William Armstrong Percy, III

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William Armstrong Percy, III
Born	10 December 1933
Occupation	professor, historian, encyclopedist, and gay activist

William Armstrong Percy, III, (born 10 December 1933) is a professor, historian, encyclopedist, and gay activist. He is a cousin of the Catholic novelist and philosopher Walker Percy and of their “Uncle Will,” William Alexander Percy (gay lawyer, poet, and author of the family history and autobiographical Lanterns on the Levee). His mother Anne Minor Dent was raised by her widowed uncle, the distinguished Memphis lawyer Dent Minor, scion of 17th century settlers of those names in Maryland and Virginia, whose great-uncle John B. Minor taught law at the University of Virginia from 1845 to 1895 and served for decades as dean of the Law School there.

After graduating as valedictorian of Middlesex School (in Concord, Massachusetts) in 1951, Percy went on to Princeton University, where he entered the Special Program in the Humanities. There he began to experience the rejection and extreme persecution of gays in those years of McCarthyism. At a time when conscription was still in effect, he volunteered for the U.S. Army. In his military stint, Percy studied Norwegian at the Army Language School and worked as a French interpreter on loan to the Central Intelligence Agency on the island of Saipan.

Following the completion of his military service, Percy received from the University of Tennessee his B.A. in 1957. He then spent a year obtaining a Certificato from the University of Naples. He went on to earn a M.A. from Cornell University and an A.M., and in 1964 his Ph.D. from Princeton.

Percy then taught at the University of New Orleans, Louisiana State University, and the University of Missouri at St. Louis for two years each. In 1968 he finally settled at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he has been teaching since. After gaining tenure and promotion to full professor, Percy came out to colleagues in 1975. He joined the fight for equal rights for gays in 1982 and began publishing in gay studies three years later. Currently he is writing his memoirs, a sort of modern Lanterns on the Levee that outs many members of his family.

In 1994, Percy offered a bounty of $10,000 for the successful outing of a living American Cardinal, a sitting justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and a four-star officer on active duty in the U.S. military. In light of the Supreme Court decision that decriminalized sodomy (Lawrence v. Texas), he has amended his bounty offer to no longer include a justice of that venerable institution. His offer, upped to $20,000, still stands for Cardinals and four-star officers.

[edit] Percy Family Writers

[edit] Family

[edit] Bibliography

With Jerah Johnson. The Age of Recovery: The Fifteenth Century (Vol. X, The Development of Western Civilization series). New York: Cornell University Press, 1970.
Associate editor with Warren Johannsen. Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. Ed. Wayne R. Dynes. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1990. The Encyclopedia won 6 prizes: The Laud Humphreys prize; Choice; American Libraries; American Library Association; New York Public Library; Gay and Lesbian Task Force of the American Library Association.
With Warren Johansson. Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. New York: Haworth Press, 1994.
Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. Campagne/Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. ISBN 0252022092
With Arnold Lelis and Beert Verstraete. The Age of Marriage in Ancient Rome. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.
With Lewis Gannett he authored chapter length biographies of Jim Kepner and C.A. Tripp and outed his “Uncle” William Alexander Percy. He also authored a bio on Warren Johansson.

Persondata
NAME	Percy, William Armstrong III
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Historian, Gay Activist
DATE OF BIRTH	10 December 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH