Photo by Duhon Photography
Educators
Jonathan Lovitz
Meet one of the artists, disruptors, educators, groundbreakers, innovators, and storytellers who all helped make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ people.
As senior adviser and director of public affairs at the U.S. Economic Development Administration in the U.S. Department of Commerce, Jonathan Lovitz says he has the “best job in the federal government.”
“I spend [my days] spreading the good news about great programs that help Americans live better,” says Lovitz. “Every day I get to help the Biden-Harris administration invest in America through our programs that create new jobs, new businesses, and new opportunities for every community to grow bigger and stronger.”
The significance of serving in the Biden-Harris administration is not lost on this gay government worker. “Getting to serve my country as an out and proud gay man means so much to me,” he says. “This is the most pro-LGBTQ and pro-equality administration ever; but it hasn’t always been like this. Every single day we’re showing young people that being out and being in public service are not just possible but celebrated.”
Before Lovitz joined the administration, he spent almost a decade at the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, where he led the charge to write and pass more than 25 bipartisan state and local laws as well as author multiple federal memorandums of understanding, opening up billions of dollars in contracts and economic development to small business owners, including minorities, veterans, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ-owned entrepreneurs.
In 2022 he also founded Lovitz Strategies, an organization focused on public policy; diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and communications strategies for corporations and nongovernmental organizations.
“I hope this is just the beginning of a lifetime of service,” says Lovitz. “I try every day to live up to my colleague, friend, hero, and fellow Out100 member Karine Jean-Pierre’s belief that our identities are our superpowers.”
“No one will work harder for the change you want to see than you will, so get involved,” says Lovitz. “Service changed my life.” @jdlovitz
Educators
Maeve DuVally
Meet one of the artists, disruptors, educators, groundbreakers, innovators, and storytellers who all helped make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ people.
Courtesy of Maeve DuVally
For 18 years, Maeve DuVally worked at Goldman Sachs as the managing director of communications. But it wasn’t until 15 years into her role that DuVally was able to enter the workplace as herself: a “transgender woman who had thought herself a man for the first 56 years of her life.”
It was 2019 when she first introduced herself to her colleagues as Maeve DuVally. The decision to come out at work had been sparked by a panel sponsored by Goldman Sachs’s LGBTQ+ affinity network on how to make the workplace more comfortable for transgender people. DuVally first realized she was trans in October 2018, after becoming sober in January of the same year.
“Getting sober in 2018 was the most harrowing and difficult accomplishment of my life so far. I believe I would be dead if I hadn’t succeeded or at the very least, I would not have realized who I am and there would be no Maeve,” says DuVally. “I had to go to the brink and look into the abyss of death before making a decision to live sober.”
A few months after coming out at Goldman, DuVally was the subject of a New York Times article, which profiled her first few days of being out at work. In 2022 she left Goldman to consult for corporations and other organizations on communications strategy and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In 2023 she published a memoir called Maeve Rising, which chronicles her struggles with alcohol and her very public coming-out.