This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. Kenneth Lewes grew up after World War II in a working-class neighborhood of the northeast Bronx, the son of an immigrant couple who never got beyond grade school.
He guessed even before he entered junior high school that he was gay. But it wasn’t until he was nearly 50 — and publishing what would become a critically acclaimed takedown of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality — that he confided his sexual orientation to his parents. “I remember finding my way to the local public library and checking out books on psychology and human development,” he said in an interview in 2019 with the Journal of Gay & Lesbian.