Lou Chibbaro
” data-medium-file=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2025/09/Lou_Chubarro1.jpeg?fit=300%2C200&quality=89&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2025/09/Lou_Chubarro1.jpeg?fit=780%2C521&quality=89&ssl=1″ />
After Lou Chibbaro arrived in D.C. in 1972—a shy kid from Queens, New York—he felt lucky to have a wonky little job writing for the American Public Power Association.
But he’d recently come out and was immediately drawn to the Washington Blade, which offered rich coverage of the gay community and the issues those within the community faced. It was also a “beacon” to young gay men like him.
So he began to freelance for the paper; his very first story for the Blade was about Jimmy Carter and the impact his policies would have on the gay community if he were elected President of the United States.
When Chibbaro wrote that story for the Washington Blade, he signed it ‘Lou Romano,’ because in those days, he says, there was still broad discrimination against gay men, especially if they were working in mainstream D.C. careers.
But it didn’t take long for Chibbaro, who turned 76 this week, to realize that he was happier chronicling the city’s gay culture as a full-time writer. So he gave up his pseudonym and began using his actual byline, later quitting his other job and joining the Blade as a full-time reporter.
“I certainly feel there is a need for the gay press,” says Chibbaro, who wrote his first story ever—that piece on Carter—for the Blade in 1976. “We can focus on issues that are not central to other news organizations. We bring a level of attention to issues that aren’t getting press.”
After nearly 50 years of news coverage, and a lifetime of change within the greater LGBTQIA community, Chibbaro is still pounding out stories for the Blade each week. His longevity is iconic; he’s believed to be the longest-tenured active reporter among the local Washington press corps, even exceeding City Paper contributor and WAMU political analyst Tom Sherwood, who says he began reporting in 1978.
In May, WETA-TV aired a special on Chibbaro’s lifetime of achievements writing for the Blade. Pate Felts, an executive producer of the documentary Lou’s Legacy: A Reporter’s Life at the Washington Blade, recalls going through hundreds of Banker Boxes of the veteran reporter’s papers and notebooks—an invaluable archive of local journalism and issues facing queer and trans people in the District and beyond for the past several decades, from HIV and LGBTQIA acceptance to military service and street violence.
George Washington University now holds an archive of Chibbaro’s records from 1980 to 2001, which is available for public inspection. Some of those materials are marked “off the record” and “not for attribution” and will be restricted from public access for 50 years from the date of creation.
“Lou has written the history of the gay movement here in the District from 1976 to today,” Felts says. “This is our history.”
Chibbaro is modest and self-effacing. He doesn’t do self-promotion and still sometimes needs help with PDFs and other technology. Don’t look for him on Twitter or Instagram, and he acknowledges that his Facebook account is only for sharing news links.
But Chibbaro’s story at the Blade reflects an even larger one—the lasting role the paper has played covering the LGBTQIA experience in D.C.
The Blade was founded in October 1969 (originally known as The Gay Blade) soon after the violent police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, officially kicked off the gay rights movement.
Issue One of the Blade was published on Oct. 5, 1969, and claims to be the country’s first gay newspaper, according to the Blade Foundation and multiple news sources. (Prior to the Blade, queer newsletters and zine-style magazines existed in cities throughout the U.S.) In the early days, the publication was a black-and-white, one-sheet community newsletter, often distributed in D.C.-area bars.
In 2009, the paper’s former parent company filed for bankruptcy protection and the paper’s fate seemed dim. But within days, advertisers, writers, and community members came up with funding to keep it going, eventually purchasing the rights to the company out of bankruptcy court.
Chibarro was at the paper during those tumultuous days, though he says the news-gathering process has always remained the same: looking for any story that has resonance for the LGBTQIA community in the District (and later the immediate suburbs of Maryland and Virginia) and write as objectively as possible about it. His latitude is wide when it comes to finding story ideas, but he also receives a lot of tips from longtime readers who contact him about things they think the paper should cover.
“In the old days when I would write stories many people were afraid to be out,” Chibbaro says. “There was still a lot of discrimination against people who were gay. Many people did not want to talk or would only talk if we didn’t use their name. There was fear.”
Former At-Large Councilmember David Catania, the first out councilmember who served from 1997 to 2015, remembers Chibbaro’s work for its impact on the discussion of gay rights in the city in the absence of significant coverage from the Washington Post and other local media.
“I don’t mean to be unkind, but I don’t get any news from the Post with respect to the LGBT community,” Catania says, noting the Blade’s deep coverage of AIDS clinics or police unwillingness to aggressively cover violence against queer and trans communities. “Who is the Lou Chibbaro of the Post? I can’t recall the last time anyone at the Post wrote anything of importance to the gay community. There are a few drive-by stories but nothing of significance.”
Catania believes the Blade continues to serve a valuable role as a “meeting place for the gay community,” especially for young people coming out or those new to the area. Chibbaro’s byline is an intrinsic part of that: “There is no Blade without Lou,” Catania says.
For Catania and other readers, the process of consuming the Blade remains the same; wander over to paper’s sidewalk newspaper boxes every Friday to pick up print copies. Despite its steady online growth, the newspaper’s print version is still very much a ritual for many District residents, with more than 10,000 copies printed and distributed throughout the city, according to co-owner and editor Kevin Naff.
Naff says that while the paper has broadened its reach to cover national and international issues, as well as doing more to emphasize digital coverage and global readership, it will always have a focus on local issues. Like Catania, he cites the paper’s coverage of Whitman-Walker Health, D.C.’s nonprofit community health center that focuses on LGBTQIA patients and HIV care, much of which reported on how grant money was spent and treatment outcomes.
Abby Fenton, who served as chief external affairs officer for Whitman-Walker for nine years, credits Chibbaro with not only elevating AIDS coverage but keeping the issue front and center. His work, she says, helped push the District government to stay focused on the impact of AIDS in the local gay community.
“Lou is a force. He was on top of every single issue that Whitman-Walker was involved with,” Fenton says. “Particularly in the early years of the AIDS crisis, it was because of the Blade that other mainstream media started covering it more and more. He was so detailed.”
In 2011, Chibbaro told Washingtonian, “AIDS became a main beat for us. We even had a section of the paper called the ‘AIDS Digest.’ We reported news about AIDS that the mainstream press wasn’t focusing on.”
But Chibbaro’s coverage has extended to issues and events outside of D.C. He gets tearful when he recounts his time out in Wyoming covering the trial of the men who killed Matthew Shepard, a college student who was beaten to death in 1998 for being gay. Chibbaro considers it one of the most important stories he’s ever covered.
“We still break a lot of stories that the mainstream media will not have,” Chibbaro says. “But things are much better.”
Chibbaro, a private person, says that most days follow a similar routine. In the old days, he would visit police briefings and the Wilson Building all the time; he does that less often today, but then again so do most reporters. He continues to cover political campaigns and local government.
Chibbaro mostly works from home, a small place in Capitol Hill, and has no plans to stop reporting anytime soon, even if he does a little more of his work nowadays from the phone.
D.C. activist Peter Rosenstein, author of Born This Gay: My Life of Activism, Politics, Travel, and Coming Out, credits Chibbaro with helping to keep the Blade in print, even as countless other newspapers (including this one) in the region and elsewhere stopped making print editions and only exist digitally.
“Lou would go to a hearing for seven hours and attend every single police press conference on violence against gays,” Rosenstein says. “Lou would announce that he was reporting for the Blade [and] it made people have more awareness of what the paper is doing and want to pick up the paper.
“We all still go out and pick up the paper.”