SHOCK! Music Legend Prince Found Dead At Age 57

Today is a very sad day! One of my favorite musical artists, Prince Rogers Nelson, was found dead at his home in Minnesota; he was 57 years old. The Internet blew up with the news and even the White House issued a statement from the Obamas on the passing of Prince:

Today, the world lost a creative icon. Michelle and I join millions of fans from around the world in mourning the sudden death of Prince. Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent. As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all. Funk. R&B. Rock and roll. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer. 

“A strong spirit transcends rules,” Prince once said -- and nobody's spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, his band, and all who loved him.

I'm so sad right now (all I can hear is that last 2 minutes of keening Prince does on the extended version of "Purple Rain" on loop in my head! )

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Bill Rosendahl, Openly Gay LA City Councilman, Dead At Age 70

Bill Rosendahl, the first openly gay man elected to the Los Angeles City Council, died this week (Wednesday March 30th) at age 70 after a long battle with cancer. Rosendahl was a host of a local public affairs cable television show before entering politics, and was succeeded by his chief of staff Mike Bonin, who wrote the following obituary for his former boss:

Widely known for his beaming smile and a booming voice, Rosendahl befriended both the powerful and the downtrodden throughout his lifetime and during his eight-year stint representing the Westside on the City Council. 

Often called the “Conscience of the City Council,” Rosendahl focused on seeking solutions to the problem of homelessness, promoting mass transit, curbing overdevelopment, and giving neighborhoods a greater voice in city decision-making. He was the first openly gay man elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and served from 2005 to 2013, when he retired to battle a stage four cancer that was diagnosed in the summer of 2012. Toward the end of his tenure in office, he became an outspoken advocate for medical marijuana, which he used to combat the side effects of cancer treatments. 

He will be missed!

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Tennis Commentator Bud Collins Dies At Age 86

Bud Collins, irrepressible tennis commentator, has died at the age of 86.

The official ATP World obituary reads:

Born in Lima, Ohio, on the eve of the Great Depression on June 17, 1929, Arthur Worth Collins, Jr. graduated from Baldwin-Wallace College and went on to serve with the U.S. Army. While a graduate student at Boston University in 1959, he began a five-year stint coaching the men’s tennis team at nearby Brandeis University. Among his players was future social activist/anti-war icon Abbie Hoffman. He officially launched his tennis journalism career in 1963, when he joined the Boston Globe, and later worked his way into radio with Boston’s PBS affiliate WGBH.
Collins broke into television with CBS Sports in 1968, regularly joined in the broadcast booth by serve-and-volley extraordinaire Jack Kramer. In 1972, Collins moved over to NBC, where he would become a staple over the next 35 years.  Generations of Americans welcomed him into their living rooms through the tennis-boom years of the 1970s and beyond via his Breakfast At Wimbledon broadcasts, as NBC brought live coverage of the fortnight across the Atlantic. Collins made us feel as if we there alongside him at the All England Club, and he was as much a part of the most prestigious of the four Grand Slams as a tumbler of Pims or a bowl of strawberries and cream.
He developed a unique rapport with players that allowed him to go beyond the usual post-match fodder. After falling to longtime rival Martina Navratilova in the Wimbledon final, Evert famously quipped, “Nice pants, Bud.” Before Collins could get off a question to Pam Shriver in 1978, the future Hall of Famer insisted, “First, turn off those pants.”

He will be missed!

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Famous Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks Was Gay!

Noted neuroscientist Oliver Sacks died last weekend at age 82. I was unaware, and I suspect many of my readers are also, that Dr. Sacks was (sorta openly) gay. Thanks to my local NPR station (KPCC 89.3 FM) I learned not only that Dr. Sacks was gay but that as a young medical resident he spent a fair amount of time in Southern California, including at famed Muscle Beach in Venice, CA where he was known as "Dr. Squat" because he could squat lift 575 pounds!

Apparently he was very conflicted about his sexuality, as this excerpt indicates:

He had here his early struggles with his gay identity — he was celibate from his 30s until he was 75, when he met the love of his life, to whom he dedicated his last book — along with ensuing, difficult relationships. He got into a couple of biker brawls. He had a mad drive to prove himself as a body surfer in Venice (where he dislocated a shoulder and broke a few ribs) and a Muscle Beach muscle man.

