The SiriusXM OutQ News Blog

Sirius XM OutQ’s own Michelangelo Signorile was inducted into the LGBT Journalists Hall of Fame over the weekend. The author, pundit and talk show host received an engraved glass award during a ceremony on Saturday night at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association annual convention in Philadelphia.

Signorile’s early career was dominated by his pioneering development of “outing”—or as he describes it, “simply reporting”—the homosexuality of public figures he viewed as advancing an anti-gay agenda. Signorile says that it’s “very validating” to now be honored by the kind of establishment gay journalists who treated him as a pariah for the “outing” work in the early days of his career.

SIGNORILE: “The work you were doing that was seen as perhaps being wrong, reckless, is actually something that helped to inspire people to think in a different way, created a debate, and obviously got to the point where people said, ‘Yeah, maybe there are some changes we need to make.’ Suddenly they look to you and say you helped to do that. That’s very gratifying.”

Also inducted into the LGBT Journalists Hall of Fame Saturday were Don Michaels, the first paid employee of the Washington Blade, and the late William Dorr Lambert Legg. Legg was instrumental in a lawsuit that forced the U.S. Post Office to allow delivery of gay periodicals.

The 50-year-old Signorile jokes that his presence among those and other elderly or deceased journalism pioneers first made him “feel very old,” then “humbled and complimented” for having “accomplished a lot at an early age.”