[7] France published his first pieces of reporting in Gay Community News in the early 1980s, and soon was assistant editor at the New York Native and contributor to the Village Voice.

[4] After a short stint at the New York Post, from which he was fired for being gay,[9] he moved to Central America to work as a war correspondent covering the region's multiple crises in the mid-80s for Religion News Service and others.

[13] In June 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, Queerty named him among the fifty heroes "leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people".

[14][15] France, who covered the Catholic sexual abuse scandal in the United States for Newsweek, turned his work into a well-reviewed and comprehensive history of the issue in the American church.

Written with former Governor of New Jersey Jim McGreevey, the book was a New York Times best seller, debuting at #3 in nonfiction hardcover sales and #1 in biography.

Richard Canning described the book as "richly suggestive but also carefully objective" in Literary Review: "[France] readily bridges the chasm between the two types of AIDS storyline to have emerged to date: the epidemiological one, which focuses on disease spread, populations, and political and institutional responses, and the biomedical one, which tells of individual bodily decline, death, grief and a legacy of loss.

"[20] The Sunday Times wrote: "Powerful...This superbly written chronicle will stand as a towering work in its field, the best book on the pre-treatment years of the epidemic since Randy Shilts's And The Band Played On...

In October 2017, trans activist Tourmaline alleged David France had relied on her labor to create The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson.

[48] The Advocate article confirmed that French had been exposed to Tourmaline's archival research through a 2015 exhibition, which included footage of Marsha P. Johnson that had never before been shown to the public.

Janet Mock later described French's claims that he "didn't learn anything" from Tourmaline's years of archival research on Johnson as "difficult to believe" in an article for Allure magazine.

It follows the work of activists rescuing survivors of torture in the anti-gay pogroms of Chechnya, and features footage that was shot in secret, using hidden cameras, cell phones, GoPros, and handycams.

This masterful documentary from David France weaves high-stakes storytelling and investigative reporting to expose the ongoing situation, resulting in an unforgettable film.