His last book was published this year and titled On The Move. In it he mentions more details about his love life, including the name of his lover, Bill Hayes.

The picture at the top of this post show Sacks in 1961 (at age 28) and then later on years later. He apparently loved motorcyles his entire life as well.

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Spock Is Dead :(

Leonard Nimoy the actor who was most famous for playing an imperturbable alien on the classic television series Star Trek, has died at the age of 83, according to the New York Times.

Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.
[...]
His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Mr. Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the last half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing: “Live long and prosper” (from the Vulcan “Dif-tor heh smusma”).

This is a sad day for all fans of science fiction!

James Stewart, Openly-Gay Author Of #1 Best-selling Calculus Textbook, Dead at 73

James D. Stewart is very well-known in the world of college mathematics as a Professor emeritus at McMaster University and the author of the best-selling calculus textbook, often called the "Stewart Calculus." However the fact that the author of Stewart's Calculus is openly gay (and Canadian!) is certainly not as widely known.

Stewart, 73, was made very wealthy by the success of his textbooks and used his money to support various philanthropic projects, mostly involving music and mathematics. In Toronto, he is known for the development of Integral House, a $32 million dollar architectural wonder which served as his residence and a state-of-the-art concert facility for 150 people with perfect acoustics and dramatic curves.

 Sadly, in 2013 Stewart was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and given a year to live; he succumbed to the disease earlier this month on December 3, 2014.

Toronto's The Globe and Mail reports:

The house and all its custom-designed furnishings were an expression of his love of curves, so prominent in calculus. But there was no “formula” for the house, he said – it was a work of art that he was lucky enough to live in, and that brought him into contact with musicians he might otherwise never have met. 

It also became a great party centre during Pride Week and at Halloween, when the all-male guests were expected to show up in extravagant drag. “He was a crazy guy, privately,” Mr. Ralph says. “That man could party. He would let it all go.” 

Dr. Stewart was “out” his whole adult life, and supported many services and initiatives for LGBT people. Joseph Clement, who is making a documentary about Integral House and its owner, said that in the early 1970s, Dr. Stewart helped launch the Pride movement in Hamilton by inviting Toronto activist George Hislop to speak in the city.

As a gay mathematician myself I had heard that Stewart was gay but had not seen any documentation of this fact. It's sort of sad that fact is becoming more well-known now that Stewart is dead, but it is still an encouraging notion that a gay man was responsible for teaching generations of college students calculus.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

Nelson Mandela, the world's most famous (and, arguably, most successful) political prisoner, has died in South Africa at the age of 95.

The New York Times has published Mandela's obituary:

Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation ofSouth Africa from white minority rule and served as his country’s first black president, becoming an international emblem of dignity and forbearance, died Thursday night. He was 95. 

[...] 

Mr. Mandela’s quest for freedom took him from the court of tribal royalty to the liberation underground to a prison rock quarry to the presidential suite of Africa’s richest country. And then, when his first term of office was up, unlike so many of the successful revolutionaries he regarded as kindred spirits, he declined a second term and cheerfully handed over power to an elected successor, the country still gnawed by crime, poverty, corruption and disease but a democracy, respected in the world and remarkably at peace. 

The question most often asked about Mr. Mandela was how, after whites had systematically humiliated his people, tortured and murdered many of his friends, and cast him into prison for 27 years, he could be so evidently free of spite. 

The government he formed when he finally won the chance was an improbable fusion of races and beliefs, including many of his former oppressors. When he became president, he invited one of his white wardens to the inauguration. Mr. Mandela overcame a personal mistrust bordering on loathing to share both power and a Nobel Peace Prize with the white president who preceded him, F. W. de Klerk.

There will be a state funeral on Sunday December 15. President Obama is expected to attend.

OBITUARY: Sean (from MTV's The Real World) Is Dead

Remember Sean from MTV's The Real World? His full name is Sean Sasser and he was Pedro Zamora's boyfriend in the show and in real life. Pedro was the first HIV-positive person very many Americans got to know through his appearance on the hit MTV reality series in the mid-1990s. (They appeared in the 3rd season of the show, the one set in San Francisco in 1994). Zamora died the day after the last episode of the show in which he appeared aired, and he and Sasser held a commitment ceremony on the show which was broadcast on MTV. Even though same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the world at the time, the desire and need for governmental recognition of same-sex couples' relationships was made very clear by the event to many of those who saw the episode.

