Dec 03, 2004  |  By: BRIAN MOYLAN  | COMMENTS     

Leroy Aarons, renowned editor, journalist and founder of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, died Nov. 28 from heart failure at Kaiser Permanente Medial Center in Santa Rosa, Calif. after a 10-month battle with cancer. He was 70.

He is survived by his partner of 24 years, Joshua Boneh of Sebastopol, Calif., and his brother, Ronald Aarons of Boulder, Colo.

Aarons, known to most people as “Roy,” worked as an editor and national correspondent for the Washington Post for 14 years and as the executive editor of the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune. In 1989, while at the Tribune, the American Society of Newspaper Editors asked him to conduct a survey of gay journalists.

At the 1990 ASNE convention, Aarons not only delivered his findings from the survey, but also came out publicly.

“I had no idea [my coming out] would be such a big deal until I was at that podium in New York about to say it,” he said in an interview with the NLGJA shortly before his death. “Other people knew it was a big deal, but I don’t think I got it until the New York Times wrote about it.”

Shortly after delivering his report, Aarons gathered six other journalists in his living room in Piedmont, Calif., and founded the NLGJA. He served as president of the organization until 1996, but was a member of the board of directors until his death.

Challenging journalism
Fourteen years later, NLGJA has 1,200 members, a headquarters in Washington, D.C., 24 chapters across the country and affiliates in Canada and Germany.

“I believe [Aaron’s work] literally forced mainstream journalists and news organizations to respectfully recognize not only the matters of sexual orientation within our profession but to better cover issues of sex orientation in our society,” said Bob Steele, Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Fla., foundation for the study and teaching of journalism.

“It was part an educational campaign and part a crusade to challenge journalism to be more open and accepting of gays and lesbians, not only in our newsrooms but also in our society,” he said.

Eric Hegedus, the current president of the NLGJA, said it was Aarons’s peer-on-peer work that helped change the coverage of gay and lesbian issues in mainstream media.

“A lot of it was being a mentor to other journalists,” Hegedus said. “Think of a newspaper or a newscast or something you read online and his imprint is there. So many things about LGBT coverage have to do with Roy. ... He taught so many people about diversity in the newsroom and news coverage.”

Aarons was born in 1933 in the Bronx, N.Y., and later attended Brown University, earning his graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University.

After two years in the Navy, he worked as a copy editor and later as city editor at the New Haven (Conn.) Journal-Courier. He started work at the Washington Post in 1962, and covered major stories including the Newark race riots in 1967 and Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and funeral in 1969.

He met his partner, Boneh, at a gay Jewish mixer at D.C.’s Jewish Community Center in 1980. The couple held their commitment ceremony there in 2000.

They both lived in Israel for a year in 1982 while Aarons freelanced for Time magazine and later moved together to Piedmont, Calif., so Aarons could work at the Oakland Tribune.

In 2000, he conducted a second survey of gay and lesbian journalists, “Lesbians and Gays in the Newsroom, 10 Years Later,” which discovered that 91.5 percent of gay media professionals were out of the closet at work. The figure in 1990 was 59 percent.

“Considerable strides have been made over the past 15 years, much of that connected to the work of Aarons,” Steele said about gay journalists in the newsroom and coverage of gay issues by the mainstream media. “That success is part of his legacy.”

Brian Moylan can be reached at bmoylan@washblade.com.