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Educators
Robin Roberts
Meet one of the artists, disruptors, educators, groundbreakers, innovators, and storytellers who all helped make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ people.
Over the last several decades, Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts has been an integral part of the morning routines of many Americans. She began contributing to Good Morning America in 1995 and was named co-anchor in May 2005. Under her leadership, the broadcast has won numerous Emmy Awards for Outstanding Morning Program as well as the 2017 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Daytime TV Hosting Team.
While Roberts has excelled at telling the stories of others, her career has also been marked by stories of her own. In 2007 Roberts told the world that she had breast cancer and shared some of her experiences on Good Morning America. In 2012 Roberts was diagnosed with a bone marrow disease, and the documentation of her medical journey won her a Peabody Award. And in 2013, she publicly acknowledged that she is gay.
“It’s an honor and a blessing to be welcomed into millions of homes each and every morning on GMA,” says Roberts. “I’m especially grateful to our viewers who have so warmly embraced all of me.”
Beyond Good Morning America, Roberts is the president of Rockin’ Robin Productions, an independent production company that creates original broadcast and digital programming. Since Roberts founded the company in 2014, it has produced projects like the award-winning Thriver Thursday digital series, the Robin Roberts Presents banner of scripted and documentary projects for the Lifetime Television Network, and the Emmy-winning Turning the Tables With Robin Roberts for Disney+.
This year Roberts married her longtime partner, Amber Laign. “Many people go into marriage hoping for and looking for what Amber and I already know we have, and so ours is a celebration,” Roberts said on GMA in August. “We’ve been living our happily ever after through all the ups and downs, so it’s a celebration.” @robinrobertsgma
Courtesy of Maeve DuVally
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.