15 Sep ARTHUR EVANS, LEADER IN GAY RIGHTS, DIES
Arthur Evans, who helped form and lead the movement that coalesced after gay people and their supporters protested a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a New York gay bar, died on Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 68.
The cause was a heart attack, his friend Hal Offen said. Evans was found to have an aortic aneurysm last year.
Evans was not at the Stonewall disturbances, but they fueled in him a militant fervor and inspired him to join the Gay Liberation Front, an organization started during the wave of gay assertiveness that followed.
For Evans and other militants, however, the group was not assertive enough. They worried that it was diluting its effectiveness by taking stands on issues beyond gay rights — opposing the Vietnam War and racial discrimination, for example. So in December 1969 they split off to found the Gay Activists Alliance, choosing a name to suggest more aggressive tactics.
While living in Washington, Evans had spent his winters in Seattle researching the historical origins of the counterculture. After settling in San Francisco, he wrote “Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture,” a 1978 book tracing homophobic attitudes to the Middle Ages, when people accused of witchcraft, the book contended, were being persecuted in part for their sexuality, often their homosexuality.
He went on to write “Critique of Patriarchal Reason” (1997), arguing that misogyny and homophobia have influenced supposedly objective fields like logic and physics