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LAURA DOUGLAS-BROWN
As editor and co-founder of GA Voice, Laura Douglas-Brown is dedicated to chronicling the multiple communities within our larger LGBT community. She’s been doing so for the last 13 years and it’s made her become one of our most trusted figures.
How would you define your role in Atlanta’s LGBT community?
As editor and co-founder of the GA Voice, and as a journalist covering LGBT Atlanta for the last 13 years, I believe my role is to chronicle the many communities that make up our LGBT “community.” I do not believe that a journalist’s role is advocacy, per se. But I do believe that the first step in empowering people to fight for the rights we continue to be denied as LGBT people is to inform and educate them about where we stand now, and connect them with those already doing this work.
What do you forecast for Atlanta’s LGBT community in the next 5 to 10 years?
My hope is that Atlanta’s LGBT community continues to grow and diversify over the next five to 10 years, and that we also become more engaged. I think the Atlanta community is on the cusp of change right now, and my hope is that we turn more towards activism than apathy. It is easy to be comfortable here, but in some ways it is a tenuous comfort, based on atmosphere but not supported by laws and policies to guarantee our full equality. My hope is that in the next 10 years that will change for Georgia.
We learn from all our experiences, both good and bad. Tell us about a negative life experience you’ve had that you learned a valuable lesson from.
For most of my childhood, I spent the best weeks of every summer at an all girls camp in North Georgia. It was my haven as I came to recognize my own difference from the girls who surrounded me for the rest of the year. The summer after I graduated high school, I was old enough to be on staff. It was an amazing time, including coming out to two of my camp friends, who turned out to also be gay.
How has being LGBT shaped your outlook on life?
Unfortunately, lesbian rumors about one of them ended with her being forced to resign. I was told I could stay or go. I chose to go, and came out to the director in the process despite being terrified that they would tell my parents, because I could not be part of covering up something so unfair.
That was 1991, and it changed me forever. At the time, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than losing the one place I felt accepted being gay, for the simple fact of being gay. I resolved from that moment that I would never again hide. I didn’t care if it cost me jobs, friends – whatever it was, I would rather not have it than love it and lose it again.
Being LGBT has made me stronger, more empathetic, and more determined to help create a world where no one faces bias or hatred simply because of who they are.
Tell us a little more about yourself. What are your hobbies? What are your goals?
I am a mini-van driving soccer mom on the weekends, and love every minute of it. I also love reading and playing with my kids. My goal is to try to find balance among all of the many worlds in which I live, and to make sure that the world my kids grow up in is better than the one I did.
If you were stranded on a desert island, what’s the one book you would want with you?
It would be too hard for me to pick one book, so instead I would pick a blank book so I could write and recall the many writers who have inspired me through the years.
