Garrett Glaser is a retired news reporter who was one of the first US television journalists to "come out

Coming out

Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....

" publicly as a homosexual.

His coming out occurred during the course of a speech he made before a large group of TV and radio executives at the 1992 convention of the Radio/TV News Directors Association being held in San Antonio, Texas

San Antonio, Texas

San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States of America and the second-largest city within the state of Texas, with a population of 1.33 million. Located in the American Southwest and the south–central part of Texas, the city serves as the seat of Bexar County. In 2011,...

. Although Glaser co-founded the Electronic Media Task Force of the National Lesbian/Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) in 1990 and was later out, as well, to fellow journalists, he was not out to the public at large. That changed in 1994, when Glaser disclosed his sexual orientation during a live report on the "Channel 4 News" at KNBC-TV Los Angeles as he was reporting on the death of Elizabeth Glaser

Elizabeth Glaser

Elizabeth Glaser, born Elizabeth Meyer, , was a major American AIDS activist and child advocate married to actor and director Paul Michael Glaser. She contracted HIV very early in the modern AIDS epidemic after receiving an HIV-contaminated blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth...

 (no relation), an AIDS activist who founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation

Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing pediatric HIV infection and eliminating pediatric AIDS through research, advocacy, and prevention and treatment programs...

.

Several weeks later, the Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

published a story on the front page of its "Calendar" section about Glaser's status as one of the nation's few openly gay TV reporters,

Earlier, in an unrelated case, Glaser had become embroiled in a public spat with Los Angeles Times media columnist Howard Rosenberg

Howard Rosenberg

Howard Rosenberg is a retired TV critic for the Los Angeles Times. He worked there for 25 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In recent years he has written the book No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle with Charles S. Feldman and compiled an anthology of...

 over Glaser's coverage of the "disappearance" of music superstar Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson

Michael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. Referred to as the King of Pop, or by his initials MJ, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records...

 for KNBC.

Glaser also worked as a TV reporter at CNBC

CNBC

CNBC is a satellite and cable television business news channel in the U.S., owned and operated by NBCUniversal. The network and its international spinoffs cover business headlines and provide live coverage of financial markets. The combined reach of CNBC and its siblings is 390 million viewers...

, Entertainment Tonight

Entertainment Tonight

Entertainment Tonight is a daily tabloid television entertainment television news show that is syndicated by CBS Television Distribution throughout the United States, Canada and in many countries around the world. Linda Bell Blue is currently the program's executive producer...

, and WABC-TV

WABC-TV

WABC-TV, channel 7, is the flagship station of the Disney-owned American Broadcasting Company located in New York City. The station's studios and offices are located on the Upper West Side section of Manhattan, adjacent to ABC's corporate headquarters, and its transmitter is atop the Empire State...

 New York.

Career in corporate communications

In 2005, Glaser left journalism and became a corporate media trainer and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) consultant for two US PR and lobbying firms.

Among the corporate clients he counseled were Nestle

Nestlé

Nestlé S.A. is the world's largest food and nutrition company. Founded and headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland, Nestlé originated in a 1905 merger of the Anglo-Swiss Milk Company, established in 1867 by brothers George Page and Charles Page, and Farine Lactée Henri Nestlé, founded in 1866 by Henri...

, McDonald's

McDonald's

McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...

, H&M, Samsung

Samsung

The Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea...

, Nikon

Nikon

, also known as just Nikon, is a multinational corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in optics and imaging. Its products include cameras, binoculars, microscopes, measurement instruments, and the steppers used in the photolithography steps of semiconductor fabrication, of which...

, and Continental AG.

In 2007, he formed Glaser Media, a media training consultancy hired by Fortune 500

Fortune 500

The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks the top 500 U.S. closely held and public corporations as ranked by their gross revenue after adjustments made by Fortune to exclude the impact of excise taxes companies collect. The list includes publicly and...

 companies to train executives to communicate more effectively with news reporters.

External links

• Garrett Glaser at the Internet Movie Database
  Internet Movie Database
  Internet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...