As is our custom, we pay our respects—belatedly this year—to some of the prominent writers, artists, and activists from the GLBT community who left us during the past year.
Mercier Philip “Merce” Cunningham, one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th century, died of natural causes on July 26, 2009, in Manhattan, at age 90. Until he turned seventy, he appeared in every performance given by his dance company, which gave its first performance in 1953. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company reached international fame on tour in Europe in 1964. His most revolutionary achievement, noted the New York Times obit, was “to have dance and music created independently of each other,” performed at the same time yet prepared separately, a feat accomplished with John Cage, his partner in both public and private life until Cage’s death in 1992. Their intimate life, while an open secret, was not officially revealed until 1989. Born in Centralia, Washington, Cunningham’s experiences with nature influenced several of his dances, as did his interest in zoology and anthropology. Cunningham owed much to the I Ching, as well as Zen Buddhism, cards, and dice, as he often relied on chance rather than narrative or other factors, to determine the number of dancers used, the parts of their bodies that would be in play, and so on. Among the many awards he won in his long life were the Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.
Mary Daly, theologian and self-described radical lesbian feminist, died at age 81 on January 3, 2010, in western Massachusetts, following a period of declining health. She had taught theology and feminist ethics at Boston College for over thirty years, and later she described herself as post-Christian. Controversy arose over her policy of restricting enrollment in some women’s studies classes to women only, a policy that led to her early retirement from B.C. in 1999. She was one of the first women in this country to train as a Roman Catholic theologian. Because the Catholic educational system barred women from earning graduate degrees in philosophy, Daly went to the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, where she earned post-doctoral degrees in philosophy and theology. She published prolifically, and made news with her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), which highlighted her views on the Catholic Church’s oppression of women over the centuries. Her last book was Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big (2006), whose topics include ecofeminism, the patriarchy, and feminist theory. She both participated in and shaped the feminist movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s.
E. Lynn Harris, barrier-shattering writer of popular fiction, died at age 54 on July 23, 2009, in Los Angeles, while on a tour for his latest book, Basketball Jones (2009). L.A. Times book reviewer Paula L. Woods is quoted as saying that he “broke barriers in popular fiction by writing of gay black characters in a time when those stories where not visible to most Americans and certainly not to most African-Americans.” Invisible Life (1991), his first novel, was self-published, and he became legendary for leaving copies in beauty salons with a note inserted asking readers to request that their local bookstores stock it. All 5,000 copies of that book sold. Harris is credited with bringing the concept of the “down low” into mainstream conversation. Born in Flint, Michigan, he received a journalism degree from the University of Arkansas, where he was the first black male cheerleader for the college’s football team. As a writer, he was noted for his generosity toward his fans and emerging African-American male novelists. His last novel, Mama Dearest [reviewed in this issue], was published shortly after his death.
Robert Hilferty, writer, activist, filmmaker, and a frequent contributor to this magazine as well as to The New York Times, The Village Voice, Opera News, and others, died by his own hand on July 24, 2009, at age 49, in Manhattan. He had been suffering from complications following a serious head injury incurred earlier in the year. Active in the 1980’s in ACT-UP, his 1989 film Stop the Church, which documented the planning and execution of the disruption of a service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan by ACT-UP in 1989, was denounced by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York but eventually aired on PBS. Born in New Jersey, he was a graduate of Princeton and had a large circle of friends, who knew him as a bon vivant. He is survived by his partner of sixteen years, Fabio Toblini.
James Hoover, one-time publisher of Boston’s weekly GLBT newspaper, Bay Windows, died of cancer on March 19, 2009, in Boston, at age 53. Born in Illinois, he attended Northeastern University and began his career as a deejay at gay clubs in Boston and Provincetown. In the early 1980’s, he began to work at South End News, a Boston neighborhood weekly. In 1985, he purchased the two-year-old Bay Windows from founding publisher Sasha Alyson. Hoover was a founding member of the National Gay Newspaper Guild and was instrumental in helping to professionalize GLBT publications, assisting in the development of the first GLBT market surveys in the 1990’s. He is survived by his partner, Jay Kubesch.
Marcella “Marcey” Jacobson, self-taught documentary photographer, died of heart failure in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, at age 97. Born in the Bronx and active in socialist causes, she first visited Mexico in 1941 and settled there in1956, taking up photography and developing her own negatives. From the 1960’s to the 80’s, she produced about 14,000 black-and white images, documenting daily life and religious ceremonies, market squares, and cobblestone streets, winning over camera shy residents. In 2001, her book The Burden of Time/ El Cargo de Tiempo was published by Stanford University Press. Her partner, painter Janet Marren, died in 1998.
James Lord, memoirist, biographer, and friend to many notables in post-war Paris, died of a heart attack on August 23, 2009, at his Paris home, at age 86. Born in Englewood, New Jersey, attended Wesleyan University and enlisted in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. While serving as a French translator in the Army’s Military Intelligence Service, he boldly dropped in on Picasso’s studio. After the war, he returned to Paris, planning to become a writer but spending most of his time as a “kind of Boswell to the artistic and social elite in France and, to a lesser extent, Britain,” as his New York Times obituary put it. His reputation as a writer was assured with A Giacometti Portrait (1965), consisting of an account of the eighteen sessions he spent sitting for his portrait by the artist. He wrote over a dozen books, including Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir (1993). His posthumous memoir, My Queer War, is scheduled to be released in April. He is survived by his adopted son and longtime companion, Gilles Foy-Lord.