According to Joe.My.God and other press reports, Sean Sasser died of cancer-related causes this week at age 44. Sasser and Zamora were one of the first gay and HIV-positive couples to appear on television and had an impact on how countless Americans viewed these marginalized groups.

The Root analyzes the impact of Sasser's life:

But the time when discrimination based on sexual orientation and HIV status was the national norm was not so long ago: Such bias was alive and well 19 years ago, when the third season of MTV's The Real World: San Francisco introduced a gay couple, both of whom were HIV positive.  

One half of that couple was Sean Sasser, who became engaged to Pedro Zamora, a Real World cast member, during the show's run. Sasser, who was black, and Zamora, who was Hispanic, became one of the first high-profile gay and HIV-positive couples -- and one of the first gay power couples of color -- represented in mainstream media. Their presence on the show sparked powerful discussions and debate on HIV awareness and education, same-sex marriage and a host of other issues that are regular parts of the national discourse today but were not in 1994. 

When I was growing up in a conservative part of Texas, Sasser and Zamora represented my first exposure to seeing a gay couple living their lives just like everybody else. I know I'm not the only one. Watching them strive to build a life together is one of my earliest memories of beginning to contemplate the idea that same-sex couples would want the same things that most couples do.

It's great to see another appreciation of that season of the The Real World: San Francisco and to see the names Pedro and Sean again.

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God.

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Iain [M.] Banks, Sci-Fi Author (1954-2013)

I finally decided to blog about some sad news, the death of best-selling Scottish author Iain M. Banks. Banks was unusual in that he was well-known both for his genre works in science fiction (published using the name Iain M. Banks) as well "regular" non-genre works of fiction published under the name Iain Banks. The only books of Banks that I read were his science fiction ones, namely the ones set in his famous "Culture" series.

I read the most recently published Culture novels The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), Surface Detail (2010) and Matter (2009) as well as a few of the earlier ones like Use of Weapons and Excession. The only one that I thought was truly outstanding was Matter. They tend to be quite long books, with intricate plots the author uses to comment wittily on different aspects of our own (western) culture using (very dark) humor. I also read one of his earlier books, The Algebraist (mainly because the title seemed mathematical).

Banks had apparently announced earlier this year that he had terminal gall bladder cancer but his death a mere two months on June 9 later came as a shock. His final book, The Quarry was published just days later in Europe. It's not another Culture novel, but a semi-biographical book about the final weeks of middle-aged guy dying of cancer. Write what you know, I guess!

Banks passing was noted by several famous British authors like Neil Gaiman, Ian Rankin and fellow scot Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting).

Celebrity Friday: Van Cliburn, Gay Pianist, Is Dead

Van Cliburn is one of the most famous names in classic music, primarily known as the namesake for one of the most prestigious piano competitions in the world. Cliburn died this week at age 78.
Cliburn became a worldwide celebrity way back in 1958 (55  years ago!) when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition.

Cliburn was taught the piano by his mother and spent most of his life living with her. He never publicly confirmed he was gay, but the Los Angeles Times obituary says:

After she died at 97 in 1994, he was sued for palimony by a longtime associate, Thomas E. Zaremba, but the suit was dismissed. For more than 20 years Cliburn lived with Thomas L. Smith, his friend and manager who survives him.

And the San Diego Gay and Lesbian News says:

In Fort Worth, it was no secret among socialites that Van Cliburn enjoyed the company of younger men, who flocked to him at parties and other social events. But Van Cliburn never publicly discussed his sexuality and dismissed gossip that he was gay. 

[...] 

Van Cliburn never married and has no heirs.

It's so interesting to me that these celebrities from previous decades who were household names in the United States are now widely being acknowledged as members of the LGBT community after their deaths. We will truly have made progress when we have more household names that are known to be openly gay when they are alive.

Celebrity Friday (bonus): Ed Koch Is Dead at 88

Ed Koch, the 3-term Mayor of New York City who was vilified by AIDS and gay activists during his tenure for the lack of an urgent response to the epidemic in the 1970s and 1980s by the City while it was under his leadership as a closeted gay man, died on Friday at age 88.

