Channing Joseph

Channing Gerard Joseph (he/him or she/her) is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and professor whose pioneering discovery of William Dorsey Swann—the formerly enslaved American who became the world’s first drag queen—has redefined how we understand U.S. history. A leading expert on race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. past, Joseph is internationally recognized for revealing how queer culture has been central to shaping American identity.

In 2022, TED named Joseph a TED Fellow—one of 20 global “visionaries” sparking “future-shaping change around the world.” His TED Talk, “How Black Queer Culture Shaped History,” has drawn more than 1.5 million viewers worldwide, establishing him as a major commentator with global reach.

A frequent keynote and commencement speaker, Joseph has lectured at the Smithsonian, Columbia University, Dartmouth, UC–Berkeley, Humboldt University–Berlin, and King’s College–London, among others. He is a trusted advisor to universities, cultural institutions, and corporations, and a frequent analyst on platforms such as CBS Mornings, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, the BBC, NBC, CBC, and beyond.

A contributing writer to The Nation, his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and dozens of others. He is a former staff journalist at The New York Times and the Associated Press, he edited 25 Pulitzer winners and shaped stories that won Polk and Pulitzer Prizes. Joseph made history as the first African-American editor-in-chief of San Francisco Weekly.

His pathbreaking research and reporting have garnered some of the most prestigious honors in journalism and letters, including the 2021 Berlin Prize and the 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. His investigations—featured in magazine cover stories and on the front page of The New York Times—have influenced public policy, ignited national conversations, gone viral globally, and galvanized the U.S. media’s reckoning with race and justice. His work inspired the Washington, D.C., Council to pass landmark legislation commemorating William Dorsey Swann and rededicating D.C.’s Swann Street in his honor.

Joseph’s career spans four continents—covering politics, culture, and human rights across the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Asia. He was the first journalist to break the story of WikiLeaks’ 2007 release of classified U.S. military documents on Afghanistan, and his acclaimed reporting on Japan’s epidemic of extreme agoraphobia earned him a fellowship from the International Center for Journalists in 2016.

Born in a family of New Orleans jazz musicians, Joseph is a proud descendant of the enslaved people who built America and gave it soul. As a reminder of his roots, he displays a record on his bookshelf of an 1843 auction at which his 5th-great-grandfather purchased the freedom of three sons.

Growing up as a young queer boy in Louisiana, Joseph rarely saw his experience reflected in the stories he was taught. Today, his mission is to uncover the lost histories of Black queer pioneers — and to ensure that future generations of LGBTQIA+ people can see themselves in the past.

Joseph is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Columbia Journalism School. In his spare time, he enjoys sci-fi movies, roller coasters, acrobatics, and creating Afro-futurist art.