Rodger McFarlane, pioneer in GLBT civil rights and HIV/AIDS awareness, committed suicide on May 15, 2009, in New Mexico, at age 54, having become increasingly debilitated by a variety of ailments. In 1981 he set up the first hotline in response to the yet unnamed AIDS epidemic (according to the Gay Wisdom blog). He was the first paid executive at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and from 1989 to 1994 he was executive director of Broadway Cares/ Equity Fights AIDS. Born in Mobile, Alabama, he attended the University of South Alabama and later joined the Navy, became a respiratory therapist, and moved to New York, where he lived with his brother, who died of AIDS. Winner of numerous awards and acclaim for his work in both theatre and HIV/AIDS awareness, McFarlane co-produced Larry Kramer’s play, The Destiny of Me (1993), and was the co-author of several books, including The Complete Bedside Companion: No-Nonsense Advice on Caring for the Seriously Ill (1998).
Alice Methfessel, the muse of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), died of lung ailments on June 28, 2009, in Carmel, California, at age 66. The two women met in 1970, at Harvard, where Methfessel was an administrative assistant, when Bishop arrived to teach. (Bishop’s long-time partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, had died several years previously.) The couple traveled extensively, and Bishop dedicated her last book, Geography III (1976) to Methfessel. Poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz stated in Methfessel’s obituary in The Boston Globe: “I think Alice made it more possible for Bishop to write those poems.” As literary executor of Bishop’s estate, Methfessel was praised for allowing magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly access to previously unpublished poems. She is survived by her long-term friend and traveling companion, Angela Leap.
Tharon Musser, whose radical ideas about stage lighting helped revolutionize American theatre, died in Newtown, Connecticut, on April 19, 2009, at age 84. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Born in Virginia to a family that could not afford electricity, she grew up using candles and gaslight. After graduating from Berea College in Kentucky, she earned a master’s degree in fine arts at Yale. Her Broadway career began with her lighting of the original production of Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1956, and she went on to design the lighting for over a hundred shows. She was nominated for ten Tonys and won three, for Follies, A Chorus Line, and Dream girls. In a 1977 interview with The New York Times, she said: “Lighting design is learning how to see. I learn to hear the lights in music in my mind.” She is survived by her partner, Marilyn Rennagel, also a lighting designer.
Harold Norse (1916-2009), one of the last of the Beat poets, was remembered by Jim Nawrocki (“In Memoriam”) in the September-October 2009 issue.
Robin Prising, writer and peace activist, died on December 14, 2008, at age 75. Born in Canada and moving with his family to the South Pacific, he endured horrific conditions during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II, recounted in Manila, Goodbye (1975). After the war, he acted in New York, and while still a teen he moved to London, where, according to his obituary in The Guardian, Sybil Thorndike coached him in Shakespearean acting techniques. Later, he became a peace activist and was on the board of the War Resisters’ League. In 1972, with William Leo Coakley, he founded Helikon Press to publish contemporary British poets, including Thom Gunn. Prising is survived by Coakley, his partner of 48 years.
Shi Pei Pu, inspiration for the play and movie M. Butterfly, died in Paris on June 30, 2009, at age 70. Asoprano and librettist for the Beijing Opera, in 1964 he met Bernard Boursicot, who accepted the fiction that Shi was a woman pretending to be a man. Boursicot began to spy for China in the 1970’s, using Shi as an intermediary. The two were convicted of espionage, and Boursicot did not learn until 1986 that Shi was a man, at which time Boursicot attempted suicide. Shi was born in China and remained in Paris after he was pardoned in 1987, singing in opera productions. He is survived by his adopted son, Shi Du Du. His story is told in Joyce Wadler’s Liaison: The Gripping Real Story of the Diplomat Spy and the Chinese Opera Star (1993) and in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, which won the Tony for best play in 1988.
James Purdy (1914-2009), novelist and playwright, was memorialized in “A Personal Remembrance” by Michael Ehrhardt in the May-June, 2009 issue.
Bruce D. Rodgers (1942-2009), author of The Queens’ Vernacular: a Gay Lexicon, was remembered by Richard F. Knablin in a Letter to the Editor in the November-December 2009 issue.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a scholar who helped create the discipline of queer studies, died of cancer in Manhattan on April 12, 2009, at age 58. She drew on the works of Michel Foucault and on feminist scholarship to bring out sexual subplots in 18th and 19th century fiction, casting familiar books in a new light. Her best-known work, The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), argues that Western culture can be understood only through a critical deconstruction of sex and gender categories as socially constructed, especially those of homo- and heterosexuality. Focusing on 19th-century England, she uncovered what she called a “homosocial” subtext running through much of Western literature. Born in Dayton, Ohio, she graduated from Cornell and received a doctorate from Yale. She taught for many years in Duke’s English department, later moving back to New York, where she taught at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Her myriad interests ranged from Proust to Buddhism to the history of textiles. While she did not like to be described as “straight,” she was married and is survived by her husband, Hal Sedgwick.
G. Donn Teal, cofounder of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in 1969, died in New York on February 3, 2009, at age 76. Born in Columbus, Ohio, he received a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and taught high school French, later moving to New York to begin his writing career. His 1971 book The Gay Militants: How Gay Liberation Began in America (1969-1971) is considered the first history of the gay liberation movement. Teal was a frequent contributor to gay periodicals. His article, “Why Can’t ‘We’ Love Happily Ever After, Too?” protesting the stereotyping of American gay men and lesbians on stage, screen, and page, was published in The New York Times on Feb 23, 1969, with the byline Ronald Forsythe.
Sources: Advocate online (www.advocate.com); Boston Globe; elynnharris.com; Encyclopedia of LGBT History in America, v. 1; Guardian online (guardian.co.uk); LA Times online (latimes.com); mpetrelis.blogspot.com; National Catholic Reporter online (ncronline.org); New York Times online (nytimes.com); pinknews.co.uk; whitecrane.typepad.com; Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History, v. 2; windycitymediagroup.com.
