAMP), dedicated to creating an online platform to honor and document the lives of members of the Yale community who perished during the AIDS epidemic, and providing an important educational tool for new generations to understand the epidemic’s impact. Together they have built a team of young alumni and students to research and write the memorials, ensuring each was written with the utmost care and respect, with outreach to friends and family to share their memories. YAMP’s launch in June 2012 generated a great deal of press, including in the New York Times. They have made extraordinary progress on this initiative by assembling an impressive and dedicated board of directors, by collaborating with several campus and community partners, and by raising project funds, including their first major grant from the Michael Palm Foundation. They have also created a multifaceted plan to expand this ongoing effort, which includes managing a team of volunteers and planning to work with other universities in order to assist them in building their own online memorials. The group is currently working on its website —the ultimate home for its compiled profiles—with design studio Linked By Air, and is scheduled to launch it by April 2013. Please visit their temporary site at http://www.yamp.org to learn more about the project, sign up for updates, to volunteer or make a donation

 

 


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