Bay Windows - June 29, 2006
Laura Kiritsy, lkiritsy@baywindows.com

Indeed, Rofes was a man of considerable accomplishment before his death from an apparent heart attack on June 26 at the age of 51. He leaves a 30-year legacy of groundbreaking gay and AIDS activism that had its beginnings in Boston and a body of published work that includes 12 books, dozens of scholarly essays and hundreds of articles that display his breadth of expertise, from the politics of charter schools to the impact of AIDS on gay male sexual culture. At the time of his death, Rofes, an associate professor of education at Humboldt State University, was on sabbatical in Provincetown, writing a book about the lives of gay men in the decade before the AIDS crisis struck.

Crispin Hollings, Rofes's partner of 16 years, said that Rofes was never idle. "In a way he was always working. He was always working on our relationship. He was always totally devoted to us," said Hollings. There was precious time reserved just for the couple, such as lighting Shabbat candles every Friday night. But almost always, Rofes was organizing. "I would call him down to dinner and he would be working on some book or organizing someone's birthday party or organizing his sex and politics discussion group," said Hollings.

"There was never a dull moment." Even when Rofes occasionally settled in to watch television - preferably Sex in the City or Ally McBeal - he was organizing some activity via e-mail at the same time. "He organized little silly things even, like Uno games, said Hollings, who made his home with Rofes in San Francisco. "He was an addict of Uno."

Rofes, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island, arrived in the Boston area in the early 1970s to attend Harvard University. His career in activism began when he joined the collective that published the advocacy-oriented Gay Community News (GCN), at the time the only weekly gay newspaper in the country. Rofes was a teacher in Belmont and wrote under the pseudonym Eric Rogers for fear of getting fired if his bosses found out he was gay. (In the mid-70s, he attended a Boston Pride Parade wearing a paper bag over his head and holding a sign that read "Jack and Jill can come out, but their teacher can't.") But he did not confine his passion for advancing gay rights to his work at GCN. Rofes, who was eventually fired from his teaching job in 1978 because he was gay, founded Boston Area Gay and Lesbian Schoolworkers, the city's first organization of gay educators. Rofes also founded two of the country's first queer youth advocacy groups, Out Here for Gay Youth and the Committee for Gay Youth.

But perhaps his most lasting impact on gay activism in the Boston area was his founding of the Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance in 1982. Rofes organized the Alliance to help pull together disparate factions of the Boston gay community in order to boost the community's political power as the Boston City Council moved from all at-large representation to a combination of district representation and at-large seats. "The Alliance was a vehicle for which lots of interested activists were able to jump into the campaigns of various figures," said Don Gorton, who was involved with the Alliance from 1988 to 1994, after Rofes had departed Boston to head the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. "That was the first time gays and lesbians mobilized in city politics in a decisive way."

Richard Burns, whose friendship with Rofes spanned the 30 years since they first met as colleagues at GCN in the 1970s, attributes Rofes's passion for activism to his "growing up as a faggot" and a Jew.

"I think those cultural identities informed his passion for justice," said Burns, executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center, who also added that Rofes "had a sexual freedom, sexual liberation bent, to his very core."

Rofes also infused his activism with his feminist and anti-racist values. At a time when there was little overlap between the gay male and lesbian communities, Rofes nurtured a distinctly co-ed environment at GCN, said Burns. Hollings recalled attending a birthday party about three or four months ago. "We were the only white people, the only men," said Hollings, "and I thought I wouldn't be here right now if it weren't that Eric [was committed to] feminist and anti-racist issues. It was meaningful both on a political and personal level for Eric."

In 1985, Rofes took the helm of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Services Center, the largest LGBT service organization in the world, where he confronted the AIDS crisis head on. During his tenure, the center launched some of the nation's first HIV prevention programs and opened the first HIV testing site in the state. Angered by the homophobia and government apathy that accompanied the burgeoning epidemic, Rofes sounded a call for the gay community to get tough. In a 1986 article for The Advocate titled "A Call to Resist: Gays Must Return to Activism," Rofes wrote, "If you are a gay man or lesbian in America today, your rights are threatened more than they've ever been during the past 15 years." He urged a movement that would incorporate "the militancy of the 60s to the issues of the 80s," that included "creative forms of militancy, including passive resistance, high visibility zaps and outrageous street dramas" - the tactics that would be adopted by ACT UP when it formed a year later. His HIV/AIDS activism continued when he became the executive director of San Francisco's Shanti Project, a housing agency for people with HIV/AIDS, in 1989. He was forced to resign after an investigation by the San Francisco City AIDS Project revealed that Rofes and his deputy director Melinda Paras could not account for $2.7 million in federal funding spent by the Shanti Project from 1991 to 1993.

As an HIV/AIDS activist with roots in the sexual liberation movement that characterized the early years of gay activism, Rofes became concerned that that gay male sexuality was being pathologized as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. "If you remember the roots of our movement among other things it was a sexual liberation movement, and when our sexuality became pathologized, Eric challenged that," said Burns. Rofes showed up to testify at a 1991 National Commission on AIDS hearing in San Francisco clad in leather, to make a statement about the array of sexual expression in gay culture.

In a 1999 Bay Windows op-ed titled "Gay men are neither dumb or self-destructive" Rofes decried the use of 80s-era prevention messages despite the advances in HIV/AIDS treatment. "By willfully misrepresenting gay men who organize their sex and relationships outside of the crisis-driven dictates of 1980s prevention, AIDS leaders cross an important line," he wrote. "They find it convenient to use all-too-willing mainstream media, amidst a political climate of homophobia and sexphobia, to divide gay men into good and bad." Rofes also published two books on the subject, Dry Bones Breathe: Gay men creating post-AIDS identities and Cultures and Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic.

After years of HIV/AIDS activism, Rofes eventually began to look at gay men's health from a more comprehensive perspective. In 1999, he organized the first Gay Men's Health Summit in Boulder, Colo., laying the groundwork for a gay men's health movement in the U.S. that looked at health issues beyond HIV, such as prostate cancer, depression and substance abuse, as well as looking at non-crisis oriented models of gay men's healthcare. Similar summits were held afterward, most recently in Salt Lake City, Utah, in October 2005.

Unlike many of his peers from the sexual liberation movement days, Rofes also embraced the marriage equality movement. He and Hollings were married on Valentine's Day 2004 in San Francisco, when Mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. When, six months later, the California Supreme Court nullified the more than 4000 marriages that occurred there, Rofes joined an Aug. 12 protest of the court's decision - despite having had root canal surgery earlier that day - in San Francisco's Castro district. He carried a sign that proclaimed "Justice will prevail" on one side; the other side declared "Null and void? Not my marriage."

"I was hoping they wouldn't annul the marriages," Rofes told Bay Windows in an interview after the court ruling. "That made me angry and energized and made many of us enraged." Rofes channeled his anger into an organization called Perfect Union, which encourages grassroots activism around the achievement of marriage equality. "I believe this is a battle that's going to be won as much in the neighborhoods and the streets and our workplaces as it is in the courts and the Congress and the media," he said.

Needless to say, Rofes will be remembered in many ways. Burns ticks off a few: a thinker, a critical analyst, an activist who could make things happen. "Eric was the consummate community organizer, he would synthesize ideas and then decide, we're going to plan a demonstration, we're going to create a conference, we're going to create a gay men's health movement and work and collaborate with other people," said Burns.

But he adds: "I think that ... many of us will remember him more deeply as a very loyal, supportive friend."

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