Michelangelo Signorile - Early Years

Early Years

Signorile was born in Brooklyn, New York and spent his early childhood in the 1960s and 1970s in Manhattan and Staten Island. He attended the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where he majored in journalism. It was in those years that he came to realize his own gay sexual orientation, but still remained closeted to many friends and to family.

In the mid-80s, shortly after graduating from college, Signorile moved to Manhattan. Among his first jobs, he worked for an entertainment public relations firm that specialized in "column-planting"—getting clients, which included movie companies and Broadway shows, into New York City's gossip columns, such as the popular Page Six at the New York Post and Liz Smith, then at the New York Daily News. This required collecting and trading in gossip, often about celebrities' private lives. Later, he became a gossip columnist himself, attending parties and movie premieres and reporting on nightlife for the now-defunct New York Nightlife magazine. It was in that world in the mid-80s, as Signorile describes in his book Queer in America, where he saw a double standard regarding how the media glamorized heterosexuality among celebrities while covering up homosexuality. But Signorile was not political at the time. He was somewhat open about his own homosexuality by that time, but he had not looked at it in the broader context of politics and culture in America. His political awakening came as the AIDS epidemic expanded in the late 80s and more friends were getting sick and dying.