William Thorsell, ’66 BA, ’71 MA, ’95 LLD (Honorary)

While it’s no one’s business what your sexual preferences are, the fact that Thorsell has been openly gay for most of his life is interesting only because, as editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail in Toronto for over 10 years, he was able to influence public opinion and help make others comfortable with their own sexual orientation.

“I think that when I was appointed editor there,” says Thorsell, “it gave permission to a lot of other editors to go further in covering gay issues and allowed gay writers to write in to the papers and to say things that were somewhat shocking at the time. I didn’t have to tell them that; they just took the cue — that I was in that chair — and that created a landscape of permissions and orders that were broader simply because of [my] identity.”

“I remember writing an article for the University of Alberta alumni back in the early ’70s called ’The Trials of the Golden Boy,’ Thorsell said in an interview in fab magazine. “I wrote that if you were a blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian guy like me, who won all the scholarships and was the president of the school and drifted through university pretty easily, you can pay a pretty high price for it by being a complete bore and not really learning very much about how the world works because it’s all too easy for you. I was actually writing that piece as an appreciation for the fact that [from] high school on, I was always pushed to the side a little bit — in my own head. I always knew I was going to be different and I was never going to go down that line and be the lawyer and play with my kids and all that. And so I think that was a gift for me. Because otherwise I would have been that repressed, horrible, bright-blue-eyed-boy achiever without the gift of the edge. And the gift of the edge in my case was to be gay.”

Thorsell spent 25 years in newspaper journalism, beginning his career as associate editor at the Edmonton Journal after taking two degrees from Princeton where he was also an assistant dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He also served as executive officer of the U of A Senate. In 2000, Thorsell left the Globe to become CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, seeing it through its recent renovations to become the showplace it is while making Thorsell an antique dealer of epic proportions.