Scan the news stories of the most consequential LGBTQ+ moments of the past three decades and the name Cathy Renna, a publicist who’s been on the frontlines since the late 1990s, repeatedly comes up. A publicity guru who’s worked with towering queer nonprofits including GLAAD and the National LGBTQ Task Force, Renna has been a force in ensuring LGBTQ+ stories make mainstream headlines and are told fairly and accurately.
Archival news footage shows Renna on the ground in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998 speaking at a press conference on behalf of GLAAD in the days following the murder of a gay university student, Matthew Shepard. Five years later, in 2003, she fought to bring awareness to a hate crime that garnered less national attention, the murder of Sakia Gunn, a Black butch lesbian, in Newark, New Jersey.
Humble and always shouting out to those who’ve stood beside her throughout her career, Renna will say she’s “relentless” in pushing intersectional queer stories to the fore, but the truth is she’s one of the best at her job.
“I remember thousands of people filling the streets for Matthew Shepard, but nobody could get on the PATH train to Hoboken and go to Newark for this kid [Gunn] because she was a Black butch lesbian. Like that’s the bottom line,” Renna recalls. “I did the same thing I did for Matt,” she says, crediting members of Gunn’s family with pushing for her story to be told.
“I’ve had the opportunity to be a publicist for the queer community, all of the queer community. That’s my driving force,” Renna adds. “News doesn’t just happen, or the way it’s covered doesn’t just happen. So, you need someone who understands how the media works and to demystify the process for others, and how to create the space to tell stories.”
A native New Yorker, Renna grew up in Queens before moving to Long Island. The daughter of an Italian immigrant father and a first-generation Italian American mother, her family was accepting when she came out in college. To this day, family, friends, food and travel (she spent summers in Italy when she was young) are some of the outlets that help her balance the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ messaging she counters daily at her job as the communications director for the National LGBTQ+ Task Force.
“They call it self-care now, but I have a life. I don’t let this take over my life. I have friends. I have family. I love my family here. I love my family in Italy. [Her wife] Karen’s family and children,” Renna says. “I’m like the best aunt in the world because I’m a little kid at heart. I still play video games. I still like to go to the movies. I collect Pokémon cards.”
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At the Task Force’s annual Creating Change, a multi-day event of community and coalition building rife with panels, parties and inspiring speeches (often from the Task Force’s president, Kierra Johnson), attendees will find that Renna’s role reaches beyond the seamless communications initiatives she and her team create. Always affable and up for a laugh, she’s a connector of people across generations, socio-economic status, experience, abilities and identities. It’s easy to imagine the activist who began volunteering for GLAAD in the early 1990s, spearheading campaigns against hate, also standing in line for an hour when new Pokémon cards are released, as she says she routinely does.
Activism wasn’t always top of mind for Renna. A biology major in college, she attended New York City Pride a few times in the 1980s, but it was another chapter in Renna’s life that included a move to Washington, D.C., to attend medical school at Georgetown University that ignited her activism. Though she realized med school wasn’t ultimately her thing, the move to D.C. was pivotal when she and her girlfriend at the time happened upon a flyer for a panel discussion on lesbian invisibility in the media. They attended the talk, packed with about 150 people for a panel that included Ann Werner, who was the co-chair of the “newly minted GLAAD chapter in Washington, D.C., which was called the GLAAD NCA for National Capital Area,” Renna explains.
Before long, Renna was volunteering with the media watchdog GLAAD, clipping articles out of The Washington Post with scissors and writing letters to the editor.
“Back then, I joke, there were like five of us doing this stuff,” Renna says, laughing.
Illustrating the climate for queer people in the early ’90s, Renna was there for protests against “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and “Basic Instinct” (1992), films with harmful depictions of trans and bisexual identities, respectively. Renna recalls the 1993 March on Washington, where she first met activists from the Task Force, including the towering activist Urvashi Vaid, whose position as communications director Renna now holds.
