Arnie Kantrowitz, Pioneering Activist and GLAAD Cofounder, Dead at 81
The New York Times. The cause of death was complications of COVID-19.Kantrowitz was “an early champion of gay rights and an indefatigable campaigner for fairer treatment of gay people by the media,” the Times notes.
Mass, a founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, called Kantrowitz “a true sage and champion.”He became vice president of the Gay Activists Alliance, one of the first groups founded in the wake of the Stonewall riots, in 1970.
That was also the year he came to terms with being gay, according to the Times. He helped found GLAAD, then known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, in 1985.He was a professor in the English department at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island from 1965 to 2006, and while there he created one of the first gay studies courses in the nation.
He promoted the work of Walt Whitman and other gay writers.In 1977 he published a memoir, Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay, in which he chronicled the difficulties he and other gay people faced in mid-century America.
