How a Boston digital news maven fought for LGBTQ+ rights
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Photo illustration: Axios Visuals. Photo: Steph Solis/Axios.
Michelle Johnson prepared for a fight. It was the early '90s, and she was about to ask an HR official at The Boston Globe for a health plan that covered her domestic partner.
- The Globe said sure — "not the answer I was expecting," says Johnson, who became the first at the newspaper to obtain those benefits.
Why it matters: There are pioneers charting their own course all around us who never go viral or grace the front pages of newspapers.
The big picture: Johnson's victory came at least a decade before dozens of U.S. companies started offering domestic partners benefits and before Massachusetts allowed same-sex couples to legally marry, becoming the first state to do so.
Zoom in: Johnson, who is Black and gay, fought for representation of Black, brown and LGBTQ+ journalists and fair coverage of marginalized communities while working at several hometown institutions.
- She was one of the architects behind Boston.com, a Globe tech columnist and, until recently, a professor at BU (where, full disclosure, she taught Steph, who's writing this).
- She also taught generations of students on multimedia journalism at several journalism conferences, including conventions held by National Association of Black Journalists, UNITY and the National Lesbian Gay Journalists Association.
- "She wanted to ensure that the students were on equal ground or exceeding where they need to be in terms of embracing the digital revolution," said Greg Lee, S.E.E.D chair at the National Association of Black Journalists when Johnson helped turned the student project into a multimedia newsroom.
Flashback: Johnson, a nightside copy editor before working on Boston.com, co-founded a local group for LGBTQ+ journalists with Globe reporter Judy Van Handle in 1992.
- It was the New England chapter of the National Lesbian Gay Journalists Association.
- That same year, they marched in Boston's Pride parade and again in San Francisco, where NLGJA held its first meeting.
- "It was the first time that we, as a group, had just come out and said, 'We're here, we're queer, we're telling the truth,'" Johnson tells Axios.
- "To be able to publicly say that was very, very cool."
Shortly afterward, Johnson became the first employee at the Globe to obtain health benefits for her domestic partner, says Gina Maniscalco, then assistant to the editor in chief.
On the editorial front, Johnson often pushed for better coverage of women, Black people and LGBTQ+ people.
- "She always held everybody's feet to the fire … and for that reason, we just had a better newsroom," Maniscalco tells Axios.
Nearly a decade after Johnson left the Globe, she was teaching a journalism class at BU when a student shared the news that the state Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal.
- "Then somebody said, 'Are you going to propose?' And I stood there thinking, 'Oh shoot, should I go home and get on one knee or something?'"
- There was no grand gesture. Johnson and Myrna Greenfield, her longtime partner, obtained their marriage license alongside their friends around midnight May 17, 2004, at Cambridge City Hall.
What they're saying: "We just kept thinking, this may not hold. Something could go bad," Johnson says.
- "But it didn't. It worked out."
Twenty years later, Johnson and Greenfield live in Jamaica Plain.
- Johnson has retired from BU's journalism program, but she works with students at Spark!, an experiential learning lab for student-led projects.
- For the first time in years, they watched the Boston Pride for the People parade in the Back Bay.
- "We felt it was important to be seen again because of all the pushback that's been happening across the country," she said. "We felt it was time to gather and show some support for our community."