This is the sixth year that I've compiled a (very incomplete) list of people we lost in 2011 whose life and work touched others, and in some ways contributed to our overall understanding of sexuality and gender. It's become a kind of mournful ritual for me. As people pass away I mourn their loss, but I also begin to put them on a list. I start thinking about it in mid-November and begin work in earnest in December. There are no criteria to who is on this list. My approach is neither scientific nor journalistic. I turn to friends and colleagues, I consult Wikipedia, and I use newspaper obituaries least of all (since most of the people who I want to remember aren't considered important enough to warrant a public obituary, and the paid obits don't offer much information).
As soon as I started doing this I was surprised by something. It seemed to me that there were a lot of people each year who killed themselves. More than I would expect. I quickly realized this was a function of how I compile the list. Suicides aren't reported in the newspaper as news, and even in obituaries, someone who killed themselves is more often described as having "died suddenly." But when you learn about people dying from someone who had a personal connection to them, you often get more of the story than you might reading a blurb in the newspaper.
This seems particularly important for those of us who choose to spend our lives talking about or working around issues of sexuality and gender. All of us have an experience of silence and shame. And most of us know that in the silence more shame can grown, more pain can be felt, and the risks for violence (at our own or someone elses hands) increase.
And so it feels to me as if the people we are remembering here would probably want us to know more, not less. That they might even prefer that we remember the complicated, messy, and dark parts of their lives and experience, and not only the Kodak moments.
So I've tried to share some of that here, with a little bit about each person we've lost and links to allow you to read more about who they were, and why they will be missed.
Read More: Sexual Losses 2011
Previously: Sexual Losses 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
| | Twitter | Newsletter Signup | Sexuality Forum | |