John Aravosis

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John Aravosis (born November 27, 1963) is a gay activist and blogger. Aravosis, an attorney who lives in Washington, D.C., is the founder of Americablog and a co-founder of StopDrLaura.com.

Aravosis is a lawyer and worked on Capitol Hill as a foreign policy advisor for a Republican senator in the late 1980s and early 1990s before becoming a Democratic activist. John has a joint law degree and masters in foreign service from Georgetown, where he studied under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

In 1998, Aravosis defended U.S. sailor Timothy R. McVeigh who was being kicked out of the military because he was gay after he was outed by America Online. Nine days before McVeigh was to be discharged Aravosis single-handedly came to his defense and launched an online campaign that got McVeigh and his case on ABC News' World News Tonight, Time, Newsweek and beyond. [1] The publicity Aravosis generated for McVeigh in this pro bono campaign got a lawyer interested in helping the sailor, and he won his case against the military and was able to get an honorable discharge and reportedly large settlement with AOL.

In 2000, Aravosis and a small group of friends launched StopDrLaura.com, the first-ever successful boycott of a TV show. [2] StopDrLaura, a one-year long pro bono campaign, got 170 of Dr. Laura Schlessinger's television advertisers to pull their endorsements [3] after Dr. Laura called gays and lesbians "biological errors," compared gay men to pedophiles, and routinely denigrated women and the right to choose.

In 2004, Aravosis launched a one-man campaign against vice presidential daughter Mary Cheney for accepting a $100,000 a year job running the vice president's re-election campaign while the campaign was making a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage one of its priorities. Aravosis' Web site, DearMary.com, was immediately profiled in Newsweek and the Washington Post, and his image of Mary on a milk carton "Have you seen me?" was reproduced widely. Up until the launch of Dear Mary, the mainstream media largely refused to note that the vice president had an openly gay daughter. After the campaign, Mary's lesbianism became widely known.

In 2005, Aravosis outed Jeff Gannon as "a conservative operative and a former male prostitute" while Gannon (real name James Guckert) was working as a White House reporter for the right-wing group Talon News.^[1]

Also in 2005, Aravosis became engaged in a fight with the right-wing seniors group USA Next over copyright violations in a highly controversial web advertisement that appeared to link gay marriage and anti-military stances to opposition Republican plans to change Social Security. USA Next failed to secure copyright for the picture it used in the web ad.

In 2005, Aravosis took on Microsoft and Bill Gates for their embrace of anti-gay bigotry. In response to complaints from the religious right, Microsoft pulled its support for a Washington state gay rights bill and then said it was rethinking its support for civil rights nationwide. Aravosis singlehandedly [4] launched a campaign to highlight Microsoft's change of heart, and after a month of nationwide bad publicity, Microsoft recommitted itself to the civil rights battle.

In 2005, Aravosis also took on the Ford Motor Company when it became known that, again at the request of the religious right, Ford was pulling its support for gay advertising and gay organizations. Aravosis launched a campaign on his blog that within two weeks got Ford to recommit itself to the gay market. [5]

Aravosis also started hosting his own Internet television show, DemsTV, which aims to fight the far right. As of February 2006, DemsTV became PoliticsTV, restructured its program, and added many specials.