April 20: The Best Little Boy in the World

Andrew Tobias, treasurer of the Democratic National Committee since 1999 and author of the pseudonymous 1973 book about coming out as a gay person, The Best Little Boy in the World, was born in New York on this date in 1947. A graduate of Harvard Business School, he began writing best-selling books about finance and business in the early 1970s, and was also a columnist in Esquire, Playboy, New York, and Time. Tobias has especially targeted anti-tax advocacy and the insurance industry for polarizing the U.S. between the haves and have-nots. In 1997, he co-hosted Beyond Wall Street, an eight-part PBS documentary. Only two years earlier, in a speech at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention, he came out as author of The Best Little Boy in the World. In 1998, he published a sequel, The Best Little Boy Grows Up. Since coming out, Tobias has been active in GLBTQ advocacy work; in 2005, he served as Grand Marshal of New York’s LGBT Pride parade. To see him advocating for Democratic Party economic policies at the Democratic National Convention in 2012, look below.

“My IQ and my net worth are the two numbers I try to keep to myself, both being substantially lower than I’d like.” —Andrew Tobias