THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

The members were elected by 276 artists, scholars, scientists and leaders in the public, non-profit and private sectors.

Johnson is also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His book Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women is in the LGBTQ Nonfiction category. ( Winners will be announced in June. )

Some of the other new members include singer, songwriter and activist Joan Baez; lawyer and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.; poet and playwright Claudia Rankine; independent filmmaker Richard Linklater; Native American scholar and artist Edgar Heap of Birds; and immunologist Yasmine Belkaid.

The 37 new International Honorary Members, from 22 countries, include Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist and pastor whose hospital provides surgery, healing and refuge for thousands of rape victims in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Ueno Chizuko, a sociologist, public intellectual and women's-rights activist in Japan.

The new members join the company of Academy members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton in the 18th century; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Maria Mitchell in the 19th; Robert Frost, Martha Graham, Margaret Mead, Milton Friedman, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 20th; and, in the past two decades, individuals such as Antonin Scalia, Michael Bloomberg, John Lithgow, Judy Woodruff and Bryan Stevenson.

International Honorary Members include Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier, Mary Leakey, John Maynard Keynes, Akira Kurosawa, and Nelson Mandela.

See AMACAD.org .