Randal Kleiser is an internationally known film director whose first feature film, Grease (1978), remains the top-grossing movie musical of all time. His other directing credits include The Blue Lagoon (1980), Summer Lovers (1982), Flight of the Navigator (1985), White Fang (1991), Honey, I Blew...
With her election to the Palm Springs City Council in November 2017, Lisa Middleton became the first transgender person elected to a non-judicial office in the state of California. Representing the desert resort city, she serves on the Riverside County Transportation Commission, the Sunline Board...
In 2010, while earning her graduate degree at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, Kristen Kavanaugh founded the Military Acceptance Project (MAP). What began as a class project, focused on addressing the needs of LGBT service members, has since evolved into a full-fledged...
Since graduating from the USC Marshall School of Business, Melissa Ward has achieved two historic firsts: she is the first African-American woman to serve as both a U.S. Air Force flight instructor and commercial airline pilot. Yet when the Chicago native enrolled at USC...
While completing his master’s degree in postsecondary administration and student affairs at the USC Rossier School of Education, Vincent Vigil discovered that retention rates for the university’s LGBT students were low. They neither felt included or safe at USC—nor was there any mentorship or...
One of the founding members of the USC Lambda LGBT Alumni Association, Amy Ross has been active in the Los Angeles-area LGBT community for over 30 years. While working as a lab technician at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, she joined the...
Alpha Mulugeta performed in drag for the first time in a USC School of Cinematic Arts student production; Years later, while earning his master’s in social work from the University of California, Berkeley, he began performing in Berkeley and Oakland drag venues as Honey...
Lindsay Harrison is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Jenner & Block. She assists corporations and individuals with federal and state appellate and U.S. Supreme Court litigation, as well as in federal and state trial courts and arbitrations. A 2003 cum...
Robert Garcia made SoCal political history in 2014, when he became the youngest, the first Latino and the first openly gay mayor of Long Beach. As the 28th mayor of the nation’s 36th-largest city, Garcia is focused on making Long Beach a leader in economic...
It was two short films—Crabgrass Manifesto and Something Close to Heaven—that got Jason Clodfelter’s foot in the proverbial Hollywood door. Veteran director Paris Barclay saw the films, produced by Clodfelter, and hired the USC School of Cinematic Arts graduate to work for him at...