I was confirming with Wayne Hoffman this morning the details of our interview for BEEF mag and for Bear Soup #25 (coming online this week) when he emailed me saying that our friend (and Bears on Bears contributor) Eric Rofes was found dead in his apartment today in Provincetown. He said he'd keep me updated but I haven't heard anything further. What a shocker. Can't find any other news about it online.
Update 3:20pm: http://www.baywindows.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=7DF1056FE578447BA3ED3C661D9DCCD0
Eric Rofes: 1954-2006
by Ethan Jacobs
Bay WindowsFriends and family will gather tomorrow, June 28, at noon for a memorial service at Provincetown's McHoul Funeral Home, located at 94 Harry Kemp Way.
Activist, author and teacher Eric Rofes died June 26 in Provincetown from what police say looks like natural causes. Rofes had long Boston roots, working as part of the collective that published Gay Community News. He founded a number of groundbreaking Boston LGBT organizations, including the city’s first group for LGBT teachers, Boston Area Gay and Lesbian Schoolworkers and two of the country’s first queer youth groups, Out Here for Gay Youth and the Committee for Gay Youth. 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.” He also founded the city’s first group aimed at organizing gay and lesbian voters, the Gay and Lesbian Political Alliance.
In the mid-80s Rofes moved to California, becoming executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in 1985, launching some of the nation’s first HIV prevention programs and opening the first HIV testing site in the state. In 1989 he became executive director of San Francisco’s Shanti Project, which was then the nation’s largest provider of housing for people with HIV/AIDS. In 1993, 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.
Beginning in the 90s he worked as an activist in the gay men’s health movement, helping to organize three national summits on gay men’s health. He served as an associate professor of education at Humboldt State University from 1999 until his death. His most recent book, A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling: Status Quo or Status Queer? (Rowman & Littlefield) was published last year.
Rofes was in Provincetown for the summer on a writing sabbatical, according to information posted on his website. Provincetown police Staff Sergeant Warren Tobias said Rofes passed away from what seem like natural causes, and there was no sign of a struggle or of drug use. He said Rofes’s family has been notified, and the case has been turned over to the Boston medical examiner’s office to determine cause of death.
