LAS VEGAS -- Washington, D.C. - November 30,
2004 - Leroy F. Aarons, the former Oakland Tribune executive editor
who founded the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association
(NLGJA) in his living room and grew it into a force in American
journalism, died at 70 late Sunday after a 10-month battle with
cancer.
Aarons, who lived with his partner of 24 years, Joshua Boneh,
in Sebastopol, Calif., died of heart failure at Kaiser Permanente
Medical Center in Santa Rosa, Calif. He is also survived by
a brother, Ronald Aarons of Boulder, Colo.
"Today, NLGJA mourns our founder and a pioneering journalist
whose unending dedication has touched all of our lives," NLGJA
Executive Director Pamela Strother said.
An accomplished journalist who spent 14 years as a reporter
and editor at the Washington Post, Aarons sent shockwaves through
the news industry in 1990 when he emotionally acknowledged that
he was gay at a conference of the American Society of Newspaper
Editors. That announcement, which came at the end of a speech
in which he also unveiled results of a landmark survey of gay
and lesbian journalists that showed most were unhappy with their
professional treatment and coverage of gay issues, served as
the catalyst for Aarons' formation of the NLGJA. Never before
had a top editor of a major newspaper come out so publicly.
"I had no idea it would be such a big deal until I was at
that podium in New York about to say it," Aarons recalled in
an interview at his home in October. "Other people knew it was
a big deal, but I don't think I got it until The New York Times
wrote about it."
Not only did the Times write about it, but in Aarons' role
as NLGJA founder and president, Aarons had the ear of the most
influential names in journalism. Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger
Jr. called Aarons "an important force in journalism" and credited
Aarons and NLGJA with a sea change in how the media in general
and his newspaper in particular handled gay issues.
"For a while, it's fair to say, the Times and NLGJA were not
close, but we got close as his organization and mine found a
common bond and a common sense of urgency," Sulzberger said.
"Roy was not only a great leader and great spokesman for gays
and lesbians in the journalism game, but he was also a good
man and a good friend. I learned an enormous amount from him
about his values and a lot of that is reflected in the values
of The New York Times."
ABC News Senior Vice President Robert Murphy, who is gay,
also recalled Aarons' impact fondly. "Roy was above all a great
journalist whose passion for our profession will always be what
comes to mind first when thinking of him," Murphy said. "Personally
I will remember him as a mentor and friend who taught us the
value of the contribution we could make to our newsrooms as
openly gay journalists. He also provided the leadership that
gave many of us the courage to join our personal and professional
lives. For that we will be forever grateful."
Today, the NLGJA has more than 1,200 members and chapters
in 24 regions in the United States as well as affiliates in
Canada and Germany.
Born Dec. 8, 1933, to the children of Jewish Latvian immigrants
in the Bronx, N.Y., Aarons was raised by his postal worker father
and two stepmothers after his birth mother, Sybil, died of stomach
cancer when he was 3. He majored in psychology at Brown University,
but he discovered his flair for writing and earned a graduate
degree in journalism at Columbia University. He was hired as
a copy editor at the Journal-Courier, a morning newspaper in
New Haven, Conn., and moved on to covering news. By age 27,
he was city editor.
Aarons was hired at the Post in June 1962, where he covered
several of the most significant stories of the time. He recalled
being the reporter who informed Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of the
death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. while covering Kennedy's
presidential campaign. Months later, Aarons would also cover
Kennedy's funeral. He was known as an exacting editor, as reflected
by a Washington Post nameplate he kept in his home office in
Sebastopol that referred to him as the "Silver Slasher" for
his editing style and his trademark shock of white hair.
Aarons' first brush with gay life was visiting a bar called
Maxine's in Philadelphia while on leave from the Navy in 1955.
"I walked in and it was like Dorothy coming from sepia-tone
Kansas to the Land of Oz, all of a sudden it was Technicolor,"
recalled Aarons in the October interview. "There were these
gorgeous men. In those days, everyone went out in jackets and
ties. There was a piano bar and a guy singing show tunes and
I thought, 'Oh my God, there are other people, not just me!'
And that started me off. I was a gay in the military."
The issue of his sexuality was one that would bother Aarons
for years, however, as he concealed it throughout much of his
journalism career and had no significant love affairs.
He met Boneh, an Israeli national, in 1981 at a gay Jewish
mixer at the Jewish Community Center in Washington D.C., and
followed Boneh to Israel in 1982, where he freelanced for Time
magazine. The couple held a commitment ceremony at the Jewish
Community Center in 2000 to mark their 20th anniversary.
