GLR Review March-April 2019

I N KEEPING with our annual tradition, we remember some of the many LGBT people who made a difference and who passed away last year. They were artists, writ- ers, activists, educators, and performers whose time on this planet ranged from 41 to 95 years. Unless other- wise noted, all deaths occurred in 2018. A CTIVISTS J INX B EERS (born Clara Jean Beers), publisher and activist, died on October 6th at age 84. Born in Pasadena, California, she en- tered the military after high school but left after a dozen years to protest the VietnamWar and to become an openly lesbian ac- tivist. She went on to graduate from UCLA and, in 1975, founded Lesbian News . She initially distributed it under the windshield wipers of cars parked near lesbian bars. It became a national magazine, published both in print and on-line, and is now North America’s longest-running lesbian publication. She was inducted into the L GBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame in Philadelphia in 2017. Her Memoirs of an Old Dyke was pub- lished in 2008. T HOMAS P. “T OM ” G ALLAGHER , statesman, died of a staph in- fection and heart condition on July 8th at age 77. Born in Man- hattan, he graduated from Monmouth University. In 1975, after participating at a Gay Activists Alliance conference, he became the first Foreign Service officer to come out publicly. He left the Foreign Service in 1976 to avoid renewing his security clearance, spending almost two decades as a social worker and counselor in L.A. and San Francisco during the worst years of the AIDS crisis. He was eventually able to go back to govern- ment work in 1994. He is survived by Amin Dulkumoni, to whom he was married. M ELANIE K AYE /K ANTROWITZ , lifelong activist and writer, died of Parkinson’s disease on July 10th at age 72. Born in Brook- lyn, she received her doctorate from Berkeley and taught the first women’s studies class while there. Politically conscious from her teenage years, she developed new ways of looking at the in- tersections of race, class, gender, and Judaism. In the 1980s, she was the co-editor of the lesbian quarterly Sinister Wisdom. She was an essayist, poet, and author of dozens of articles and books, including the semi-autobiographical short story collection, My Jewish Face & Other Stories (1990). She is survived by her longtime partner, activist and organizer Leslie Cagan. C ONNIE K URTZ , who successfully sued the New York City Board of Education for domestic partner benefits in the late 1980s, died at age 81 on May 27th. Born in Brooklyn, she IN MEMORIAM Honoring Those Who Left Us in ’18 M ARTHA E. S TONE Martha E. Stone is the literary editor for this magazine. moved to Israel in 1970 with her husband and family, left after four years, and met up with her old friend Ruth Berman, also married to a man. They fell in love, married, and were the sub- ject of the award-winning 2002 documentary Ruthie and Con- nie: Every Room in the House . She is survived by Ruth and by a large extended family. D ICK L EITSCH , activist, died of cancer on June 22nd at age 83. President of the Mattachine Society in the 1960s, he organized “sip-ins” in 1966 to protest New York state’s ban on serving al- cohol to openly gay people in bars. The ban was later overturned. Originally from Kentucky, where he knew that he was gay from his earliest years, he arrived in New York in 1959. So important were his organizing efforts that one historian stated: “Without Dick Leitsch, there would have been no Stonewall.” His part- ner, Timothy Scoffield, died of AIDS-related causes in 1989. M ARCIA J. L IPETZ , activist, died of cancer in early September at the age of 71. Born into a socially conscious family in Louisville, Kentucky, she received her doctorate from North- western University, and began her career teaching at Chicago- area universities . She was the first full-time executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and helped establish the Center on Halsted, the Midwest’s largest social service agency for the LGBT community. She is survived by Lynda Crawford, to whom she was married. T IMOTHY M C C ARTHY , activist and video historian, died on Oc- tober 19th at the age of 61, as a result of an automobile accident. His death was called a “catastrophic loss for the arts commu- nity” in Provincetown. He was known to many in the Boston- Provincetown area for his work in ACT UP in the 1980s and 90s. As a film documentarian, he was a constant presence at public and artistic events in Provincetown and made a film doc- umentary, Meth + Murder in P-town (2007). He worked with Sexual Minorities Uganda, using the power of film to “empower the repressed and oppressed to speak for themselves.” D ONNA R ED W ING , lifelong activist, died of cancer on April 16th at the age of 67. Originally from Massachusetts, she held leadership roles at the Gill Foundation, Human Rights Cam- paign, the Gay & Lesbian Al- liance Against Defamation, and worked in progressive politics and organizations throughout her life. Most recently, she was executive director of One Iowa, where she launched a summit for LGBT seniors. She was fea- tured in the Sundance Award-        