12 LGBTQ+ Nurses You Should Know About

Nurses shape the policies that protect patients from discrimination, and caring well for vulnerable populations takes cultural competence built on evidence, not assumption. The nurses below, listed alphabetically by last name, have advanced care, research, and education for LGBTQ+ people, often without recognition. This is nowhere near a complete list.

1. Ellie

Ellie, a bisexual woman of color, founded the Inclusive Care Project after seeing how little training exists for the specific needs of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC patients. The organization expands access to training for health professionals and works to close health disparities for queer communities and people of color, offering online and corporate courses. Her aim is a safer healthcare system for everyone.

2. Billy Caceres

Billy A. Caceres, PhD, RN, AGPCNP-BC, FAHA, FAAN, is an assistant professor at Columbia University School of Nursing and the Center for Sexual and Gender Minority Health Research. He is the principal investigator on studies of how adverse life experiences affect sleep and heart health in vulnerable adults, including the RESTORE Study on discrimination, sleep, and blood pressure in Black and Latin American LGBTQ+ communities.

3. Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer (Ret.)

Cammermeyer, RN, PhD, joined the Army in 1963 at 19 after her family emigrated from Norway. She volunteered for Vietnam, where she ran the neurosurgical intensive care unit. Forced out when she became pregnant, she later worked in Veterans Affairs hospitals in Washington and lost her place in the Reserves in 1988 after disclosing she was a lesbian during a security clearance interview. She challenged the ruling, won reinstatement in federal court, and saw her story told in the film "Serving in Silence."

4. Bobbi Campbell

Born in 1952, Campbell was a registered nurse at Ralph K. Davies Medical Center and a graduate student at UCSF when he was diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma at 29, early in the AIDS epidemic. Writing in The Sentinel, he became one of the first people to publicly put a face to the disease. He and Baruch Golden wrote some of the first safer-sex guidelines for gay men, and he pushed people with AIDS to advocate for themselves until his death on August 15, 1984, about three and a half years after his diagnosis.

5. Kevin Edelen

Kevin Edelen, MS, APRN, FNP-C, is a family nurse practitioner with FOLX Health, which provides gender-affirming care, and an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University. His work centers on primary care, substance misuse, and LGBTQIA+ patients. His team delivers virtual primary, preventive, and sexual health care across 24 states, covering fertility, hormone replacement therapy and gender consultations, nutrition, smoking cessation, and STI testing.

6. Clare Madrigal

Clare Madrigal, BSN, RN, is a nurse educator focused on building LGBTQ+ inclusion across healthcare. Through ReachEducation.gay (Rainbow Education and Consulting for Health), she works to raise the visibility of LGBTQ+ patients and the gaps in cultural understanding that lead to discrimination and weaker care.

7. Florence Nightingale

During the Crimean War, Nightingale founded modern nursing education and used statistics to argue for reform, including a groundbreaking statistical diagram. Her legacy is also contested: critics point to the elitism and racism in her views, including their effect on Indigenous children in Canada and New Zealand. Though she never married and was deeply religious, historians have speculated she may have been a lesbian, citing her own writings about sharing a bed with other women.

8. Anthony Pho

Anthony Pho, PhD, MPH, ANP-C, is an adult nurse practitioner and a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. He began as an ER nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital, holds an adjunct position at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, and practices at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. At Weill Cornell Medicine he built and taught an LGBTQ+ curriculum for medical residents, and he serves on the executive committee of the LGBT Health Workforce Conference.

9. Em Rabelais

Em Rabelais, PhD, MBE, MS, MA, RN, is an assistant professor of human development nursing science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and describes themselves as a white, disabled, queer, agender health ethicist. Rabelais argues that real reform cannot come from within existing structures and calls for those who hold power in nursing to cede it. Rabelais has published 10 papers and earned several honors.

10. Lillian Wald

Wald founded community nursing in the U.S. and was an early champion of school nurses. She never married and, in her own correspondence, described deep affection for at least two close companions. She fought for women's rights and racial integration and helped establish the NAACP. After her death on September 1, 1940, some 2,000 people gathered at Carnegie Hall to honor her.

11. Rachel Walker

Rachel Walker, PhD, RN, FAAN, describes themselves as a queer nurse inventor working at the intersection of community and biotech, and is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The first nurse named an Invention Ambassador by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Walker brings a background in oncology nursing, rural emergency response, patient navigation, and disaster relief. In 2020 Walker received the Global Hero Award from the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association Nursing Section.

12. Bertha Wright

Born in San Francisco in 1840, Wright was a public health nurse and one of the first school nurses in Alameda County. Seeing a desperate need for infant care, she co-founded the Baby Hospital, later renamed UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland. A determined health activist and instructor of postgraduate nursing students at UC Berkeley, she died on May 6, 1971, and is buried beside her partner, Mabel Weed, in Palo Alto, California.