GLR January-February 2023

K ENWARD E LMSLIE , poet, died on June 29th at age 93. A grand son of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, he was born in Manhattan and raised in Colorado Springs and Washington, DC. After graduating from Harvard, he moved to Cleveland, where he interned at Karamu House, an interracial theater company. He published several plays and many volumes of poetry. He collaborated with visual artists and wrote the book and lyrics for several musicals, including The Grass Harp (1971), based on Truman Capote’s novel. He was the publisher of Z Press and the annual Z magazine. He was a major figure in the New York School of poets. He was predeceased by life partners and col laborators, lyricist John LaTouche (d. 1956) and poet Joe Brainard (d. 1994). J EFFREY E SCOFFIER , writer and activist, died on May 20th at age 79. Born in Baltimore, he grew up in New York City, re ceiving a master’s in international affairs at Columbia. He founded The Gay Alternative, a publication of the Gay Activists Alliance of Philadelphia in 1972, and moved to San Francisco in the late 1970s, where he was editor of the monthly journal So cialist Review . In 1988, he was cofounder of the quarterly LGBT magazine Out/Look. He and his colleagues there organ ized the first OutWrite literary conferences in San Francisco. He went on to become marketing director for the NYC Depart ment of Health and Mental Hygiene. He was a prolific essayist and contributed to many books. His last book was Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge (2021).

R ICHARD H OWARD , poet and translator, died on March 31st at age 92. He is remembered in this issue by David Bergman. S TEVE N EIL J OHNSON , author of gay fiction and mystery nov els, died on December 13th, 2021, at age 64. He was remem bered by John Cooke in the July-August 2022 issue. A RNIE K ANTROWITZ , writer, professor, and activist, died on January 21st at age 81. Born in Newark, N.J., he received a master’s in English literature from New York University. He helped lead the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in 1970, its first year, and was a guest on talk shows, dealing with homopho bia from other guests and the hosts themselves. In 1985, he co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Defamation League (later GLAAD). He was chair of the English Department at the College of Staten Island, where he’d taught for over 40 years and pioneered a gay studies course there. His Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay (1977) is considered a classic. As a Whitman scholar, he wrote widely on the topic, including ar ticles for this magazine. He is survived by his partner, Dr. Lawrence Mass. D AVID M ELNICK , poet, died on February 15th at age 83. He was born in Urbana, Illinois, and grew up in L.A. He took a master’s in mathematics at the University of Chicago, but for most of his life he worked as a copy editor at The San Francisco Chronicle . He published several books of poetry and reviewed poetry and opera. He cofounded the Gay Artists and Writers Kollective (G.A.W.K.), a group for people involved in the arts. He was per haps best known for a pastiche of the Iliad titled Men in Aïda (1983; expanded in 2015), which was set in a bathhouse. His last work, A Pin’s Fee , was a chapbook about his partner David Nelson Doyle’s death from AIDS in 1988. W ILLIAM A. P ERCY III , historian and writer, died on October 30th at age 88. Born and raised in Mississippi, he earned a doc torate in history at Princeton and taught ancient and medieval history in the South before landing at U-Mass, Boston, in the late 1960s, where he remained for five decades. In the early ’80s, he became involved in the gay liberation movement and contributed to a number of scholarly publications and maga zines, including this one (starting in 1999). He co-authored or co-edited about a dozen books, including the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (1990). He was perhaps best known for his provocative 1996 book Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece . R ICHARD S TEVENSON (born Richard Lipez), mystery writer, died on March 16th at age 83. Born and raised in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Lock Haven University and began a stint in the Peace Corps in 1962, teaching in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Back in the U.S., he moved to the Berkshires and contributed numerous articles to major magazines and newspapers. His mystery series, featuring the openly gay de tective Donald Strachey, began in 1981 with Death Trick and at the time of his death, he had written fifteen more titles in the series. Four of the Strachey novels were made into films by the Here! TV network. He is survived by his husband, Joe Wheaton.

The G & LR

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