“He told me that he loved me that night before he passed away,” he said. They never reconciled, said Gaynor, but they did have that most important conversation in his final hours. Gaynor graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, and days before starting studying for his graduate degree at Columbia School of Journalism, his father died. “Even though they were only rejecting a part of me, because it was so much a part, it was the core of who I was, I felt devastated, and we never talked about it ever again. And I remember being heartbroken because there was nothing worse than the people who created you and reared you, rejecting you,” he said. So when he was 19, and had fallen in love with another man, his father confronted him about being gay. “The black church is deeply, deeply entrenched in the Black community, and so many of its views of homosexuality comes from the Black church and and its interpretation of the Bible.” “I grew up in the Black church, I sang in the choir, I was on the usher board,” he said. His mother is a retired NYPD officer and his dad worked as a conductor on the New York City subway, in addition to being a minister. Gaynor grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, known locally as “Bed-Stuy,” but in his neighborhood, “They called it Bed-Stuy, Do or Die,” he said. “‘Grio’ means storyteller in West Africa and so much of our mission is about telling our stories because traditionally mainstream media outlets did not tell our stories accurately or they didn't tell our stories at all.” At theGrio, we decided to to double-down on our mission to amplify the voices of Black and brown people and to tell their stories and tell them accurately.
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“Being a black journalist, especially in 2020, was very disheartening because there's so much death and so much negative things happening to the community, things happening within the community. “Then just a few months after that, we had the murder of George Floyd, then the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Arbery, and they were back to back,” he recalled. Gaynor directed theGrio’s coverage of the death toll, from the famous to everyday people, young and old.
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We didn't even really have a full understanding of what Covid was, how you contracted Covid,” he said.
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And at that time especially, we were seeing that predominantly Black and brown people were dying, at disproportionate rates, of Covid.
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“The world is shutting down and people are dying. Gaynor, 32, began his tenure as manager of theGrio in the days immediately before Covid-19 sparked lockdowns. Gerren Keith Gaynor hosts the Dear Culture Podcast. Those of us who identify as LGBTQ+, especially the Black and brown, we're still navigating through a lot of trauma that we've experienced throughout our childhood, through our adulthood, despite what we may have been able to achieve in our individual careers.” “It means everything to me to be authentic and to use my role to amplify the community, because it brings healing to the community and also helps bring healing to myself. “I just try my best to live my life authentically as I am, especially as a Black, queer man working in media,” Gaynor said. He spoke by phone from Brooklyn about his experience coming out and navigating a new role in journalism during the pandemic.
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He has served as an editor for Fox News, BET, and VIBE magazine. Being a millennial speaking to other millennials, he has perfected the way to communicate and relate to his audience. Gerren Keith Gaynor: The managing editor at theGrio and host of the Dear Culture Podcast, Gaynor speaks to his unique experiences growing up as a gay Black man and his journey of learning to live freely within his true self in his journalism and commentator/host career.