The New York Times ran an extensive obituary in today's edition of the paper:

His political odyssey took him from independent-minded liberal to pragmatic conservative, from street-corner hustings with a little band of reform Democrats in Greenwich Village to the pinnacle of power as New York City’s 105th mayor from Jan. 1, 1978, to Dec. 31, 1989. Along the way, he put an end to the career of the Tammany boss Carmine G. De Sapio and served two years as a councilman and nine more in Congress representing, with distinction, the East Side of Manhattan.

[...]

Mr. Koch, for whom the headline “Hizzoner” seemed to have been coined, was a bachelor who lived for politics. Perhaps inevitably there were rumors, some promoted by his enemies, that he was gay. But no proof was offered, and, except for two affirmations in radio interviews that he was heterosexual, he responded to the rumors with silence or a rebuke. “Whether I am straight or gay or bisexual is nobody’s business but mine,” he wrote in “Citizen Koch,” his 1992 autobiography.

[...]

Mr. Koch was also harshly criticized for what was called his slow, inadequate response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Hundreds of New Yorkers were desperately ill and dying in a baffling public health emergency, and critics, especially in the gay community, accused him of being a closeted homosexual reluctant to confront the crisis for fear of being exposed.

It's definitely worth going to go read the whole thing yourself...

Queer Quote: Aaron Swartz

Lots of people around the world are mourning the news today of the death of Aaron Swartz at age 26 (by suicide). Swartz was well-known around internet freedom as a pioneer and prodigy. He was one of the co-founders of the reddit social networking site as well as instrumental in promoting RSS feeds and stopping the "Stop Online Privacy Act" last year in the U.S. Congress.

Interestingly, Swartz was part of a generation of young people who see sexuality as more fluid and a different construct than older people (like yours truly). In 2009, in  an article he wrote an article titled "Why I am Not Gay" explaining this belief, which I am excerpting here as today's Queer Quote:

Having sex with other people of your gender isn’t an identity, it’s an act. And, like sex in general among consenting adults, people should be able to do it if they want to. Having sex with someone shouldn’t require an identity crisis. (Nobody sees having-sex-with-white-people as part of their identity, even if that’s primarily who they’re attracted to.)

People shouldn’t be forced to categorize themselves as “gay,” “straight,” or “bi.” People are just people. Maybe you’re mostly attracted to men. Maybe you’re mostly attracted to women. Maybe you’re attracted to everyone. These are historical claims — not future predictions. If we truly want to expand the scope of human freedom, we should encourage people to date who they want; not just provide more categorical boxes for them to slot themselves into.

Interesting ideas. I don't disagree with his hope, but I think it discounts the power and historical echoes of the heterosexist society that we currently live in. Thoughts, anyone? If so, please add your responses in the comments.

 Hat/tip to TowleRoad

Sally Ride, 1st U.S. (Lesbian) Woman In Space, Dies

Sally Ride was a role model for millions of women for her pioneering
 role in literally going where no woman had gone before

Sally Ride, one of the United States' most famous female scientists for becoming the first American woman to go into space (twice), died on Monday after a long fight with pancreatic cancer.

Of interest to the LGBT community is this quote from Ride's official obituary:

In addition to Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of 27 years, Sally is survived by her mother, Joyce; her sister, Bear; her niece, Caitlin, and nephew, Whitney; her staff of 40 at Sally Ride Science; and many friends and colleagues around the country. 

Ride was married to another astronaut, Stephen Hawley from 1982 to 1987. Ride considered Tam O'Shaughnessy her life partner for over 27 years, and O'Shaughnessy serves as the CEO of the company Ride founded, SallyRideScience.com.


It will be interesting to see how many of the press reports that cover the death of Sally Ride as an icon for American woman will also include information about Ride being an icon for the LGBT community.

Donna Summer (1948-2012)

Donna Summer, the longtime Queen of Disco and gay icon, has died at the age of 63 after a long fight with cancer. Summer was well-known for her string of chart-topping hits  in the 1970s and 1980s like "Hot Stuff," "Bad Girls," "Last Dance," "She Works Hard For The Money," "MacArthur Park"and her duet with Barbra Streisand "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)."

Whitney Houston, 1963-2012

Whitney Houston has apparently died at the age of 48. The Grammy Awards are tomorrow. It's gonna be crazy!

She will always be remembered for her hits like I Will Always Love You, The Greatest Love of All and  many many more. Very sad news.

