John L. Quinlan Bio
Updated January 2009

John Quinlan is a Madison, Wisconsin-based journalist, nonprofit development consultant, civil rights activist, media reform advocate, gay community leader, and radio show host. He grew up as the son of a teacher and United Methodist pastor in small communities all over Wisconsin, and has lived in Madison since 1978. His travels have taken him to 48 states and 13 countries in Europe and South Asia. In January 2008, he was the recipient of the city of Madison's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2008 Humanitarian Award, in recognition for 30 years of advocacy on behalf of civil rights and social justice in the greater Madison community and beyond.

Since 2005, John has been the host and executive producer of an award-winning public affairs radio show called Forward Forum (www.forwardforum.net), where he has interviewed local and national/international guests involved with politics, community organizing, civil rights, media reform, and the arts.

John has held a number of important leadership positions in the greater Madison community, as both executive director and board president, in the realms of affordable housing advocacy and civil rights, including having served as the director of the Tenant Resource Center and OutReach (Madison's LGBT community center). As an advocate for fair housing and equal opportunity, he helped to draft and pass several pieces of local legislation, and has also advocated for legislative change at the state and federal levels. In early 2007, he directed an extensive series of forums on community responses to hate crimes, under the auspices of the Wisconsin Center for Pluralism. As a gay community leader, he has been a leader in efforts that resulted in the reversal of the local Big Brothers/Sisters chapter's exclusionary policies toward gays, the creation of an 8,000 person civil rights march and four days of associated events in 1989, and has been instrumental to ongoing advocacy efforts promoting cultural competency toward LGBT youth and children in LGBT families in the Madison schools.

John has also served in a leadership position on more than a dozen community groups, including past service as the board president of the Fair Housing Council, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission housing committee, chair of the Gay and Lesbian Visibility Alliance, vice chair of the civil rights coalition Communities United, co-chair of the Coalition for a United Dane County, trustee of the American Civil Liberties Union of WI, president of the Wisconsin Community Fund, and co-chair of the city of Madison's Study Circles on Race Program. John has also taken an active role in electoral politics at all levels of government, including being an important advisor throughout the early career of U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, an early supporter of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, and service as the Northern Wisconsin Media Director for the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign (during which time he coordinated preparations for the visits of both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton).

He currently serves as the 2009 president of the United Nations Association USA-Dane County, as a steering committee member of the Midwest Social Forum, was a recent past board representative on Madison's Northside Planning Council, and is active in the 500 member Downtown Madison Rotary, including recent service as Public Relations Chair. In May of 2009, he began a three-year-term as a commissioner on the Madison Equal Opportunities Commision. He is leading efforts to promote Madison-based support for a Selma, Alabama-based oral history project, which would also serve as a means of educating Madison area youth and adults about the ongoing legacy of the civil rights struggle.

John has also pursued a parallel career as a journalist and public relations specialist, and has contributed actively to the Wisconsin LGBT and ethnic minority press, and as a radio show reporter, host and producer. Working in various capacities, he has helped to place hundreds of print and broadcast stories for various civic groups and social justice organizations locally and nationally. In the late 1990s, he served as the first managing editor of the nation's first gay and lesbian parenting magazine, the Los Angeles-based, Alternative Family Magazine. In addition to his radio show, his work life includes cultural competency, and nonprofit and communications-related consulting work, under the auspices of his consulting firm, Q Solutions, LLC. This includes conducting workplace trainings on equal opportunity issues, public speaking engagements, organizational strategic planning, events coordination, and video production. He has been a local leader in bridging understandings between those rooted in traditional media, and those seeking to harness the full potential of New Media, and has begun to organize a community-wide forum on this topic. Last year, he returned to studies in history and communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison-an experience he's enjoying immensely.

In addition to the 2008 King award, John has received several recognitions for his contributions to the community, including Wisconsin Fair Housing Advocate of the Year (1988) from the federal department of Housing and Urban Development and the state of Wisconsin Equal Rights Division; Man of the Year 1993, from OutReach; the 1995 Stonewall Award from Milwaukee Pride; and the Sally Sunde 2002 Award for Social Justice, from Community Shares of Wisconsin.

On the occasion of this last award, John Nichols, associate editor of Madison's Capital Times newspaper, and contributing editor to the Nation, wrote, "Quinlan's wide-ranging activism marks him as the sort of big-picture leader who understands the need to cross boundaries of race, class, gender, and personal experience and circumstance to achieve change. Quinlan's long experience working for so many important causes has made him not just a wise and good presence. It has made him a necessary player in our community, our region and beyond, as Community Shares of Wisconsin has rightly recognized."