Background

Aarons was born in the Bronx on December 8th, 1933, to Jewish Latvian immigrants.

Education

Leroy Aarons was studying psychology at Brown University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1955. Later he switched to journalism and received a master's degree from Columbia University in 1958.

Career

Aarons' first journalism job was with the New Haven, Connecticut, Journal-Courier, where he was a reporter and then city editor. He joined the Washington Post in 1962 as an editor and became known as the “Silver Slasher” because of his editorial style and silver hair. Serving as a national correspondent from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, Aarons covered a number of major stories, such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, Kennedy's later funeral after his assassination, and the 1967 Newark, New Jersey, riots. Leaving the Post in 1976, he joined the staff at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was involved with the summer program for minority journalists.

A year spent in Israel as a freelance correspondent in 1982 was followed by a move to the Oakland Tribune in California where Aarons served as executive editor. Leading efforts to diversify the paper and boost circulation, he became the paper's senior vice president. Under his leadership, the Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for coverage of the Loma Prieta, California, earthquake.

In 1991, Aarons returned to freelancing, publishing his book Prayers for Bobby: A Mother 's Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son (1995), while also writing the radio docudrama Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers (1991) and the libretto Monticello (2000). Aside from these later accomplishments, Aarons came into the limelight when he announced his homosexuality at a 1989 American Society of Newspaper Editors conference while presenting a paper about homosexual journalists. The next year, he and several other journalists founded the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, for which he served as president until 1997.

In 1999 he joined the University of Southern California faculty as a professor of journalism and director of the Annenberg School's sexual orientation issues-in-the-news program. At the time of his death, he was in the midst of writing a play about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Achievements

• Leroy Aaron guided the Association of LGBTQ journalists and made a great contribution to it. Thanks to him many people learned more about the LGBTQ community.

Works

More photos

• audiobook

  • Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers

    (The original version of LATW's groundbreaking docudrama a...)

    1991

• book

  • Monticello

    (A timely and hauntingly beautiful new opera with libretto...)

    2009
  • Prayers for Bobby: A Mother's Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son 1996
  • Lesbians and gays in the newsroom 10 years later 2000

Personality

Aarons often described as a good leader and a strong person. Despite the fact he had cancer, Aarons was always full of energy and wanted to finish his job.

Physical Characteristics: While working in the Washington Post, he became known as "Silver Slasher" for his editorial style and silver hair.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Roy was not only a great leader and great spokesman for gays and lesbians in the journalism game, but he was also a good man and a good friend. I learned an enormous amount from him about his values and a lot of that is reflected in the values of The New York Times.” - Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.
  
  “Personally I will remember him as a mentor and friend who taught us the value of the contribution we could make to our newsrooms as openly gay journalists. He also provided the leadership that gave many of us the courage to join our personal and professional lives. For that, we will be forever grateful.” - Robert Murphy

Connections

Aarons had a life partner named Joshua Boneh. They were not married but held a commitment ceremony (due to restrictions of their religion).

Mother:

Sybil Aarons

Sybil Aarons died of stomach cancer when her son was 3.

Brother:

Ronald Aarons

life partner:

Joshua Boneh

Leroy Aarons met Boneh, an Israeli national, in 1981 at a gay Jewish mixer at the Jewish Community Center in Washington DC, and followed Boneh to Israel in 1982, where he freelanced for Time magazine. The couple held a commitment ceremony at the Jewish Community Center in 2000 to mark their 20th anniversary.

Friend:

Robert Clyve Maynard

Aarons' friend and colleague, who Roy a features editor at the Oakland Tribune.

References

• Contemporary Authors vol. 233