Chibbaro first came to Washington, D.C. in 1971 while a student a SUNY Brockport; he returned in 1975 to work and to earn a graduate degree in broadcast journalism.
While his mother was initially upset and his father worried about the prospects for his career if anyone found out that he was gay, his parents ultimately accepted his sexual orientation.
[1] In 1978, two years after he started volunteering at the Blade, he became self-employed as the publisher of a public utility newsletter; it was at that time that he dropped the use of the pseudonym in favor of using his real name.
[1] His decision to use his real name was spurred by a particularly gruesome event that he reported on in which 9 men died in a fire in a rundown adult theater that drove home to him the dangers of living a secret life.
[1] During his time at the Blade, he covered such wide-ranging stories as the AIDS epidemic; political protests; murders, including the 1976 murder of one of the congressional staff members of Rep. Morris Udall at a gay cruising area; congressional members who were hiring male prostitutes; federal efforts targeting gay men for dismissal from their government jobs; to a gay ex-Marine who foiled an assassination attempt on the life of President Gerald Ford by grabbing the would-be assassins gun and deflecting the shot.