Two decades ago, Jamie McGonnigal sat at a United Nations dinner with actors Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, wondering why he, a Broadway producer and voice actor, had been invited. But by the end of the night, he would sign on to lead a team of 30 American teenagers to rural Namibia, where they would build bathrooms for students and fences to keep animals out of schools.

“Are we teaching?” he’d asked the couple. “No,” they told him. “You’re building bathrooms.”

It was an odd pivot for someone whose career had been built in recording studios and theaters. But McGonnigal said he has always been drawn to the odd pivots, the unexpected ways to be useful. 

That same instinct has McGonnigal, now 50, working to give childhood back to scared kids in Hyattsville, one Squishmallow at a time.

McGonnigal is the president of the PTA at Hyattsville Elementary School (HES), where his son, Malcolm, attends school. And for the past three years, he’s put himself in charge of prizes for the Zombie Run, a huge annual fundraiser for local schools.
This year, McGonnigal pulled in hundreds of games from gaming companies — both card game makers and traditional video game makers like Nintendo, said Amy Parker, a fellow PTA board member. And he persuaded several small startups and businesses to donate hundreds of games. The prizes were distributed as general race day pickups, awards for race placement and as incentives for students and families who hit different fundraising levels. Some years, he’s collected around two thousand dollars’ worth of prizes in donations. McGonnigal reaches out to companies that serve him Instagram ads, asking for donations.

“He’s just like a big teddy bear,” Parker said. “He has a larger stature, … but he’s such a softy. He is so kind. Anyone who really meets him just ends up with a smile on their face.”

She described McGonnigal as integral to the HES community, someone who was connecting different segments of families even before joining the PTA board. “He’s really able to tap into the different needs from the different segments of the community and identify the best resources,” she said. “Really great at building connections.”

McGonnigal thinks about the kids in the community who are scared right now, worried their parents or grandparents might disappear.

“For every moment they’re spending being scared … part of their childhood disappears, and I think that’s the biggest crime right now,” he said. “So anything I can do to make sure they get even five or 10 minutes back of that childhood — that’s a win in my book.”

McGonnigal’s activism is rooted in the same instinct that sent him to Africa nearly two decades ago. When he arrived in Namibia in 2007, he worked with the San people — among the oldest cultures on Earth. There, McGonnigal discovered a community whose written language was gone, whose spoken language was fading, and whose numbers had been rapidly dwindling. McGonnigal said, “Part of building up these schools was so that they could have schools in their community where they could share that language and keep that language alive.”

One night toward the end of his time there, McGonnigal said he and his team set up a projector and showed “The Lion King” on the side of a school. He said the children had never seen a movie before. McGonnigal remembers the children running up to the screen, pointing at the animals they recognized, calling them by their own words. 

“There was just something so magical about it,” he said. It was freezing outside, and by the end of the movie, the Americans stripped down to their underwear, giving their clothes to the kids. 

Returning to New York in 2007 after six months in Africa was a shock, he said. His priorities had shifted. “I realized, OK, I love theater. I love acting. It’s something that fulfills me still. But I need to be using my power for good.”

Throughout his voice acting career, spanning “Pokémon,” “Yu-Gi-Oh!” and “One Piece,” McGonnigal has become known for his activism as much as his anime roles.

Monica Rial, a fellow voice actor and friend, remembers meeting him at a 2002 convention. “He was wearing a political T-shirt,” Rial recollects, “and that was not a time when people made their political views clear.” He would run panels reassuring kids that “high school might suck, but when you get a little bit older, everything’s going to be OK,” she recalls. “He was very nurturing to all of those kids.”

The Namibia experience catalyzed something deeper in McGonnigal. When California’s Proposition 8 threatened marriage equality, McGonnigal founded Take Back Pride — a movement designed to bring protest back into Pride celebrations. The catchphrase was direct: “Wear a thong if you want to wear a thong, but carry a sign while you’re doing it.”

It was activism that brought McGonnigal to D.C. in the first place. In 2010, he was organizing a rally at the White House to fight “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Clinton-era military policy that forbade openly gay, lesbian or bisexual citizens from serving in the military. The night before, he handed out flyers at gay bars. A man approached him: “You’re not from here, are you?” The tell? McGonnigal was carrying “a big gay Metro D.C. map,” he said. The questioner was Sean Carlson, the man who spent the rest of the night handing out flyers with him.

A year later, McGonnigal and Carlson were moving into their first D.C. apartment. By 2013, they were married.

Their son, Malcolm, is not white. “We wanted to make sure we’re living in a place where he is not othered — where he sees people who look like him, because he’s not seeing that at home,” McGonnigal explains. 

The three of them now live in a Sears bungalow in Hyattsville where they can see Carlson’s alma mater, DeMatha Catholic High School, from the front porch.

It’s an unlikely trajectory for someone who spent decades voicing anime characters in Manhattan studios, who sat at U.N. dinners with movie stars and who showed “The Lion King” to children in Namibia who’d never seen a screen. But for McGonnigal, the motif has always been clear.

“My activism right now?” he says. “My activism is making sure that kids can be kids.”

____________________________________

Zaka Hossain is a graduate journalism student at the University of Maryland.