WRITER Jamie James died in Indonesia on February 9, 2020, at the age of 68. His most recent nonfiction books were Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri (2019), The Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the Last Age of the Exotic (2016), and Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage (2011). He also wrote two novels, Andrew & Joey: A Tale of Bali and The Java Man. The 2014 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, James contributed criticism, travel reportage, and essays to many publications including Harper’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Atlantic, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times, among other publications.

IN KEEPING WITH our annual custom, we remember some of the LGBT activists, writers, performers, educators, and artists who made a difference in their lives and who died last year from a range of causes, including the Covid-19 pandemic. All dates are in 2020 unless otherwise indicated.

With the publication of Faggots in 1978, Larry Kramer became a proudly, defiantly gay writer, but paradoxically through a sweepingly satirical indictment of early gay liberation. In its palpable anger, it landed better initially with mainstream critics of the gay community than with gay activists.

FOUR-TIME Tony-Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally (1938–2020) died on March 24th at his winter home in Sarasota, Florida, an early casualty of Covid-19. His death followed a stream of recent honors …

WIDELY acknowledged as the cofounder, with Del Martin, of the first lesbian organization in the U.S., the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Phyllis Lyon died of natural causes in San Francisco on April 9, 2020, at the age of 95. …

AS WE DO every year at this time, we remember some of the LGBT activists, writers, performers, educators, and artists who made a difference and who passed away over the past year. Their lifespans ranged from 24 to 87 years. Unless otherwise indicated, all dates are in 2019.

DONALD CRIMP was an AIDS activist, an art critic, a critical thinker, a prolific writer with an expertise on Andy Warhol, and so much more.

DONALD BOISVERT (1951–2019) was a queer academic, scholar, theologian, theorist, Anglican priest, activist and revolutionary, but I will remember him best as the sublime friend that he was.

Commented Richard Schneider: “Alistair was a wonderful writer and an amazingly quick study when breaking into a new field or genre. His interests ranged far and wide, and he soon branched off from workplace issues to LGBT rights, popular culture, history and biography, gay erotica, and so on.”