The Los Angeles-based ONE Archives Foundation announced that longtime LGBTQ+ activist and nonprofit leader Tony Valenzuela (he/him) has been named as its new executive director.
Valenzuela is the first Latinx person to lead ONE Archives Foundation, the longest continuously operating LGBTQ+ organization in the United States.
ONE Archives Foundation will mark its 70th anniversary in November. Valenzuela succeeds Jennifer C. Gregg, who had been executive director since 2016.
Valenzuela was most recently the executive director of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit the Foundation for The AIDS Monument (FAM), which is dedicated to installing a world-class monument in West Hollywood Park to memorialize lost loved ones and educating the public about the historical achievements of HIV/AIDS activist communities. Prior to FAM, he was executive director of Lambda Literary, the renowned queer literary-arts nonprofit.
Valenzuela has been a part of the LGBTQ+ movement since becoming president of his campus queer organization at UC San Diego in 1990. He spent the early part of his career in management roles at the LGBT Center and LGBT VOICES (Voters Organized in Coalition for the Election), both in San Diego, and the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services in Los Angeles.
For his work as a leading activist and thought leader in HIV/AIDS communities since the 1990s, Tony was named one of the country's most influential LGBTQ+ leaders in Out Magazine's annual OUT100 list.
Founded in 1952, ONE Archives Foundation is the oldest active LGBTQ+ organization in the United States and is dedicated to telling the accurate stories and history of all LGBTQ+ people and their culture.
