LGBTQ+ Planned Gift Memorializes Fond Memories

Alumnus Michael Schmidt found a home at GW and met his future partner, who died in 2010. His $1 million planned gift to support the LGBTQ+ campus community honors the legacy of his GW experience.

Michael Schmidt, BA ’78, MBA ’85, is helping support the university’s LGBTQ+ community through a $1 million planned gift to fund a student scholarship and benefit the LGBTQIA Resource Center, which celebrates and supports sexual and gender diversity. The Michael R. Schmidt and Bruce C. Craig Fund that his gift will establish is named after Schmidt’s late partner Bruce Craig, BA ’78, MA ’84, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010.

“GW gave me my adult life,” Schmidt said. “It gave me my partner. I thought it would be a perfect legacy to leave a gift in both our names that we could share with today’s robust, forward-looking students.”

Hailing from suburban Connecticut, Schmidt came to GW in 1974 on a scholarship and was immediately taken by the Washington, D.C., scene and campus life. “GW was a welcoming place,” Schmidt said. “I found all these people who were dear to me and, for the first time, I found a community where I could express myself.”

Schmidt originally planned to study political science in the heart of the nation’s capital. But as an aspiring actor, he soon switched to drama—and learned two important lessons about theatre. “First, acting is really hard,” he laughed. “And second, I was no good at it.” Schmidt switched his major once more to speech-language pathology and audiology. He returned to Foggy Bottom to earn his MBA.

“GW gave me my adult life. It gave me my partner. I thought it would be a perfect legacy to leave a gift in both our names that we could share with today’s robust, forward-looking students.”
— Michael Schmidt

Schmidt joined and eventually led the Gay People’s Alliance, the precursor to today’s student-run Allied in Pride organization. The group helped him finally feel comfortable expressing himself as the person he wanted to be. While posting signs for a meeting, Schmidt met his future-partner Craig in a Marvin Center elevator. Craig had walked around the block seven times, Schmidt recalled, before mustering the courage to attend the Gay People’s Alliance meeting. “I was the first openly gay person he ever met,” he said. The pair bonded during a film studies class, watching Casablanca at the Circle Theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue. They began dating soon after, and moved into an Adams Morgan apartment after graduation.

Before meeting Craig, “I had the feeling that I wasn’t capable of loving another person,” Schmidt said. But throughout their 32-year relationship, Schmidt discovered, “that I could come to love someone more than I even loved myself.”

A retired advertising executive for The Washington Post, Schmidt has kept his ties with GW and hopes that his scholarship gift to support a student involved in GW’s LGBTQ+ community will help future students also find a family on campus. When speaking to the students at the LGBTQIA Center last year, Schmidt sympathized with their ongoing struggle against stigmatization, even as he cheered the advances made since his years at Foggy Bottom.

“I was amazed to learn that it has gotten to a level where gender identity has become almost an everyday part of the university, which is not something that was part of life when I was there,” he said. Most impressive, Schmidt said, was the passion and optimism he saw among today’s students. “They have a real zest for the future, “he said. “In some ways, they remind me of me.”

Main photo: Alumnus Michael Schmidt (center) with students from the LGBTQIA Resource Center