October 5 is a day that gave us a pioneering bisexual activist, the oldest known openly gay woman in America, the newspaper that told gay Washington’s stories for half a century, and the first openly gay man to anchor network evening news. Not a bad Tuesday.
Ruth Ellis: A Century of Living Out Loud
Ruth Charlotte Ellis was born in 1899 in Springfield, Illinois, a time when being openly gay wasn’t just risky — it was borderline science fiction. She came out in 1915. Let that sink in. 1915. World War I hadn’t even started for America yet, and Ruth was already living her truth.
Ellis moved to Detroit in the 1930s, where she did something remarkable: she taught herself printing and ran her own successful printing business out of her home. In the 1930s. As a Black woman. As a Black lesbian woman. She printed fliers, posters, and stationery, and her home quickly became the de facto community center for Black LGBTQ Detroit — a place to gather, to be safe, to be themselves.
Ellis lived openly as a lesbian for over 85 years. She didn’t hide. She didn’t apologize. She didn’t wait for permission. When she passed away in her sleep on October 5, 2000, she was 101 years old. Her final words of advice to the community? “Don’t give up.” The Ruth Ellis Center in Detroit, which serves homeless LGBTQ+ youth, carries on her legacy of radical hospitality.
(No public domain or Creative Commons photo of Ruth Ellis was available. We’d rather publish without one than use a fake image.)
Robyn Ochs: The Bisexual Voice That Wouldn’t Be Silenced
Born on October 5, 1958, in San Antonio, Texas, Robyn Ochs grew up to become one of the most important bisexual activists and educators in the world. And if you’re thinking “bisexual activist” sounds like a niche gig, consider that bisexuality is still routinely erased, questioned, and dismissed — even within the LGBTQ+ community itself. Ochs has spent her career fighting exactly that.
Ochs is perhaps best known for her definition of bisexuality, which has become the gold standard: “I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted — romantically and/or sexually — to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.” If that sounds more nuanced than the binary categories most people are comfortable with, well, that’s the point.
She edited Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, a landmark anthology that gave voice to bisexual people across 42 countries. She taught at Tufts University’s Experimental College. And on May 17, 2004 — the very first day it was legal — she married her partner Peg Preble in Massachusetts. She literally got married the second the law allowed it. That’s not just activism. That’s efficiency.
The Washington Blade: America’s Gay Newspaper Turns 57
On October 5, 1969 — just three months after the Stonewall Riots lit the fuse on the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement — a group of volunteers in Washington, D.C. printed the first issue of what would become one of the most influential LGBTQ+ publications in American history. They called it The Gay Blade, and they distributed it for free around the city.
The name was later shortened to The Washington Blade, and it has been continuously published ever since. That’s 57 years of covering everything from the AIDS crisis to marriage equality to the rise and fall of political allies and enemies alike. It has outlasted newspapers a hundred times its size. It has survived the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2010s — and even a 2009 attempt by its parent company to shut it down. The Blade’s staff walked out, started a new paper called the DC Agenda, and then bought the Blade’s assets back. Because of course they did. You don’t shut down the gay press without a fight.
Today, the Blade is the oldest continuously published LGBTQ+ newspaper in the United States, still covering D.C. politics, national LGBTQ+ news, and everything in between. Happy birthday to the paper that refused to die.
Thomas Roberts: The Anchor Who Refused to Stay in the Closet
Thomas Albert Roberts was born on October 5, 1972, in Towson, Maryland. He grew up to become a television journalist, working his way through local news, CNN, and eventually MSNBC, where he became a daytime anchor and, notably, the first openly gay man to anchor a national broadcast network’s evening news when he filled in on NBC’s Nightly News in 2015.
That’s not just a footnote. Network evening news is the most-watched news format in America, and for decades, the assumption was that the audience wouldn’t accept an openly gay anchor. Roberts proved them wrong. He also never shied away from LGBTQ+ issues in his coverage, and he was one of the few national journalists willing to challenge anti-gay politicians directly on air.
He also somehow found time to appear in The Avengers (2012) and Iron Man 3 (2013) playing himself, which is a flex that very few journalists can claim. Roberts now runs GayGoodNews, because apparently being a trailblazing network anchor wasn’t enough.
What It All Means
October 5 gave us a woman who lived openly as a lesbian for nearly a century (Ellis), a woman who turned bisexuality into a recognized identity (Ochs), a newspaper that told our stories when nobody else would (The Blade), and a man who broke the last glass ceiling in broadcast news (Roberts). Four very different lives, connected by one date and one simple refusal to be invisible.
So happy birthday, Robyn and Thomas. Rest in power, Ruth. And happy anniversary, Washington Blade. Not bad for a day that most people associate with “the Monday after a long weekend.”
