Eric Rofes, 51; Fought to Separate Gay Males' Identity from AIDS

By Jocelyn Y. Stewart

June 30, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

At the heart of author Eric Rofes’ work was a desire to liberate gay male sexuality from an identity he said was crafted by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

That ill-informed identity of pathology and victimhood constrained gay men’s sexuality, Rofes said, and persisted after AIDS was no longer a crisis for most gay men.

“Among the most effective ways of oppressing a people is through the colonization of their bodies, the stigmatizing of their desires and the repression of their erotic energies,” Rofes wrote.

Rofes, an outspoken organizer in the gay community and a Humboldt University professor who viewed sexual liberation as crucial to social justice, died of a heart attack Monday in Provincetown, Mass., where he was working on a book. He was 51.

“His leadership ... contributed enormously to our understanding of the need for honest discussions about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and its issues,” said Loren Ostrow of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. “Eric’s death is a loss to all of us, a rare voice of truth.”

Richard Burns, a friend and fellow activist, said one of Rofes’ “greatest accomplishments was leading the effort to create a gay men’s health movement that was focused on a broader range of health issues than just HIV and AIDS.”

Rofes wrote or edited 12 books, including the 1998 “Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures,” which the Nation called “perhaps the most important book about gay male culture and community of the past decade.”

Rofes’ long history as an organizer helped shape and give credence to his analysis of issues concerning the gay community.

Rofes was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Aug. 31, 1954, and raised in Commack on Long Island. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and American language and literature from Harvard College in 1976 and began his activism in Boston, where he worked with the publication Gay Community News.

“Gay Community News in the late 1970s was the only lesbian and gays newsweekly in America,” Burns said. “Eric was a part of that newspaper for about a decade.”

But in the 1970s, public intolerance for gays and lesbians ran high. Rofes was said to have marched in a gay pride parade with a paper bag over his head for fear of losing his job. In 1978 he was fired from a job teaching sixth-graders after he informed the principal and the school board that he was gay.

Later he was hired by the Fayerweather Street School in Cambridge, Mass.

Rofes also founded a group in Boston for gay teachers and another for gay youth. In 1982 he created the Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance, which raised the profile of gay and lesbian people in electoral politics in Massachusetts, said Burns, who is executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of New York.

At Fayerweather Rofes wrote his first book, a collaboration with his students titled “The Kids’ Book of Divorce: By, For, and About Kids” (Lewis Publishing, 1981). Two other collaborations followed.

The idea for the book grew out of a realization of the effect of divorce on children: Fourteen of his 20 students had divorced parents, and many wrestled with unresolved emotions. Potential publishers initially wanted to delete sections of the book “like living with a gay parent and parents having friends sleep over,” Rofes told The Times. Those sections remained.

In the 1980s, as AIDS decimated gay communities around the nation, Rofes confronted the crisis in Los Angeles, where he served as director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center from 1985 to 1988.

Under Rofes’ leadership, the center created one of the nation’s earliest HIV prevention programs and created a shelter for homeless gay and lesbian youth.

In 1989 he served as executive director of the Shanti Project, a nonprofit AIDS service organization in San Francisco that provided emotional support, hospital-based counseling, housing and transportation to people with AIDS. In 1993 Rofes resigned after an audit raised questions about the manner in which the group’s federal funding was spent.

In 1994 he began studies at UC Berkeley, where he earned a master’s and a doctorate in social and cultural studies.

By the late 1990s Rofes was calling for a reconceptualization of AIDS.

The 1980s description of AIDS as a crisis was “not a PR gimmick,” he said in a 1997 Village Voice article. “It was our authentic psychological and cultural response as rumors of the disease circulated, lesions appeared, corpses piled up and sex clubs closed.” But as medications allowed people to survive with the illness, the community moved out of the crisis mode, he said, and prevention efforts needed to do the same.

“If you raise a population of young gay men with the repeated idea that AIDS is the end of the world and it’s what’s going to get them, how dangerous do they consider other things like syphilis, like substance abuse, like violence?” he told a reporter for the Herald-Sun newspaper in Durham, N.C.

Rofes organized three national health summits to address a broad range of issues confronting gay men.

On Valentine’s Day in 2004, Rofes married his partner of 16 years, Crispin Hollings, in San Francisco. Their marriage and thousands of others were later invalidated by a California Supreme Court ruling.

Rofes is survived by Hollings; his mother, Paula Casey-Rofes; and a brother, Peter Rofes.

A memorial service will be held in San Francisco on July 15 at 3 p.m. at the Metropolitan Community Church, 150 Eureka St.