Gay Liberation Pioneer Arnie Kantrowitz dies at 81


Arnie Kantrowitz, a literature professor and early advocate of gay rights and a tireless campaigner for the media to treat gay people more fairly, died January 21 at a Manhattan rehab facility. He was 81 years old.

The reason was complications from his life partner, Covid-19. Lawrence D. Massaforementioned.

The gay rights movement was fueled by a riot in mid-1969, provoked by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village that led to the founding of the Gay Activists Alliance a few months later. Mr. Kantrowitz became vice president of the organization in 1970 as he began to come to terms with his own homosexuality.

In 1985, she was a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (now known as GLAAD), which was formed to counter the negative media coverage of the AIDS crisis.

His memoir, “Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay” (1977), showed a wide audience the difficulties he and his gay contemporaries faced in the 1950s and 60s, and recalled how he faced them, including two suicide attempts. The book also chronicled historical events in the movement, including the first Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day Parade held in New York City in 1969.

“He was the leader of the generation of activists who put their lives and livelihoods to advance the gay liberation cause in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall Rebellion,” wrote Andy Humm last month. GayCityNews.com.

Dr. Mass described Mr. Kantrowitz as “a true sage and champion”.

Credit…Bolerium Books

Arnold Kantrowitz was born on November 26, 1940 in Newark. His mother, Jean (Zabarsky) Kantrowitz, was a real estate broker. His father, Morris, was a lawyer and salesman.

Arnold graduated from Weequahic High and was accepted by Columbia and Princeton. However, he later remembered that, being both gay and Jewish, he did not enroll in either school because of his lack of self-confidence.

“I felt the ‘other’,” she said in an interview with. Queer Newark Oral History Project in 2015. “I felt different than they wanted me to be my family.”

“My mom even took me to the doctor,” he added. “He didn’t think I was gay, he thought I was sensitive. And me! Both of them!”

He graduated from Rutgers University-Newark with a BA in 1961 and earned a MA in English literature from New York University in 1963. He also completed his preparations for his doctoral degree at NYU.

His first teaching post was at the State University of New York, Cortland, from 1963 to 1965. From 1965 until his retirement in 2006, he taught where City University offered one of the oldest gay studies courses at the College of Staten Island. In 1999, he was elected head of the English department.

Mr. Kantrowitz was a leading advocate of Walt Whitman’s work and author of a biography of Whitman, published in 2005 as part of the “Gay and Lesbian Writers” series.

At one point, he shared a house at 186 Spring Street in Lower Manhattan with two other gay rights leaders: James W. OwlsDied of AIDS in 1993 at the age of 46, Dr. bruce voellerHe died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of 59.

Physician and author, founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Dr. Along with Mass, his brother Barry is saved from Mr. Kantrowitz.

Mr. Kantrowitz, who was involved in the founding of the gay rights movement and survived longer than many of its other founders, many of whom died of AIDS, provided a longer perspective on the movement’s progress and the personal balance of patience and willpower. the strength needed to endure being gay in an undesirable world.

In a queer Newark interview, he recalled that during his early days in the Gay Activists League, he assumed that gay marriage would be embraced by Americans immediately. A few years later she realized it would take much longer,

“And it took a moment to look back now, you know,” he said, “because looking back at the long historical view, how many years are there? Forty-six, 50 years, whatever? That’s a very small amount of time given the duration of history.”

Similarly, he recalled that while he was teaching, they shared questions of gay students about their sexuality with him cautiously, but with an intimacy that he had never felt comfortable with as a college student.

“The students came to me with their secrets and, you know, I supported them as much as I could,” Kantrowitz said, and I encouraged them by saying, “I survived, you will live too.”



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