GLR Review March-April 2019

        this is how I learned how to be an editor and publisher. As for Lars, gay activism and publishing were sidelines in a career that was all about music and philanthropy, in that order. When I met him in 1980, he was still doing harpsichord recitals around the country and was part of a Boston-based en- semble called Quantz. In his home he had three keyboards: a grand piano, a harpsichord, and a virginal, later replaced by a Yamaha, all of which he played expertly. He also played the organ, which became the basis for his later career as music di- rector for a Unitarian-Universalist church near Boston. As a philanthropist, he served as president of the Phillips Foundation, succeeding his father in that role. Ellis the First had electrified Long Island in the early 20th century (literally, by building the power stations) and endowed the foundation. His mother’s maiden name was Grumman, as in the Grumman Corporation of military aircraft fame. His father had once been pres- ident of Ithaca College. Lars himself broke a family tradition by choosing Harvard over Cornell. In college he concentrated in music and later took a masters at New England Conservatory, on whose board of directors he later sat for many years. His role in the life of this magazine was ongoing. He was a charter member of our board of directors, but it was his unofficial role as consultant and confidant at our weekly lunches on Boylston Street—a tradi- tion that lasted 25 years—that made all the difference. He had great ideas about editorial direction, but he was also a font of knowledge about things like the latest Apple product or software update. Other topics of conversation at the Saturday lunch included the latest issue of The New York Review of Books , which was an early model for The G&LR . This would lead inevitably to politics, which Lars discussed with relish. Like me, he had come from a conservative family but had done wonders with himself, adopting an eclectic politics that favored reason over ideology. An early boyfriend would accuse him of tending to “pontificate,” which was slightly accurate, but only in the sense that he spoke with the authority of someone who knew what he Larry Phillips, the Sine Qua Non of The G&LR R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . T HIS MAGAZINE would not exist were it not for Ellis L. Phillips III, known to the world as “Larry” but to me as “Lars,” which is how I’ll refer to him here, with your indulgence. It was Lars who recruited me to join an alumni or- ganization and take over the editing of its quarterly newslet- ter, which became the incubator for The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review , whose first issue was Winter 1994. Thus he was the critical connection that made it possible and was a major inspiration for the magazine’s early development. He was also my best friend. Ellis Laurimore (where “Larry” came from) was born on Groundhog Day, 1948, and left us on Halloween, 2018—two pagan holidays; I’ve no idea what this means. He made it to age seventy, which is pretty great for a person of his generation with Type 1 diabetes, that cruel chronic dis- ease that science hasn’t quite been able to neutralize, though Lars himself was acutely aware of, and grateful for, the genius of mod- ern medicine that made his survival possible (synthetic insulin!). The cruelty of Type 1 is that the damage from sugar highs and lows over a lifetime is cumulative and systemic, the loss of faculties slow but inexorable. But let me go back to the alumni organi- zation that I mentioned, which was the Har- vard Gay & Lesbian Caucus. While I was gallivanting (well, working) in Europe in the 1980s, Lars was in- volved in an effort that would forever change the lives of LGBT people at Harvard. He and a small cadre of faculty and alumni/æ had launched a campaign to get the university to officially ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The effort was suc- cessful in 1985 when Harvard became the first university in the U.S. to adopt such a policy (many others would follow). It was shortly after my return from Europe that Lars re- cruited me to join the Caucus, and he soon had me editing their dormant newsletter, even teaching me how to use a desktop publishing program called Ready,Set,Go. The first issue (in early 1987) was a joint effort, but I soon got the hang of it, and IN MEMORIAM www.barnesandnoble.com M Y ROOMMATE AND I were forced by the Phillips Exeter Academy in 1962 to un- dergo psychiatric treatment to be cured of our homosexuality, with the result that he committed suicide and I became a schizophrenic. Another schizophrenic, the German theologian Paul Tillich, thought that I was the Second Coming of Christ. Rejecting this label, I told my first lover, Mark Frechette, that he was the real Christ. After Mark starred in Anto- nioni’s film Zabriskie Point , he was cru- cified in prison in 1975 at the age of 27.