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DESIGNER, ACTIVIST, & ARCHITECT

HERMES MALLEA, MICHAEL BREWER,
& CAREY MALONEY

Designer Hermes Mallea (left) and architect Carey Maloney (right), partners in business—M (Group), an architecture and decoration firm—and in life, are also cochairmen of a new project at the New York Public Library called LGBT@NYPL. The committee's goal is to raise money to have the library's extensive LGBT materials cataloged and digitized; once that's done, they will not only be preserved, they'll be more widely available online to scholars and readers everywhere. The committee has raised $1.7 million in just six months—a fitting tribute to the couple's energy and their 20 years of activism at the library.

It's not easy for anyone to be a student at Morehouse College, the only historically black all-male school in the country. With alumni that include the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., NAACP chairman Julian Bond, and Spike Lee, the mystique of the "Morehouse man" looms large—and it hasn't traditionally included openly gay students.

Six years ago one student beat another with a baseball bat because he thought a sexual advance was being made. Michael Brewer (center), a political science major, helped to organize a week of activities this past spring that was dubbed the "No More ‘No Homo' Initiative." Now the senior would like to organize a pride festival. Things have improved at the college, he says, but "there are still some brothers who need their paradigm shifted."
Photographed by Roger Erickson in New York City

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