The Advocate

Yes, I'm a communications person, um, by training, but even before that, as a theater kid and a big reader, I just found words to be a powerful tool in expressing my own experience of the world, how I was feeling, what I was seeing, but also in engaging with and persuading others.

So to me, communications has always been about moving ideas and moving people, and that has been true in all the work that I've done from my time working as a magazine editor and writer, um, including time with The Advocate magazine in a time...

I was an adolescent, a young adult during the height of the AIDS crisis, so working for The Advocate magazine, which was the national gay and lesbian news magazine, um, I began to appreciate how narratives and stories about people, about communities really do matter.

And that was a magazine at the time, um, in its early days, that was writing about a community that didn't get talked about.

Um, parts of our lives didn't get showcased, celebrated in ways that we wanted to see, that we hoped to see.

But now is the time for us to think about how we build towards what's next.

So leaning in on these divisive issues, um, and doing the long, hard work and appreciating that there is a, a history and a legacy that we're building on, even if the current political moment is throwing, throwing some real headwinds at us.

At the beginning of our conversation, you talked about you starting your career and working at The Advocate, and I know that today you are on the board of Outwards, an organization that captures, preserves, and shares the stories of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, um, elders to build community-