Anglo-American journalist and commentator Andrew Sullivan was BOTD in 1963. Born in South Godstone, Surrey, he was educated at private schools, and studied at Oxford University, where he became a supporter of Margaret Thatcher and right-wing politics. He won a scholarship to Harvard University in 1984, relocating permanently to the United States. He began his professional career as a journalist for the New Republic magazine, eventually becoming editor in 1991. A practising Catholic and fervent supporter of the Republican Party, he became the poster boy for Log Cabin Republicans (conservative, mostly white cis-gendered gay men), outlining a conservative case for gay marriage in his much-quoted 1989 article Here Comes the Groom. He came out as HIV-positive in the 1990s, bizarrely claiming to have contracted the virus via oral sex, a claim disputed by most doctors as medically impossible. In his now-infamous 1990 article Gay Life Gay Death, he accused AIDS activist group ACT-UP of alienating mainstream support for homosexuality, describing the endorsement of oral sex and other safer-sex practices to akin to genocide. His scorched-earth assault on gay liberalism continued in his 1991 article Sleeping With the Enemy, in which he condemned activists Larry Kramer and Michelangelo Signorile for outing closeted public figures, which he called a “conscious strategy of intimidation”. In 1994, he published and endorsed excerpts from The Bell Curve, a now-discredited eugenicist text, prompting his colleagues to threaten to resign unless he published a retraction. In his 1995 book Virtually Normal, he argued for the assimilation of (white, middle-class, cis gendered) gay men into mainstream American society, advocating for the dissolution of ACT-UP and other gay rights organisations. He left The New Republic in 1996 and worked for the New York Times Magazine. In 2001, after years of criticising gay men’s “irresponsible” sexual behaviour, he was revealed to be a member of bareback sex website for HIV+ men (using the screen name “RawMuscleGlutes”), leading to his resignation from the NYT. He worked briefly for The Times of London and The Atlantic, shifting most of his journalistic output to his self-published blogs The Daily Dish and The Daily Beast. An opponent of hate crime laws, affirmative action, trans rights, socialised medicine and the liberalisation of abortion laws, he was a vocal opponent of America’s post 9/11 “War on Terror” and Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine. He also wrote frequently about his inability to get US citizenship, due to Republican President George W. Bush’s ban on applications from HIV+ people. Following the election of Democrat President Barack Obama in 2008, the ban was lifted, and Sullivan applied successfully for permanent residency, becoming a US citizen in 2016. In his lighter moments, such as his 2014 blog post Lumbersexuals: The Triumph of the Bears, he described gay bear culture as “a reaction to the whole ghastly meterosexual moment when straight men… decided to shave, product and starve themselves so as to look more like women” and a strategy of “the gays” to transform society “by exponentially increasing the number of men we might have a hankering or a fetish for.” After closing his blog in 2015, he relaunched it in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing to rail against left-wing gay politics, promoting the right of white middle-class gay men to be apolitical, and writing a fawning obituary for Queen Elizabeth II. Sullivan married his long-term partner Aaron Tone in 2007, announcing their divorce in 2023. His current relationship status is unknown.