IN KEEPING with tradition, we take time to remember a few of the notable LGBT people who died during the previous year. — Jeremy C. Fox
Jonathan Bracker was a poet who wrote with insight and humor about the natural world, growing up gay in the pre-Stonewall era, and in recent years about aging, death, and grief. His poem “A Suggestion for Gays” was published in the November-December 2025 issue of The G&LR.
Bracker was born in New York City, grew up in Louisiana and Texas, and began writing poetry in junior high school. He later studied creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin under the poet Frederick Eckman. He went on to teach at colleges in Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and California, settling in San Francisco in 1973. He was the editor of Bright Cages: Selected Poems of Christopher Morley (1965) and co-author of a 1976 biography of Morley. His thirteen poetry collections include Constellations of Clover (1973), Some Poems About Women (1993), Paris Sketches (2005), Civilian Aboard U.S. Navy Ship at Sea (2011), and Love Poems of a Gay Nerd (2022).
Bracker died at age 88 at a rehabilitation facility in San Francisco due to complications following heart surgery.
Andrea Gibson was a genderqueer spoken-word poet, performance artist, and activist whose work moved audiences across the spectrums of gender and sexuality. Their passionate, sometimes sardonic, often political poems about gender, patriarchy, love, basketball, and gun control emerged from the traditions of slam poetry, a form that Gibson helped reinvigorate on college campuses and in coffeehouses across the country in the mid-2000s.
Named Colorado’s poet laureate in 2023, Gibson toured extensively despite chronic stage fright; published seven books, including Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns (2008), Pansy (2015), and You Better Be Lightning (2021); and released seven albums. After being diagnosed in 2021 with terminal ovarian cancer, Gibson and their wife, fellow poet Megan Falley, shared their struggle with the disease in the documentary film Come See Me in the Good Light, which won the Festival Favorite award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Gibson died at age 49 at home in Longmont, Colorado, “surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs,” Falley wrote.
Nikki Giovanni was a poet, educator, activist, public intellectual, and one of the leading lights of the Black Arts Movement that grew out of the Civil Rights struggle and included writers such as James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde. In her early career, Giovanni wrote stirringly about racism and 
formed her own publishing company because, she wrote: “No one was much interested in a Black girl writing what was called ‘militant’ poetry.”
Giovanni also wrote honestly and humorously about her ambivalence toward relations between men and women, writing in the poem “Housecleaning”: “i always liked housecleaning/ even as a child … and unfortunately this habit has/ carried over and I find/ i must remove you/ from my life.” She gave birth to a son, Thomas, in 1969 and never publicly disclosed the father’s identity. She taught at Queens College and Rutgers University before being recruited to Virginia Tech by English professor Virginia C. Fowler, who became a scholar of Giovanni’s work, her biographer, and her life partner. They married in 2016.
Giovanni died at age 81 from complications of lung cancer in a Blacksburg, Virginia, hospital in December 2024.
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was among the protesters outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969 and went on to a half-century career in activism for Black trans women, incarcerated trans women, and people with HIV/AIDS. Miss Major moved to New York City in 1962 after being expelled from two colleges for wearing dresses, and soon 
began performing in drag shows and doing sex work to survive. A year after a cop knocked her unconscious at Stonewall, she was convicted of robbery and sent to a men’s prison. While behind bars, she endured brutal treatment and met a leader of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, which led to her advocacy for trans prisoners.
Miss Major provided direct care for people with HIV/AIDS in New York in the early 1980s; founded a home healthcare service, Angels of Care, in San Diego; and later led San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange. She was the first executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project until her retirement in 2015 and received the Susan J. Hyde Award for Longevity in the Movement from the National lgbtq Task Force in 2018.
Miss Major died at age 78 at her home in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Felice Picano, author, activist, and frequent contributor to The G&LR, died at age 81. He was remembered by Walter Holland in the May-June 2025 issue.
Edmund White, groundbreaking gay novelist and memoirist, died at age 85. He was remembered by Dimitris Yeros, David Bergman, and Leo Racicot in the September-October 2025 issue.
Robert Wilson was an iconoclastic theatrical director, playwright, choreographer, and visual artist whose collaborators ranged from Philip Glass to Lady Gaga. Perhaps his most famous work, sometimes called his masterpiece, is 1976’s Einstein on the Beach, an abstract, plotless five-hour opera with music composed by Glass. Wilson and Glass later collaborated on The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down (1984) and on White Raven and Monsters of Grace (both 1998).
Described by The New York Times in 1992 as “[America]’s—or even the world’s—foremost vanguard ‘theater artist,’” Wilson was less interested in the traditional theatrical fixations of dialogue and plot than with movement, space, and lighting effects. He famously said: “Light is the most important actor on stage.” His extensive credits include two fully silent productions, Deafman Glance (1971) and Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), and productions of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1990), Wagner’s Parsifal (2005), Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (2007), and Beckett’s Happy Days (2008).
Wilson died at age 83 at his home in Water Mill, New York, after a brief illness.
