Signorile, Michelangelo, 1960-....

In 1988, at the age of 27, Michelangelo Signorile was a gossip columnist covering the wild nightclub scene of the 1980s, searching out the scene of the moment-whether it was Area, the Limelight, or the Palladium-in hopes of the hottest celebrity tidbit. Political activism may have been the farthest thing from his mind as he jotted down every juicy detail, but one night-as he describes in his first book, Queer in America -he was enticed into conversation by a pair of attractive, muscled members of ACT UP. Weeks later, he joined a group of activists at St. Peter's Church in midtown Manhattan for a protest of a speech by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger. Although he had joined them somewhat apprehensively, the harsh words of the vocally anti-gay leader soon drove him to wave his fists and shout to the shocked cathedral that Ratzinger was "no man of God." The afternoon ended with the sudden activist, and five others, in handcuffs.

As Signorile explains, the experience at St. Peter's proved to be a pivotal one. "My nightclub life almost completely stopped… It seemed pointless to go to these plastic affairs and have dull, irrelevant conversations after spending all day on ACT UP… I was feeling powerful about being gay." His new focus on gay activism sent his writing career on a political, oft-times controversial direction. By the summer of 1989, Signorile had become one of the founding editors of Outweek, a weekly gay magazine, where his all-cap diatribes against the right-wing and the gay closet would soon help fuel a national controversy on the ethics of "outing." In the process, it would also firmly establish his career.

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