Chris Bell (1974 – 2009)
I can’t offer you the exact dates of Chris Bell’s birth and death, which is precisely why I write this column once a year. I didn’t know Chris personally, although I was at the Queer Disability Conference in 2002 where he gave a paper titled “To Act Is to Be Committed”. I read about his death on a listserv, and then went to read more about this activist and academic who brought together threads of disability, illness, HIV, race, class, and orientation as he experienced them in his own life and tried to make them accessible and relatable for others who were more unaware of them than necessarily unaffected by them.
Chris was a former president of the Society for Disability Studies and at the time of his death lived in Syracuse, NY where he was a Fellow at the Center for Human Policy, Law and Disability Studies at Syracuse University. He was working on a PhD in the UK. In his relatively short life Chris contributed with both passion and compassion to public discussions and understandings of what it means to be disabled, to be sick, to be HIV+, to be gay, to be black, to be a man…what it means to be human. The comments online regarding the news of his death speak to the many ways Chris made a difference and touched people’s lives personally and professionally.
Read more – Media dis&dat: Obituary: Chris Bell, disability studies scholar on race, HIV/AIDS, dies
Alice Rossi (September 24, 1922 - November 3, 2009)
One of the founders of the National Organization for Women, sociologist Alice Rossi was attacked and called “a monster, an unnatural woman, and an unfit mother” for suggesting that the world would be a better place if women had the choice and option to work if they chose rather than stay home and raise children. Looking back Rossi wrote “My theme was simple enough. For the first time in known history, I wrote, motherhood had become a full-time occupation for adult women, and motherhood was not enough. For the psychological and physical health of mother and child, for the sake of the trembling family unit, and for the progress of society, equality between men and women was essential and inevitable. Older women, who were past career choices, resented my article; younger women felt reprieved. I know for certain that my essay lowered the birth rate by at least 12 children, and increased the number of Ph.D.’s accordingly.” She was also the author of the important 1994 text Sexuality Across the Life Course.
Read more - New York Times: Alice S. Rossi, Sociologist and Feminist Scholar, Dies at 87
Jack Wrangler (July 11, 1946 – April 7, 2009)
Known first as a gay porn performer, and later in life as a writer and theatre producer, Jack Wrangler embodied much of what is complicated and confusing about sexuality. While he started in gay porn he also performed in straight porn, and his thirty-three year romantic relationship with singer Margaret Whiting presented a challenge to anyone wanting to box in his emotions, identities and desires. I love this quote from a 2008 interview about why doing gay porn was important to him: "At the time we were all trying to find out who the hell we were as individuals, what we wanted specifically on our own terms, who we wanted to be, what our potentials were, what our differences were, what made us unique… And I think that's why the XXX-rated films were important, because it was like, Oh, my God, there are other people who like the same things as me, like leather, or being blown on a pool table. [Laughs] It was a start—literally stripping ourselves naked and trying to begin from there." I also love the story that he landed a part in a play as a bad go-go dancer after being discovered go-go dancing (badly) at a club.
Read more - SFGate.com: Porn star, theater producer Jack Wrangler dies
Marilyn French (November 21, 1929 - May 2, 2009)
I remember my mother’s copy of “The Women’s Room”. It was the white one that had the word “Women’s” written in pen over the word “ladies” in the title. I would have been eight or nine years old and feeling not particularly like a boy I thought both words sounded better than the ones I was being called. French was called “anti-male” (whatever that means) and was frequently associated with a quote from one of her characters who said “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.” But if you read her work or ever heard her speak (which I got to do once in Vancouver, BC) you understood that her own analysis was far more complicated that that of her characters. Writing in her 1992 book “The War on Women” French argued that “Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it,” Whatever one thinks of her statements on gender and power in isolation, her willingness to speak directly to injustices she perceived, and not worry about the political consequences, is something that will be sorely missed.
Read more – Women’s Media Center: Carol Jenkins Remembers Marilyn French
Marilyn Chambers (April 22, 1952 – April 12, 2009)
Marilyn Chambers was best known for her work in “Golden Era” seminal porn films including Behind the Green Door and Insatiable. Chambers was also one of the first porn stars to attract significant mainstream media attention. At the time that Behind the Green Door came out a non-sex modeling job Chambers had done much earlier came to fruition when her face appeared on the box cover of Ivory Snow powdered detergent (advertised as "99 44/100% pure”). Chambers left porn but came back to it in the late 1990s performing in several films directed by Veronica Hart. Chambers always seemed honest and avoided simplifying her relationship to porn, something that isn’t easy to accomplish given the many pressures big name performers experience from the media, anti-porn activists, and the self-aggrandizing porn industry.
Read more – LA Times: Marilyn Chambers dies at 56; '70s porn star and Ivory Snow model
