The New York Times Blogs - November 7, 2008
Sewell Chan and Jonathan P. Hicks

The death was confirmed by Geoff Eaton, who was the councilman's chief of staff and is now an aide to Representative Charles B. Rangel. The cause was complication of pneumonia resulting from leukemia, Mr. Eaton said.

Elected in 1997, Mr. Reed represented East Harlem and Manhattan Valley, and parts of the Upper West Side and the South Bronx. He left office in 2005, unable to seek re-election to a third term because of term limits. He was a Democrat, and the first openly gay black member of the City Council.

Born on Feb. 21, 1949, Mr. Reed, a New York native, was the son of a black father and a white mother. He and a twin sister were "raised by their mother and stepfather, both white, in an upper-middle-class Manhattan world of civil rights activism, prep schools, the Vineyard," according to a 1998 profile in The Times.

Mr. Reed dropped out of Ohio Wesleyan University and received conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War. He was involved in the original Stonewall riots, and then spent 10 years in San Francisco, as a salesman for the Otis Elevator Company and as a gay political activist.

He returned to New York in the late 1970s, and became politically active through a block association, leaving Otis to run a service program in Brooklyn for people with H.I.V. He lived for many years at 425 Central Park West, near 103rd Street. He became a Democratic district leader in the late 1980s.

Mr. Reed became H.I.V.-positive in 1981, when the virus that causes AIDS was first detected, and fought health problems for years; in 1997, he completed chemotherapy for multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer.

Mr. Reed had fairly contentious races in both his campaigns for the Council, running unsuccessfully for the State Senate and for the Council before winning a council seat in 1997, in a district that had previously been represented by Adam Clayton Powell IV, who ran for Manhattan borough president. The district has a largely Hispanic population, and Mr. Reed first won by prevailing in a field with four other candidates, all of them Hispanic.

Four years later, in 2001, he prevailed again, but after an even more contentious campaign in the Democratic primary. In that race he faced Felipe Luciano, a television reporter and anchor and a co-founder of the Young Lords.

Mr. Reed was a champion of asthma prevention legislation, frequently pointing out this his district had some of the highest rates of the disease in the state. He was also a passionate advocate for measures to have the city stimulate the development of affordable housing for moderate- and low-income New Yorkers. He was also a staunch opponent of a plan by the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to relocate the Museum of the City of New York from East Harlem to the old Tweed Courthouse, near City Hall. That relocation was later reversed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He was also an outspoken critic of random searches of black men known as racial profiling.

Mr. Reed is survived by his twin sister, Elinor Reed of Manhattan.

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