Gloria Casarez, Philadelphia's First LGBT Affairs Director

Gloria Casarez was born in Philadelphia in nineteen seventy-one, and she spent her adult life building the political and institutional infrastructure that the city's most marginalized communities had long been denied. She began as a street-level activist focused on economic justice, welfare rights, and affordable housing in Latino neighborhoods. She then led the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative, developing programs serving men of color and transgender people that were recognized nationally as models.

Mayor Michael Nutter appointed her Philadelphia's first director of LGBT Affairs, an office she held until her death from cancer in twenty fourteen at age forty-two. Under her leadership, Philadelphia adopted what were then the broadest municipal protections for LGBT people in the nation. The historical marker placed at City Hall near the spot of her memorial service recognizes a Latina lesbian who built power quietly, through policy and coalition, in a city that now honors her name on its streets.