GLAAD appoints Nick Adams as Director of Transgender Media

LOS ANGELES, CA – GLAAD, the nation’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) media advocacy organization, today announced Nick Adams as Director of Programs, Transgender Media.

In that role, Adams will helm GLAAD’s longstanding work to increase the quantity and quality of transgender representation in news, entertainment, and digital media.

“Improving the way transgender people are portrayed in entertainment media and in the news is critical to accelerating acceptance,” said GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis. “As someone who has been doing this work for over fifteen years, Nick’s expertise and media acumen are unmatched. His work to bring trans-inclusive plotlines and stories to networks and newsrooms has already changed the face of inclusive representation.”

Adams, who previously served as GLAAD’s Director of Communications & Special Projects, has been an integral member of the GLAAD staff since 1998 and has significantly contributed to the organization’s ongoing commitment to transgender visibility. In 1998 he created the transgender section of GLAAD's Media Reference Guide, which included best practices for reporting on the transgender community – standards that the Associated Press and The New York Times subsequently used to improve their own style guides. He has worked with dozens of television shows to help them create more realistic, multi-dimensional transgender characters, including: Degrassi which won a Peabody Award for its inclusion of a transgender teen; Glee, which worked with Adams to recruit a 200-person transgender choir; and The Bold and the Beautiful, which currently has the only series-regular transgender character on scripted broadcast and cable television. Adams has conducted trainings on how to fairly and accurately portray transgender people to high-level executives at NBC, FOX, CBS, E!, Bravo, Oxygen, and other networks.

In 1999, Adams co-founded FTM Alliance of Los Angeles, a community-based organization dedicated to empowering the female-to-male transgender community, and for the past five years he has served on the board of Transforming Family, an organization for families with transgender and gender non-conforming children.

Adams will be based in Los Angeles.