Photo by Perch James Melikyan
Educators
Tony Valenzuela
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 15 years, Tony Valenzuela has been at the helm of LGBTQ+ arts and culture organizations, including Lambda Literary and the Foundation for the AIDS Monument. In summer 2022, Valenzuela embarked on a new chapter when he became the executive director of the One Institute (formerly the ONE Archives Foundation), the oldest continually operating queer organization in the country, which works to tell the stories of the LGBTQ+ community.
In 2022 the One Institute celebrated its 70th anniversary, and Valenzuela spearheaded an LGBTQ+ history festival to celebrate. “This year, I am most proud of having started Circa, the first and only queer and trans history festival in the country,” says Valenzuela. The Los Angeles County-wide festival ran during the month of October and featured dozens of exhibitions, lectures, readings, screenings, workshops, podcasts, and performances by queer and trans artists, activists, and educators.
A leading activist and thought leader in HIV and AIDS communities, Valenzuela has been involved in the LGBTQ+ movement since 1990, when he became president of his queer campus organization at University of California, San Diego. Among his many accomplishments, he founded the LGBTQ Writers in Schools program, which was the first queer educational initiative in the New York City public school system for K-12 students. He also served in management roles at the San Diego LGBT Community Center as well as Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services in Los Angeles. @oneinstitutela
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.