Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is the first male, as well as the first openly gay individual, to serve as White House Social Secretary. Today's Out Spotlight is Jeremy Bernard.

Jeremy Bernard was born on November 4, 1961 to Herschel and Loretta (Utterback)Bernard. He grew up in San Antonio as the son of a lawyer, who did civil rights work and raised money for the presidential campaigns of Robert F. and Edward M. Kennedy. As a young man Bernard headed east to Hunter College in New York but never graduated and then moved to Los Angeles where he waited tables and met David Mixner, a gay rights leader who soon became his mentor and helped him raise money for Bill Clinton’s first presidential run.

In the 1990s, Mr. Bernard went to work for Marc Nathanson, a billionaire cable-television executive. “Jeremy is very social,” Nathanson told The Daily Beast. “There was never a party he did not like to go to.”

He served as a board member of A.N.G.L.E. (Access Now for Gay & Lesbian Equality) and the National Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund. He was also a member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's LGBT Advisory Committee, the Los Angeles Police LGBT Advisory Committee and the Los Angeles Mayor's LGBT Advisory Committee.

Bernard was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve on the President's Advisory Committee on the Arts for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

A prominent Democratic fundraiser and gay rights advocate who served for eight years on the Democratic National Committee. By 2007 he and Rufus Gifford, his partner at the time, began bundling what would be tens of millions of dollars for candidate Obama through their consulting firm, B & G Associates. After the election he was rewarded with the job of White House liaison to the National Endowment of the Humanities, where his lack of a college degree would seem to have posed a problem.

“I thought it might, and I was proven totally wrong,” said Jim Leach, the endowment’s chairman. Instead, Bernard “would give these reports, and he would have these somewhat stolid academics in the palm of his hand with cute observations.”

After two years at the NEA he left to go help the American ambassador to France and a friend from Los Angeles, Charles H. Rivkin, dial up the wattage at embassy soirees in Paris. He had barely settled in before he was summoned back to Washington to tackle parties at the White House. Bernard was appointed to the position of White House Social Secretary by President Barack Obama on February 25, 2011. He is the first male, as well as the first openly gay individual, to serve as White House Social Secretary.

By the time he took the position in the White House, he and Gifford, who served as the finance director for the 2012 Obama campaign, had ended their relationship.