October 4, 1947 – April 4, 2020
Detroit native Raymond Henry Warner Jr. graduated with the class of 1965 from Redford Union High School, attended Wayne State University, and worked for the State of Michigan from 1970 until his retirement. He was an early leader in the Detroit Gay Liberation Front, and wrote for the Gay Liberator and Gayzette newspapers. Warner became active in the Libertarian Party, running for Congress in 1996.
May 12, 1936 – December 10, 2022
Native Detroiter Charles Robert Alexander came out into the gay world while a student at Cass Tech. He earned his B.A. at Wayne State University and had a long career with the Detroit schools. An acclaimed artist, he was active with Affirmations and MCC Detroit, and in 1997 received the local LGBTQ Lifetime Achievement Award. