25 Facts About Jay Blotcher

Jay Blotcher was active in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in its early years, serving as chair of the media committee, and was a founding member of Queer Nation.

Jay Blotcher's work has appeared in both mainstream and LGBTQ publications, including The New York Times, the Advocate, Out, POZ, Gay City News, and LGNY.

Jay Blotcher was born to nineteen-year-old Valerie Paul in June 1960, although his birth remained unknown to his biological father, Baltimore Orioles pitcher Arnie Portocarrero.

Paul and Portocarrero had met through friends over drinks in Boston one evening, Jay Blotcher says his mother later told him.

Jay Blotcher grew up in Randolph, Massachusetts, with his sister, Andrea, adopted, and attended Temple Beth Am Hebrew School.

Jay Blotcher's parents were active at temple, both serving in leadership roles and volunteering at temple events.

Jay Blotcher's interest in LGBTQ activism began while he was a student at Syracuse University, where he wrote a pair of articles profiling the school's Gay Student Association in the student newspaper, The Daily Orange, and magazine, Report.

Jay Blotcher moved to New York City after graduating from college in the spring of 1982.

Jay Blotcher was living with friends on the Upper West Side.

In 1983, Jay Blotcher worked as an associate producer for Our Time, a thirteen-week television series on metropolitan gay life, produced and hosted by activist, author and film historian Vito Russo.

In 1989, Jay Blotcher moved to the Lower East Side, taking a one bedroom apartment on the second floor of an 1889 tenement building on Essex Street where he paid $485 per month in rent.

Jay Blotcher recalls that many of his activist comrades lived in the neighborhood, and several, including his friend, author Michelangelo Signorile, lived upstairs in the same building.

In 1990, with Alan Klein, Jay Blotcher co-founded Public Impact Media Consultants, a public relations firm specializing in progressive groups and individuals.

Jay Blotcher was volunteering at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1987, working the telephones for donations to its annual AIDS Walk New York, when he first heard about the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

Jay Blotcher said that resonated with him, so he attended the demonstration the next morning.

Jay Blotcher attended the first meeting of ACT UP's media committee, convened in the living room of Vito Russo's West Twenty-Fourth Street apartment.

Jay Blotcher would become the fourth person to chair the committee, following David Corkery and Bob Rafsky, who shared the role, and Michelangelo Signorile, who passed the responsibility on to him.

Jay Blotcher spoke on behalf of ACT UP at numerous demonstrations, including the second anniversary "spring lie-down" at New York City Hall in July 1989, and Stop the Church on December 10,1989, among others.

Jay Blotcher represented the group at the International AIDS Conferences in Montreal, Amsterdam, and Yokohama.

Jay Blotcher participated in other demonstrations, including the protests of the Food and Drug Administration in 1988, and the National Institutes of Health in 1990.

On one occasion a photo of Jay Blotcher being arrested appeared in USA Today, and his mother, although displeased, clipped out the photograph and mounted it on the refrigerator.

In 2001, Jay Blotcher left Manhattan, and moved to High Falls, New York with Brook Garrett, then his domestic partner.

That same year, Jay Blotcher was one of the organizers of Join the Impact, a global online effort to organize for LGBTQ marriage equality, and attended the group's Lake Worth, Florida demonstration to protest Florida's Amendment 2, a measure that would have constitutionally defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

Jay Blotcher was the editor of Rainbow flag creator Gilbert Baker's posthumous memoir Rainbow Warrior: My Life in Color.

Jay Blotcher said the work was the fulfillment of a promise he had made to Baker in 1997.