Aarons and Boneh, a computer consultant, moved to Piedmont,
Calif., in 1983 when his friend and longtime colleague Robert
Maynard hired him as features editor of the Oakland Tribune,
which Maynard had recently purchased. Aarons, who became executive
editor and later senior vice president for news at the Tribune,
led the paper to a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for its photojournalism
during the October 1989 earthquake in the Bay Area. His sexual
orientation was known to the staff, and he and Boneh frequently
entertained other journalists from the paper at their home.
Still, the attention garnered by the ASNE announcement in
1990 altered Aarons' career dramatically. In the late 1970s,
he had co-founded with Maynard the Maynard Institute for Journalism
Education, a center dedicated to encouraging more people of
color to enter journalism, so he viewed the NLGJA as an extension
of that work.
"The NLGJA did for gays and lesbians what (Maynard was) doing
for people of color," Aarons said in the October 2004 interview.
"It was the same mission."
Others at that first NLGJA meeting in Aarons' home in Piedmont
recalled that his coming out at the ASNE meeting was a watershed
for many.
"His coming out in a major public way was frightening for
him," said Elaine Herscher, then a reporter for The San Francisco
Chronicle. "But he did it, and it was to the good of all of
us. … He was a visionary, way ahead of the curve, an absolute
dynamo."
NLGJA President Eric Hegedus agreed. "I don't think anyone
can properly quantify the enormous difference Roy made in the
journalism world," said Hegedus, a page designer for The Philadelphia
Inquirer. "Through work in the NLGJA and as a founding board
member of the Maynard Institute, he also helped bring together
the minority journalism groups to tackle some of the most important
diversity issues on the broadest scales possible. Roy's behind-the-scenes
work had such a profound and far-reaching impact on so many
people."
Aarons' creative endeavors spanned far beyond journalism.
He wrote "Prayers for Bobby," a 1995 nonfiction book about a
mother's grief over her gay son's suicide. In 1991, he co-authored
a docudrama about the Pentagon Papers that won the coveted Corporation
for Public Broadcasting's Gold Award for best live entertainment
program on public radio.
He also wrote the libretto for the 2000 opera "Monticello,"
about the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,
and more recently wrote "Sarah's Diary," a fictional opera about
woman who lost her husband in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks. At the time of his death, Aarons was working on a play
about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for
which he and Boneh spent a month in South Africa earlier this
year.
Aarons remained at the helm of the NLGJA until 1998 and remained
on the board until his death. In recent years, his focus for
NLGJA work turned to a successful crusade for journalism schools
to include gay issues in diversity training. Aarons himself
founded a landmark course at the University of Southern California's
Annenberg School for Communications on gay issues in the media.
In fact, former NLGJA President Robert Dodge noted that Aarons
remained up until a few weeks ago involved in work on this topic
as the NLGJA representative to the Accrediting Council on Education
in Journalism and Mass Communication.
"Here's a man who was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation
therapy and was fighting for his life and yet still intellectually
engaged, still had the energy to call and let me know I hadn't
gotten my work done," said Dodge, a Washington, D.C., correspondent
for the Dallas Morning News.
That tenacity was precisely what garnered the respect of the
leaders of the journalism world who now credit him for the fair
way gay-related news is handled in the American media.
"Roy Aarons was one of those largely unsung heroes who really
did as much as anyone I can think of to advance understanding
and equality," said Andrew Tobias, treasurer of the Democratic
National Committee and author of a best-selling memoir about
his own coming out. "Long before there were budgets or fundraisers
for his National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, he went
from newsroom to newsroom, editorial board to editorial board
and at the highest levels, opened eyes and minds to what had,
up until then, been a largely invisible issue."
The NLGJA also was good for Aarons, said Medill School of
Journalism Dean Loren Ghiglione, a friend whose copy Aarons
edited when Ghiglione was a Washington Post intern in 1963 and
who later was the ASNE president to commission the survey of
gays and lesbians in the newsroom.
"With NLGJA, Roy became out front," Ghiglione said. "He would
be at table at lunch with (former Washington Post Executive
Editor) Ben Bradlee and other people and it seemed to me that
he was one of the guys but not the person you looked to at the
table. Later, he became somebody people looked to. He was a
leader."
Still, Aarons was humble about his own accomplishments with
NLGJA, Dodge said.
"Like a good parent, Roy never bragged about what he did,"
Dodge said. "He bragged about his kids, and we were his kids."
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