“This was a very interesting time to get involved in the movement because we were still reeling from the HIV pandemic. AIDS, literally on a weekly basis, you would be at a funeral or a wake,” Renna recalls. “We had a resurgence of [activism] with Queer Nation and ACT UP, but also, groups like GLAAD and the Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign.”
Toward the end of the decade, Renna was deployed to Laramie on behalf of GLAAD in the wake of Shepard’s murder, where she moderated a press conference and helped navigate people through interviews as the nation watched. It was there she also met Shepard’s parents, Judy and Dennis Shepard, who would go on to fight for recognition of diverse victims of hate crimes throughout their lives. To this day, she’s still called to do talk-backs for “The Laramie Project,” Moisés Kaufman’s 2000 play about the events following Shepard’s murder.
“It’s interesting because what I did there is what I’ve done everywhere else in many ways. It’s just that it was magnified countless times in terms of the level of visibility,” she says. “I did what I always did, which is, someone was in trouble, and they needed help.”
After years as the news director with GLAAD, she eventually worked for a publicity company before co-founding Target Cue in 2006.
“I just felt like the community needed a PR firm for the queer community, but one that they could frankly afford for the level of comms work that they needed,” says Renna, who’s supported trans organizations including The GenderCool Project and Gender Spectrum. “I was perfectly placed to start doing what I did at GLAAD, right? But doing it as an entrepreneur. So doing consulting.”
When Covid hit in March 2020, Renna, who had contracted with the Task Force under Executive Director Rea Carey to help with Creating Change and on queering the census and the vote, came on as the interim communications director during the shutdowns. “I hadn’t had a real job in 15 years,” she says, adding that at the end of the year, she was asked to come on full-time.
“I was looking in the mirror and saying, ‘Can I take like next week off or whatever?’” she says.
“I have such a deep love and respect for [Task Force President] Kierra Johnson and her leadership and her approach that our movement really needs that I said ‘yes.’ And that was now five years ago,” Renna adds.
The public relations veteran calls the Task Force her “political home,” one that meets the moment. Early in the pandemic, with the 2020 presidential election on the horizon, Renna worked on the Task Force’s “Queer the Vote” and “Queer the Census” campaigns, ensuring that LGBTQ+ people are counted.
Creating Change was in full swing in Las Vegas in January 2025, the week of Donald Trump’s re-inauguration, when he almost immediately signed the executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Fear and trepidation were in the air at Creating Change, along with the queer joy the gathering fosters.
“To be honest, I was worried. I am worried less about myself because I know that when they come for trans people, they’re coming for all of us, of course, but it was very clear who in our community was in crosshairs,” Renna says. “Literally, the first 48 hours, we were dealing with anti-trans executive orders. … I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach that this was really gonna hurt people that I care about.”
Renna describes herself as “running around like Sonic the Hedgehog” during the multi-day event, but she gleaned hope from a quiet moment watching the crowd at an intimate conversation on the Creator’s Stage in the exhibit hall, where artists and influencers shared their stories.
“If you looked at that crowd, the thing that’s always most striking to me about working with the Task Force is it’s everybody,” she says. “It’s intergenerational, it’s multiracial, it’s multi-gender. And in that way, I felt a little comforted and reassured that people were in it. We were in it together.”
Now, more than 15 months into the second Trump term, Renna emphasizes collaboration and the interconnectedness among social and political movements as well as the work of providing political education, which she says is not always “super visible.”
“In 2025, people felt helpless, and that was partially because people didn’t understand the process, what was happening. Does an executive order mean it’s the law?” she says. “[Political education] happens at state houses, at gatherings we put together with partner organizations. It doesn’t necessarily happen under the bright lights, but it’s really important because it’s helping people understand that no matter their background, their experience, they can all be helpful, can all be a part of the process of fighting back.”
What’s next for Renna and the Task Force? “The foot is on the gas for the November elections, the midterms,” Renna says, adding that there’s hope with recent gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia.
“We have to keep people organized, and organizing, and fighting, and showing up in November. That’s the biggest challenge politically,” Renna says.
