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GLSEN Gets a New Boss
You could say GLSEN is getting a new principal. On Wednesday the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network announced that Eliza Byard will become its new executive director, replacing founder and longtime executive director Kevin Jennings. Byard, who takes the reins on November 1, spoke to The Advocate about the task ahead for LGBT students and all of us who want to see them thrive.
An Advocate.com exclusive posted October 15, 2008
GLSEN Gets a New Boss
Dr. Eliza Byard

You could say GLSEN is getting a new principal.

On Wednesday the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network announced that Eliza Byard will become its new executive director, replacing founder and longtime executive director Kevin Jennings. Byard, who takes the reins on November 1, spoke to The Advocate about the task ahead for LGBT students and all of us who want to see them thrive.

Any discussion of GLSEN has to begin with Jennings, whose face has been synonymous with the organization he founded. Byard has been Jennings’s deputy since 2001, yet a GLSEN without Jennings may take a bit of getting used to.

“GLSEN was the brainchild of a very visionary, powerful individual,” Byard said. “Our history to date has been very much intertwined with his, and I think that makes sense. [Now] we’re at a stage in the organization’s growth where it’s ready to be an institution that has many different faces. That’s been forced upon us by Kevin’s decision to leave, but it’s also the next right step for the institution as a whole.”

Byard threw her hat in the ring for the executive director job but “insisted” on a national search, according to a statement by Bob Chase, GLSEN national board chair. Six months later, Byard got the job by unanimous vote.

“I was pretty overwhelmed by the warmth and enthusiasm of the response,” she said. “It meant the world to me.”

While Jennings came to GLSEN directly from the classroom, Byard got her start as a producer working in film and TV.

“I was working at channel 13 [the PBS flagship in New York] when I was 13,” Byard said, not kidding. She even interned as a teen with journalist’s journalist Bill Moyers. “I always had the opportunity to work on things that really matter to me. Mentors like [Moyers] really gave me a sense of the larger purpose of the work.”

Byard and Jennings first crossed paths in 1995, when both joined the creative team for the 1996 documentary Out of the Past, which interweaves the story of the struggle to create a GSA in Salt Lake City with pivotal chapters of LGBT history. Byard cowrote, coproduced, and coedited the film; it won the audience award at Sundance and later aired on PBS.

Education fascinated her, for a couple of reasons.

“One, I was studying U.S. history,” she said. (She would go on to earn a Ph.D.) “Two, I did a project for Frontline [in 1994] called School Colors that was about multiculturalism in public education 40 years after Brown v. Board of Education. From my own experience and from the people I was around making that film, I’ve always had a clear sense that education and school experience is crucial as one of the few shared experiences that Americans have.”

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Stockwell is the editor at large for The Advocate.

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