Individual | Inducted 2024
Lori Lightfoot, who served as Mayor of Chicago from 2019 to 2023, is the first out LGBTQ+ mayor in the city’s history, making Chicago the first (and as of this induction, still the only) of the United States’ three largest cities to boast an out LGBT chief executive. She is also the first out lesbian Black woman to serve as mayor of a major American city.
Lightfoot’s term in the Mayor’s Office was preceded by decades of support and leadership. In the early 1990s, as a young lawyer, she helped to write the first Cook County Human Rights Ordinance as a pro bono project at the law firm of Mayer Brown and Platt. She was an early supporter of Lambda Legal’s Midwest Office, which has been at the center of every legal or legislative battle over LGBT rights, and was an early supporter of the Victory Fund when it first came to Chicago in the 1990s. She currently serves on the national board of the Victory Fund.
Lightfoot’s accomplishments as Mayor on behalf of Chicago’s LGBT community were significant in spite of multiple challenges. Her administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the roll-out of vaccines centered the most vulnerable in our city, including the LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS communities. Her administration’s accomplishments impacting the LGBT community also include investing $5 million in youth homelessness prevention and services with a focus on LGBTQ+ youth; convening a working group to review and revise policies on Chicago Police Department interactions with the transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming communities and expanding the number of CPD liaisons to the LGBTQ+ community; and officially dedicating the long-awaited AIDS Garden Chicago on the site of the former Belmont Rocks beach in Lincoln Park on June 2, 2022, a year after she broke ground on the project. “As we memorialize those we’ve lost to the HIV epidemic and inspire those who continue to fight the disease, it has never been more important to immortalize Belmont Rocks’ legacy as a safe space where people could gather, support one another and be their full selves,” Lightfoot said at the AIDS Garden’s 2022 dedication. I hope that residents and visitors alike will continue gathering here at our city’s newest symbol of liberation, individuality, and hope.”