Donna Minkowitz

Donna Minkowitz is a writer of creative nonfiction from Brooklyn, New York, United States. She became known for her coverage of gay and lesbian politics and culture in The Village Voice from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, for which she won a GLAAD Media Award.

In 1998, she published the memoir Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters With the Right Taught Me About Sex, God, and Fury (the Free Press ), which won a Lambda Literary Award. In that book, she went undercover with several anti-gay Christian Right groups including Focus on the Family and wrote about the surprising things she, a lesbian leftist, had in common with them.

Minkowitz has also written for such publications as Salon.com, The Nation, Ms. magazine, The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, and The Advocate.

In 1999, she penned a controversial creative nonfiction piece for Salon.com about the Matthew Shepard murder, "Russell, Aaron and Me," that explored the emotions of his 21-year-old killers in terms of the terror of sex and intimacy.

As part of the preparation for Ferocious Romance, Minkowitz successfully disguised herself as a 16 year-old Christian evangelical boy to write about the Christian right men's group the Promise Keepers for Ms. Magazine in 1995. That article, in which she argued that the Promise Keepers movement was both good and bad for women and feminism, was widely read, and Minkowitz won an Exceptional Merit Media Award for the piece from the National Women's Political Caucus and Radcliffe College.

In 1995, Minkowitz also contributed an essay, "Giving It Up: Orgasm, Fear, and Femaleness" to the influential anthology To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, edited by Rebecca Walker.

In the decade beginning in the year 2000, Minkowitz underwent treatment for painful Repetitive Strain Injury in her arms and shoulders due to computer use, and began work on a book combining memoir and fantasy called The Marvelous Toy.

In the spring of 2011, she started a blog, Donna Minkowitz: Fantasy, Memoir, Food, Sex, Left, at donnaminkowitz.wordpress.com.

Minkowitz has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show and numerous NPR programs.

She is famous for uncovering the Brandon Teena story, and her Village Voice article on the subject was said by director Kimberly Peirce to have been the original inspiration for the film "Boys Don't Cry."