Don Lemon

Don Lemon
CNN anchorman

With the publication last May of his unflinching memoir, Transparent, Emmy-winning CNN news anchor Don Lemon came out to the world at large. In a interview with The New York Times, he noted, “I guess this makes me a double minority now.”

Born in Louisiana, Lemon made his first on-air inroads as a co-anchor on Chicago’s NBC5 News and as a correspondent for The Today Show and The NBC Nightly News. Joining CNN as a reporter six years ago, he’s gone on to cover the 2008 presidential election (during which he was pushed into a golf cart by Marcus Bachmann) and the accusations of child molestation against Bishop Eddie Long (revealing he had been molested as a child in the process) and hosted a panel on transgender representations on The Joy Behar Show.

Currently a network correspondent and weekend anchor for CNN Newsroom, Lemon, 45, has won the Edward R. Murrow Award for covering the D.C. sniper’s capture and local Emmys for reports on Craigslist, Chicago real estate and Africa’s AIDS epidemic. In 2009, he made Ebony’s 150 Most Influential African-Americans list.