A Gay Pioneer has died...

[Chris James]

Frank died yesterday...it was like losing a member of the family.

http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2011/10/promine...eny-dies-at-86/

Before you think we were close friends I will say we were not, everyone called him Frank. He was everywhere in Washington, D.C...everywhere gay. I first met him at an AIDS march in the early eighties, I think it was the very first one held. A year later we talked at a friend's house and again I saw him at talk he gave in a gay bookstore.

Frank used to tell it like it is. He was one of the first outspoken members of the gay community, a role forced upon him by his firing as a government employee for being gay. He was a sage, a wonderful speaker and the force behind the Mattachine Society, Washington's first gay rights organization.

No doubt he had quite an ego, but he needed one after what happened to him. You can see that in some of the videos posted online. But he was a kind man, a caring man, and everything a gay man ought to be. He used that power to grab headlines, to inspire the fight for gay rights. He rallied people to the cause, he cried at funerals and like the rest of us he lost many friends. He will be missed.