Eric Rofes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eric Rofes (August 31, 1954 — June 26, 2006) was a gay activist, feminist, educator, and author who wrote or edited 12 books.
Rofes was a native of Brooklyn, New York and a graduate of Harvard University. He received a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995 and a doctorate in social and cultural studies in 1998.
He was appointed to the White House Conference on the Family in 1980. He became director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in the 1980s.
In 1989 Rofes became executive director of the Shanti Project, a nonprofit AIDS service organization in San Francisco. He resigned in 1993, following an audit that questioned how the group had spent federal funds.
In 1998 Rofes wrote Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures, in which he argued that the AIDS crisis had passed and gay men needed to free themselves from the sense of emergency and victimhood. A review in The Nation described Dry Bones Breathe as "perhaps the most important book about gay male culture and community of the past decade."
Rofes was a professor of Education at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, and served on the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Rofes was in Provincetown, Massachusetts, working on his 13th book when he died of a heart attack.
[edit] Bibliography
- The Kids' Book of Divorce: By For and About Kids, 1983 (English and Japanese editions)
- "I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves" Lesbians, Gay Men and Suicide, 1983
- The Kids' Book About Parents, 1983
- The Kids' Book About Death and Dying: By and For Kids, 1997 (English, Japanese, and Chinese editions)
- Socrates, Plato, & Guys Like Me: Confessions of a Gay School Teacher, 1985
- Gay Life: Leisure, Love, and Living for the Contemporary Gay Male, 1986
- Living with AIDS on Long Island: A Practical Guide, 1989
- Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic, 1996
- Opposite Sex: Gay Men on Lesbians, Lesbians on Gay Men, 1998
- Dry Bones Breathe: Gay men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures, 1998
- Youth and Sexualities: Pleasure, Subversion, and Insubordination In and Out of Schools, 2004
- The Emancipatory Promise of Charter Schools: Toward a Progressive Politics of School Choice, 2004
- A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality & Schooling: Status Quo or Status Queer, 2005
