American journalist (born 1968)
Diane Anderson-Minshall (born March 19, 1968) is an American journalist and author best known for writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects. She is the first female CEO of Pride Media. She is also the editorial director of The Advocate and Chill magazines, the editor-in-chief of HIV Plus magazine, while still contributing editor to OutTraveler.[1] Diane co-authored the 2014 memoir Queerly Beloved about her relationship with her husband Jacob Anderson-Minshall throughout his gender transition.
Biography
Born Diane Anderson is originally from Southern California, she later moved to Payette, Idaho at an early age. Diane is an open Native American LGBTQIA advocate. She is an alum of Tulane University (which she attended 1986–87) and Xavier University of Louisiana (the only Black, Catholic university in the nation, which she attended 1987–88). While working full-time in publishing, she continued taking classes at University of California, Berkeley, Chaffey College, College of San Mateo, and Idaho State University before finishing a weekend B.A. degree completion program at the New College of California.
Diane and her partner Jacob Anderson-Minshall later decided to have another wedding ceremony, celebrating their union as husband and wife after Jacob Anderson-Minshall transitioned from female-to-male.[2]
Career
In 1990, Minshall became the editor of the Crescent City Star, a weekly LGBT newspaper in New Orleans.[3] In 1993, Diane became an editor at On Our Backs, the lesbian erotic magazine founded by Nan Kinney and Debbie Sundahl. A year later, she and fellow On Our Backs employees left the magazine and founded their own publication, the lesbian entertainment magazine Girlfriends.[3] She later became executive editor of Curve.[2] Anderson-Minshall started working for The Advocate in 2011.[4]
During her tenure at Girlfriends and later at other publications including Curve, Anderson-Minshall became known for her celebrity interviews.[5] Dana Plato,[6] Angelina Jolie[7] and singer Sinéad O'Connor[8] "came out" as lesbian or bisexual women in interviews with Anderson-Minshall, although O'Connor and Plato later retracted their statements.[9]
In 1999, Minshall founded the short-lived women's lifestyle magazine, Alice. As a freelance writer, she has been published in dozens of magazines including Passport, Bust, Bitch, Venus, Utne and Seventeen. She became an editor at Curve magazine in 2004 and later became editor-in-chief.
Minshall co-edited the anthology of LGBTQ youth writing, Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Race and Sexuality, and her autobiographical essays have appeared in numerous anthologies. Her first solo fiction, Punishment with Kisses was published in 2009.
Minshall co-authored the 2014 memoir Queerly Beloved: A Love Story Across Genders with her husband Jacob Anderson-Minshall. The work focuses on how their relationship survived the transition from lesbian couple to husband and wife.[10] The couple previously collaborated in writing the Blind Eye Detectives mystery series (Blind Curves, Blind Leap and the Lambda Literary Award finalist Blind Faith) through Bold Strokes Books. In 2015 Jacob Anderson-Minshall became the first openly transgender author to win a Goldie award from the Golden Crown Literary Society; he shared the award for best creative non-fiction book with Diane Anderson-Minshall for Queerly Beloved: A Love Story Across Genders.[11]
Minshall was on the Larry King Now show as a special guest talking about HIV in transgender women in 2015. In which she explained why trans woman had a higher rate of HIV than other people in the LGBTQIA community.
Minshall became the editor-at-large of The Advocate and the editor-in-chief of HIV Plus Magazine. In 2018, she helped launched Chill Magazine.
On January 15, 2020, Pride Media announced Diane as its new chief executive officer, the first woman to ever hold the position at the company.
