Gary Paul Wright is the Founder and Executive Director of the African American Office of Gay Concerns. He is very active within the LGBTQ community in Newark, New Jersey, where he served two 3-year terms as a Charter Member of the City of Newark’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning (LGBTQ) Mayoral Advisory Commission (through July, 2014). He was appointed to the Essex County Executive’s LGBTQ Advisory Board in 2011, and is currently serving a second three-year term as well. Gary Paul also served as a Charter Board Member of the newly established Newark LGBTQ Community...
Louie Crew Clay is a pioneering activist who founded the gay Episcopal group Integrity USA in 1974 and co-founded the LGBT caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English in 1975, among numerous other achievements. In this interview, we focus on his life in Newark, where he moved in 1989 to teach English at Rutgers University-Newark. You can read more about his life and work in his most recent book, Letters from Samaria (2015), and his Wikipedia page, from which we take the following biography. See also Louie’s richly-documented website, as well as his online photo album, with an...
Arnold (Arnie) Kantrowitz, a 1961 B.A. alum of Rutgers University-Newark, was a pioneering activist for LGBT equality in the United States. He served as vice president of New York City's influential Gay Activists Alliance, founded in 1970 in the wake of the Stonewall uprising, and in 1985 co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in response to antigay coverage of the AIDS crisis by New York City tabloids. GLAAD, still today the leading advocate for fair and accurate representation of LGBT people in the media, counts among its early successes an effort to persuade New York...