Godless Wednesday: Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

This week on Godless Wednesday we are commemorating the untimely passing of Christopher Hitchens, who has been the public face of godlessness for a decade at least.

Here's an excerpt of part of an obituary of Hitch from Slate magazine:

Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949, Hitchens studied at Oxford before launching his journalism career in the 1970s with the magazines International Socialism and the New Statesman. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States, where he was a regular columnist at The Nation for two decades before parting ways with the liberal magazine after proudly disagreeing with its editors about the Iraq war.

Hitchens won the National Magazine Award for commentary in 2007, the same year that he became an American citizen on his 58th birthday. Foreign Policy named him to its list of the top 100 public intellectuals the following year, and Forbes magazine labeled him one of the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media in 2009, a distinction that took some by surprise given Hitchens's vocal support of George W. Bush's war on terror.

He was a frequent guest on news programs and at public debates, and rarely passed up the opportunity to defend his positions when given the opportunity to do so. He was the author of nearly 20 books, including God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and Arguably, a collection of his more recent essays that was published earlier this year.

Hitchens remained steadfast in his criticism of religion even in the face of his grim prognosis. In an August 2010 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, his colleague at The Atlantic, Hitchens made it known that even if he were to somehow recant his devout atheism on his deathbed, any apparent conversion would be a hollow gesture. "The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain," he said. "I can't guarantee that such an entity wouldn't make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark."

LGBT Icon Frank Kameny Dead At 86

Wow... Just days after my friend (and longtime lesbian activist) Paula Ettelbrick died, the LGBT community has lost one of it's wise elders: Frank Kameny, who was a gay rights pioneer, starting his activism in the 1950s.

The Washington Post covers Kameny's death thusly:

Mr. Kameny, a Harvard PhD whose homosexuality led to his discharge from a federal government job more than half a century ago, lived to see his years of determined advocacy rewarded by the success of many of his campaigns and by his ultimate welcome from a political establishment that had rejected him.

His death, apparently on National Coming Out Day, occurred in a year in which gay men and lesbians were accorded the right toserve openly in the armed forces, as David A. Catania (I-At Large), the D.C. Council’s first openly gay member, noted Tuesday night.

[...]

In what appeared to be one of the great triumphs of Mr. Kameny’s often lonely, uphill struggle, the protest signs that he once carried in front of the White House were put on display in the Smithsonian Institution four years ago, to be viewed along with the museum’s other reminders of the course of U.S. history. 

Mr. Kameny said he created the slogan “Gay Is Good.” In their pungent succinctness, the words both suggested his rhetorical skills and embodied the beliefs that he championed.

Years before the gay rights movement existed in any widely recognized form and in an era in which open assertion of homosexuality could invite physical harm, Mr. Kameny worked to increase the acceptance of gay men and lesbians in mainstream American society and to win recognition of their equality under the law.

Among the many advances Kameny is credited with working for and seeing come to fruition include: a public apology from the federal government in 2009 for firing him 50 years before; the repeal of the District of Columbia sodomy law; an executive order signed by President Clinton eliminating sexual orientation as a category for denying security clearances; an openly gay man appointed by President Obama as head of the Office of Personnel Management; and the founding of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations in the 1950s.

Longtime Lesbian Activist Paula Ettelbrick Has Died

Paula Ettelbrick held leadership positions at several important LGBT non-profits

I am saddened to report the news that longtime lesbian activist, Paula Ettlebrick, died of cancer-related causes at the age of 56 on October 7th. Ettelbrick was especially well-known in LGBT leadership circles. I knew her best as the Legal Director for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in the 1990s and later as the third Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesban Human Rights Commission (she was named a few years after I had left their Board of Directors in 2002).Most recently, Paula had been named the Executive Director of the Stonewall Community Foundation in New York City, resigning that position in August 2011.

Gay City News has some remembrances of Paula from fellow luminaries in the LGBT movement:

In a message distributed via email from Brazil on Friday morning, Cary Alan Johnson, who succeeded Ettelbrick at the helm of IGLHRC, wrote, “First and foremost I can say that I found her to be so genuinely, deeply, unfalteringly committed to our liberation as LGBT people. She also had a deep respect for all progressive movements and causes. Paula was one of the most sophisticated strategists I've ever met.”

In her work at IGLHRC, Ettelbrick strove with particular focus to educate American activists about the need to follow the lead of LGBTQ communities on the ground in countries where the group was seeking to provide support.

