Leroy F. Aarons

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Leroy F. Aarons bigraphy, stories - American dramatist and playwright

Leroy F. Aarons : biography

December 8, 1933 – November 28, 2004

Leroy "Roy" F. Aarons (December 8, 1933 – November 28, 2004) was an American journalist, editor, author, playwright, founder of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), and founding member of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2005 he was inducted into the NLGJA Hall of Fame.

Role in journalism education

Aarons had, in the 1970s, collaborated with Robert Maynard in establishing programs to educate people of color for journalism careers. Now Aarons turned to LGBT issues in journalism.

Aarons believed that coverage of the gay community, as with other minorities, required sophisticated training of journalists. He began to lobby journalism schools to include gay issues in their diversity training and achieved some success. In 1999, as a visiting professor of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, he founded and directed its Sexual Orientation Issues in the News program. Adapted by universities around the country, the program analyzes how the media have shaped public perception of people and issues since the early 20th century.

Until his death, Aarons also served as NLGJA’s representative to the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Death

On November 28, 2004, Leroy Aarons died of cancer. He was 70 years old.

At the time of his death, Aarons was working on another play, Night Nurse, about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for which he and his life partner of 24 years, Joshua Boneh, had spent a month in South Africa doing research earlier that year. An actor and producer in Berkeley, California performed it as a work-in-progress in Mill Valley. The play has not yet been completed.

Joshua Boneh carries on Aarons’s work.

Music and opera

Aarons had a lifelong love of music, and often invited colleagues and friends to his home in California for sing-along parties. Everyone joined in on Broadway show tunes, but Aarons would solo occasionally with a ballad like Leonard Cohen’s "Famous Blue Raincoat".

In the last decade of his career, Aarons turned to opera, writing the libretto for Composed by Glenn Paxton, Monticello portrays the love affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. L. A. Theatre Works produced the original work in 2000.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Aarons wrote the libretto for Sara’s Diary, 9/11, an opera composed by his collaborator on Monticello, Glenn Paxton. Actually a song cycle, this work is a fictional account of a pregnant woman, who, after her husband dies in the tragedy, experiences deeply mixed emotions. The opera premiered at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center on Sept. 8, 2003 in commemoration of the unprecedented attacks.

Washington Post

Aarons remained at the Post for many years. As an editor and a national correspondent, he served as New York bureau chief and later established the paper’s first Los Angeles bureau.Jon Thurber. November 30, 2004.Leroy Aarons, 70; Editor Founded Group for Gay, Lesbian Journalists He covered major events of the 1960s and 1970s such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, urban riots, and government scandals.

Aarons had a front row seat when the Pentagon Papers story surfaced. As Los Angeles bureau chief, he covered California-related events in the case, including what work Daniel Ellsberg had been doing for the Rand Corporation and how he managed to remove the Pentagon Papers from Rand headquarters.

The scandal that forced a president to resign was Watergate, and the Post was the paper that broke the story. Because of his role at the paper during the Watergate reporting, Aarons was hired as an accuracy consultant for the Post-centered film about the scandal, All the President’s Men (film). He also had a bit part in the movie.

Prayers for Bobby

In 1989 Aarons read a newspaper article about the suicide of a young gay man, Bobby Griffith, and its effects on his mother. Mary Griffith had tried throughout her son’s adolescence to pray away his gayness. Bobby suffered enormously from his family’s lack of support and acceptance and his church’s condemnation of homosexuality; at age 20, he jumped to his death from a freeway bridge. Her son’s death eventually led Mary to moderate her religious beliefs and become one of the most visible activists for PFLAG, the nationwide association of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She used this platform to urge parents to understand and accept their children’s homosexuality.