Award-winning writer and educator Hilton Als and veteran reporter and editor Dudley Clendinen are the 2018 inductees to the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame, NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists announced. Their induction will take place on September 8 during NLGJA’s National Convention in Palm Springs, CA. The convention will be held at the Hotel Zoso from September 6-9. NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists is an organization of journalists, media professionals, educators and students working from within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBTQ issues. Leroy Aarons founded NLGJA in 1990, pioneering a watershed movement in journalism and newsrooms throughout the nation. Following his death in 2005, the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame was launched to honor remarkable individuals like Aarons and to tell their stories. To date, the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame has honored 38 LGBTQ individuals, living and deceased, who have left a lasting mark on the profession - through their own courage, by blazing trails and, above all, through their masterful dedication to the practice of journalism. Hilton Als is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, critic and social commentator. His work surrounding identity and queerness has earned him the praise of the nation’s leading literary and cultural institutions. He is currently a staff writer and theatre critic at The New Yorker. His most recent book, "White Girls," was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of a Lambda Literary Award in 2014. He has worked across diverse media and has collaborated on installments and exhibitions at the Metropolitan Opera, La MaMa and the VeneKlasen/Werner gallery in Berlin. Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. The late Dudley Clendinen was a national reporter and editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times, frequently known for his writings on gay life, societal inequality, addiction and illness. Clendinen explored gay life in America, from the ravage of AIDS in the last decades of the 20th century, to his lens on gay rights activism, identity and community-building. He identified the need for AIDS coverage early in the epidemic, and advocated firmly for front page placement of news stories about the disease in The New York Times. In the final years of his life, when diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, he wrote frankly about illness, death and dying before he passed away in 2012. NLGJA is the leading professional organization for LGBTQ journalists with more than 20 chapters nationwide, as well as members around the world. Inductees will be honored at this year’s National Convention to be held in Palm Springs September 6-9. More information is available at www.nlgja.org/2018.