Rea Carey, executive director of the Task Force, wrote, “I will truly miss Paula — her sass, her smarts, and her smile. She was supportive of me and of other women in leadership positions. In fact, upon becoming the executive director of the Task Force, I received a note card from her along with a contribution to the Task Force in honor of women’s leadership.”

Sue Hyde, who directs the Task Force’s annual Creating Change conference, wrote that Ettelbrick’s “story is incomplete without calling forward her inspiring and visionary work as a community organizer par excellence.” It was Ettelbrick, Hyde said, who pioneered efforts to increase the representation of LGBT Americans in the US Census, at a time “when to do so was regarded as quixotic.”

Calling her “a great hero,” Ross Levi, ESPA’s executive director, noted that as the group’s general counsel, Ettelbrick took the lead in negotiating provisions of the city’s 1997 domestic partnership law with Mayor Rudy Giuliani. At the time that law was enacted, it was the most comprehensive package of such benefits in the US.

Kate Kendall, who heads up NCLR, said, “Paula was possessed of singular intelligence, integrity, ferocity, and wit. She was also unfailingly generous and open-hearted. She will be missed as a tireless advocate of the most disenfranchised.”

Kevin Cathcart, Lambda Legal’s executive director, recalled, “When Paula Ettelbrick came to Lambda Legal 25 years ago to fight for the rights of gay men and lesbians, it took not only vision and a passion for justice –– it also took courage to stand up in court and in the public eye during that earlier time in our history. Paula was fearless.”

In her work at Lambda, NCLR, the Pride Agenda, and the Task Force, Ettelbrick aggressively maintained that the fight to expand rights and protections for gay and lesbian couples and families must benefit as broad a definition of family as possible. In 1993, in a collection edited by William Rubenstein titled “Lesbian, Gay Men and the Law,” Ettelbrick wrote an essay “Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?” that spelled out a feminist critique of how the institution had historically constrained the freedom and rights of women. The community, she argued, should be pressing for social and legal changes to support alternative family structures truer to the reality of queer lives.

I have used Paula's essay as a text in my Race, Gender and Justice class for years and had last seen her at the Williams Institute's Global Arc of Justice conference at UCLA in 2009. I also know her ex, Suzanne Goldberg, well, (who is another luminary in the LGBT rights movement). She is survived by her partner Marianne Haggerty and her son and daughter Adam and Julia.

Paula will be sorely missed. Many people are commemorating her by commenting on her Facebook page:

Celebrity Friday: Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011)

Elizabeth Taylor, glamorous Hollywood film star for decades and AIDS activist and gay icon, died on Wednesday March 23rd.

Her New York Times obituary, written by a guy who died in 2005, described her:

In a world of flickering images, Elizabeth Taylor was a constant star. First appearing on screen at age 10, she grew up there, never passing through an awkward age. It was one quick leap from “National Velvet” to “A Place in the Sun” and from there to “Cleopatra,” as she was indelibly transformed from a vulnerable child actress into a voluptuous film queen. 

In a career of some 70 years and more than 50 films, she won two Academy Awards as best actress, for her performances as a call girl in “BUtterfield 8” (1960) and as the acid-tongued Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966). Mike Nichols, who directed her in “Virginia Woolf,” said he considered her “one of the greatest cinema actresses.”

Even here in Cape Town, South Africa, her death was huge news.

Gay(?) Sci-Fi Icon Arthur C Clarke is Dead

Joe.My.God has the details. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Grand Master of Science Fiction, died on Wednesday in his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka at the age of 90. Interestingly, his Wikipedia entry does not mention his sexuality at all.

Neither the Los Angeles Times or New York Times obituaries mention Clarke's sexuality.

Clarke is best known for his collaboration with visionary film director Stanley Kubrick on the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, elements of which Clarke used to create a best-selling novel of the same name.

Similarly to Joe.My.God, I grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke's novels, although my first (and the only one I can remember reading at the time) was Childhood's End and in general I was more of a devotee of Isaac Asimov's work than either Clarke or Heinlein. Clarke's three sequels to 2001 were also best-sellers, despite being of ever decreasing quality.

It is true that Clarke had a genius for making wild predictions about future technology that have so far come true: geostationary satellites (now called Clarke orbits), cell phones, space stations and the Internet.