Editing Michelangelo Signorile (section)

== Early years ==
Signorile was born in [[Brooklyn]], New York, and spent his early childhood in the 1960s and 1970s in Brooklyn and [[Staten Island]]. He attended the [[S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications]] at [[Syracuse University]], where he majored in journalism. It was in those years that he came to realize his own homosexuality, but remained closeted to many friends and to family.

In the mid-1980s, shortly after graduating from college, Signorile moved to [[Manhattan]]. Among his first jobs, he worked for an entertainment public relations firm that specialized in "column-planting", a term for getting clients into New York City's [[gossip column]]s, such as [[Page Six]] in the ''[[New York Post]]'' and [[Liz Smith (journalist)|Liz Smith]], then at the ''[[Daily News (New York)|New York Daily News]]''. This required collecting and trading in gossip, often about celebrities' private lives. Later, he became a gossip columnist himself. It was in that world, as Signorile describes in his book ''Queer in America'', where he saw a double standard regarding how the media glamorized heterosexuality among celebrities while covering up homosexuality. But Signorile was not political at the time. He was somewhat open about his own homosexuality by that time, but he had not looked at it in the broader context of politics and culture in America. His political awakening came as the [[AIDS epidemic]] expanded in the late 1980s and more friends were getting sick and dying.