GLR January-February 2023

IN MEMORIAM

Bright Lights That Dimmed Last Year M ARTHA E. S TONE

I N KEEPING WITH our annual tradition, we remem ber here some of the people who left us over the past year—the writers, artists, performers, and activists who made a significant contribution to LGBT culture and community. All dates are in 2022 unless otherwise in dicated. A CTIVISTS L ESLIE C OHEN , memoirist, activist, and entrepreneur, died on March 16th at age 76. Born in Manhattan, and a self-described tomboy, she met Beth Suskin on her first day of freshman year at Buffalo State College. She received a master’s degree in art history from Queens College and became a gallerist in the 1970s. She and three lesbian friends became the first women in Manhattan to own and manage their own lesbian club, the Sa hara, which was notable for its apparent lack of mob interfer ence. She and Suskin were the lesbian figures sculpted by George Segal for the Gay Liberation Monument in Greenwich Village, which was cast in 1980. In 1992, she received a law degree from NYU. Her 2021 memoir, The Audacity of a Kiss: Love, Art and Liberation , was reviewed in this magazine. She is survived by her wife, Beth Suskin. K ATHLEEN D E B OLD , activist and writer, died on October 9th at age 66. Brooklyn-born but raised in Maryland, she went to the University of Maryland and then joined the Peace Corps, where she taught beekeeping in the Central African Republic. After re turning to the U.S. in the late ’80s, she became an activist, work ing for the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and editing the book Out for Office: Campaigning in the Gay Nineties (1994). She was a frequent book reviewer, cartoonist, and crossword puzzle contributor to a number of LGBT publications. In 1999, she be came executive director of the Mautner Project, an organization for lesbians with cancer, where her leadership was seen as “transformative.” In 2015, she was cited as a “Community Pi oneer” by the Rainbow History Project in Washington. She is survived by her wife, Barbara Johnson. J OE T OM E ASLEY , activist and lawyer, died on February 13th at age 81. Born and raised in small Texas towns, he received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M and then taught Eng lish. After serving in the Navy, he went to law school at the Uni versity of Texas. Moving to New York, he became co-chair of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in the mid-’80s, and later president of the Human Rights Campaign Fund. In the 2000s, he served on the board of the Servicemembers Legal De fense Network, where he helped fight against the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. He is survived by his husband, Peter Freiberg.

Theirs was among the first same-sex marriages featured in the New York Times.

J OHN S TEPHEN H UNT , writer and human rights activist, died on March 17th at age 85. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he came out while in the Army, attended several uni versities in the U.S. and the U.K., and traveled extensively. He had a special interest in post-apartheid South Africa. He was active in the worldwide LGBT rights movement and was one of the founders of Lambda Resource Center for the

Blind in Chicago, where he lived. Amajor booster of this mag azine, he was a member of many professional LGBT organiza tions and was the U.S. correspondent for Out! New Zealand Magazine . His scholarly works include Religion and LGBTQ Sexualities: Critical Essays (2016) . R USTY M AE M OORE , educator and activist, died on February 23rd at age eighty. Assigned male at birth, she felt from early childhood that this was the wrong gender. She grew up near Pittsburgh and received a doctorate in law and diplomacy at Tufts University near Boston. She taught at a number of uni versities and was dean of the Hofstra Business School, where she launched the first transgender studies class. Her Brooklyn home, called “Transy House,” became a shelter for trans people and was large enough to shelter a dozen individuals who would otherwise have been homeless. It was modeled after a shelter she had run with Marsha P. Johnson in the 1970s. In 2019, Frameline made a short film about it titled Changing House . She is survived by her wife, Chelsea Goodwin. They had tran sitioned together in the early 1990s. U RVASHI V AID , activist, writer, attorney, and former executive director of the NGLTF , died on May 14th at age 63. She is re membered by Richard Burns in this issue. A RTISTS AND P ERFORMERS J AMES B IDGOOD , film director and photographer, died on Jan uary 31st at age 88. He arrived in New York at age eighteen, having fled his home state of Wisconsin. With visions of the Ziegfeld Follies in his mind, he worked as a drag performer in the East Village. When not onstage, he tended bar, and the tips he made allowed him to go to Parsons School of Design. In the 1960s, he began photographing for physique magazines with the aim of making the men as beautiful as Playboy bunnies, staging lavish photo shoots in his apartment. In 1971, his mo

Martha E. Stone is the literary editor of this magazine.

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