Diane Anderson-Minshall

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Diane Anderson-Minshall (b. March, 19, 1968) is an American journalist best known for her writing and editing of lesbian lifestyle magazines.

Born in Southern California she moved to Payette, Idaho at an early age. It was there that she began her journalism career at 13, covering the school beat for the Independent Enterprise. In high school she worked for the Gate City Journal (Nyssa, Oregon) and the Daily Argus Observer (Ontario, Oregon). She attended Tulane University and Xavier University, both schools in New Orleans, UC Berkeley, Chaffey College, and Idaho State University before graduating from San Francisco’s New College of California.

In 1990 she became the editor of the Crescent City Star, a weekly GLBT newspaper in New Orleans. In 1993, she became an editor at On Our Backs, the lesbian erotic magazine founded by Nan Kinney and Debbie Sundahl and formerly edited by sexpert Susie Bright. A year later, she and fellow On Our Backs employees, including Heather Findlay, left the magazine and founded their own publication, the lesbian entertainment magazine Girlfriends.

During her tenure at Girlfriends and later at other publications including Curve Magazine, Anderson-Minshall became known for her celebrity interviews, which were occasionally referenced and quoted by mainstream publications like People, US Weekly, New York Times, and The National Enquirer. Several actresses including Dana Plato, Angelina Jolie and singer Sinéad O'Connor “came out” as lesbian or bisexual women in interviews with Anderson-Minshall, although O'Connor later retracted her statements.

In 1999 Anderson-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 the lesbian publication, Curve, in 2004 and is currently that magazine’s executive editor.

She has received a handful of honors for her work including a 1998 Visa Versa award for her celebrity journalism and Power Up’s Ten Amazing Gay Women in Showbiz Award in 2006. In 2000, Anderson-Minshall was a finalist for the Women in Periodical Publishing’s Woman of the Year Award.

Anderson-Minshall co-edited of the anthology of LGBT youth writing, Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Race and Sexuality, and her often autobiographical essays have appeared in numerous anthologies.

Her most recent work, the mystery novel Blind Curves, was published in April 2007 by Bold Strokes Books. It is the first installment in the Blind Eye Mystery Series which Anderson-Minshall writes with her transgender husband Jacob Anderson-Minshall.

Diane and her husband, Jacob Anderson-Minshall, who pens the nationally syndicated column Transnation, have been together since 1990. They were legally married March 19, 2006 after Jacob transitioned from female to male. They previously were domestic partners registered in the state of California.

[edit] Anthologies

  • Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television
  • Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine
  • Body Outlaws
  • Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism
  • Young Wives Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership
  • 50 Ways to Support Lesbian and Gay Equality: The Complete Guide to Supporting Family, Friends, Neighbors or Yourself
  • Tough Girls

[edit] External links