July 24. 2009

  E. Lynn Harris Harris recently completed a book tour for his latest novel, Basketball Jones

E. Lynn Harris, the best-selling author who introduced millions of readers to the “invisible life” of black gay men, died Thursday night while on a business trip to Los Angeles, said Laura Gilmore, his publicist. Harris was 54 years old.

In novels like Invisible Life, A Love of My Own, If This World Were Mine, and his New York Times best-selling memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Harris virtually invented a new genre: books that depicted black gay men living double lives, CNN reports.

Keith Boykin, an author and friend, explained to CNN that Harris encouraged the black community to talk openly about homosexuality.

“We have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in the black community,” Boykin said. “E. Lynn Harris encouraged people to ask and to tell.”

Detroit Free Press staff reporter Cassandra Spratling offered this profile of Harris in 2003 when his memoir was first released:

E. Lynn Harris exploded on the landscape of contemporary black literature in the 1990s like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. He introduced readers hungry for savvy stories to a stable of characters they came to know like friends they hung out with, or wanted to.

And though the characters were fictional -- sort of -- the soap opera-like drama in their lives was so real it kept readers talking long after they'd finished the last pages.

Talking and wondering, especially about how many supposedly straight men were keeping sexual trysts with men on the down low, secretly, as several of Harris' characters did.

Harris became a celebrity in both black and gay communities, a favored friend and mentor to other up-and-coming writers and, of course, a hugely successful and prolific one himself -- eight novels since 1994, when his initially self-published “Invisible Life” was picked up by a major publisher and turned into his first best-seller. Three of his novels have been optioned for films.

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identity issues

anglican

Dr. Joel D. Weisman, who was one of the first physicians to detect the AIDS epidemic and who became a national advocate for AIDS research, treatment, and prevention, died Saturday at his Westwood home, Los Angeles Times reports. He was 66.

He had heart disease and had been ill for several months, said Bill Hutton, his domestic partner of 17 years.

In 1975, Dr. Weisman came out as gay and ended a three-year marriage to start a new life in Los Angeles.

Soon after joining a medical group there as a general practitioner, he began to notice a puzzling series of ailments among gay men who came to see him. In 1978 he diagnosed a rare cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma, in a gay Anglo man in his 30s. It’s a cancer usually seen in elderly Mediterranean men. Several other other patients had shingles, another affliction normally seen in much older patients.

Dr. Weisman also had a number of patients with swollen lymph glands which is often an indication of lymphoma, a type of cancer that originates in the immune system. But in these cases, no lymphoma was detected.

In 1980, Dr. Weisman opened his own practice in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles with Dr. Eugene Rogolsky. He quickly became “the dean of southern California gay doctors” according to Randy Shilts, who described Dr. Weisman’s medical detective work in his definitive AIDS chronicle, And the Band Played On (1987).

Dr. Weisman’s growing fame allowed him to see a larger than normal number of gay male patients. And he began to detect a troubling pattern among the ailments they presented.

Dr. Weisman’s sense of foreboding deepened with the arrival of two patients who had a panoply of confounding problems: persistent diarrhea, eczema, fungal infections, low white blood cell counts, LA Times reports.

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hiv, history

state_ca, state_tx