Women of the Year
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a woman of the year every year. She has a long history of fighting for the rights of women, LGBTQ people, people of color, and other marginalized groups.
As a lawyer, she was arguing against sex discrimination back in the 1970s, when what was then called Women’s Liberation had far from universal support. One of her most significant early cases was Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue Service, which showed that gender equality benefited men as well as women. In the case, dramatized in the 2018 film On the Basis of Sex, Ginsburg successfully argued that a man shouldn’t be denied a tax deduction for what he paid his mother’s caregiver, when a woman in the same situation would receive the deduction.
Ginsburg, who graduated first in her class at Columbia Law School in 1959, taught law at Rutgers University, where she started a class on women and the law, and then Columbia before President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980. Then President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court in 1993, making her only the second woman to serve on the high court. Three years later, she joined the court’s majority in its first pro-LGBTQ ruling, Romer v. Evans, which struck down a discriminatory state constitutional amendment in Colorado.
Ginsburg went on to be in the majority in other pro-equality rulings, and she dissented eloquently from the court’s 2018 ruling in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because, according to the baker, it would violate his rights of freedom of speech and religion. While the majority found that Colorado officials, when they found baker Jack Phillips had run afoul of the state’s antidiscrimination law, did not give his religious beliefs appropriate consideration, Ginsburg wrote, “What matters is that Phillips would not provide a good or service to a same-sex couple that he would provide to a heterosexual couple.”
She further noted, “Phillips declined to make a cake he found offensive where the offensiveness of the product was determined solely by the identity of the customer requesting it.”
That was in keeping with Ginsburg’s record. In 2013, she became the first Supreme Court justice to officiate a same-sex couple’s wedding. “I think it will be one more statement that people who love each other and want to live together should be able to enjoy the blessings and the strife in the marriage relationship,” she told The Washington Post at the time. She has gone on to officiate weddings for other same-sex couples.
Ginsburg’s admirers have rightly been worried about her health and her ability to remain on the court at least until a Democratic president is in office. Now 87, she has had several bouts with cancer, but she is nothing if not a survivor. Early in March, she was asking tough questions as the court heard a case on a restrictive abortion law in Louisiana, just as she did when the justices heard LGBTQ rights cases last October (a ruling in those is expected in June). The Notorious RBG remains a fierce advocate for equality, and long may she rule. —TRUDY RING
Janelle Monáe
Multi-hyphenate Janelle Monáe kicked off the Academy Awards this year with a performance that was celebratory, subversive, and queer to the core. The ceremony began with Monáe stepping through a door to a mock-up of the set for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She removed a tuxedo jacket and replaced it with the familiar cardigan to sing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” before launching into a rousing version of her song “Come Alive” off of her 2010 debut album, The ArchAndroid.
Pausing for a moment to play the piano for Billy Porter, who sang a few bars of “I’m Still Standing” in a tribute to Elton John and Rocketman, Monáe took to the audience clad in the queenly garb from Midsommar and claimed her intersectional identity.
“Tonight we celebrate all of the amazing talent in this room. We celebrate all the women who directed phenomenal films,” Monáe said, calling out to the women whose work the Academy failed to recognize. “And I’m proud to stand here as a Black, queer artist telling stories.”
An actress, singer, and musician, and visionary in terms of representing the intersections of her Black queer identity, Monáe costarred in the Harriet Tubman biopic Harriet last year in which Cynthia Erivo played the titular role. She previously made big waves in films like Hidden Figures and Welcome to Marwen.
This April, Monáe is the lead in the horror flick Antebellum, in which, as if in a nightmare, she time-travels to the South when slavery was alive and well. From the producers of Get Out and Us, the film is a long-overdue star vehicle for the pansexual trailblazer whose conceptual 2018 album Dirty Computer was a love letter to and a promise to continue to tell the stories of marginalized people. —TRACY E. GILCHRIST
Nadine Smith
For decades, Nadine Smith has been a force for LGBTQ equality. First, she was an award-winning journalist with the Tampa Tribune, as well as a freelancer for other local and national outlets. Today, she is the executive director of Florida Equality, a position she has served since the organization’s founding in 1997. Her work has never been more critical.
Smith’s past accomplishments are many: cochair of the 1993 March on Washington, a founding board member (as a college student) of the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization, and cochair of the Federation of Statewide LGBT Advocacy Organizations. Moreover, Smith has made her mark in the political world as the first Black lesbian to run
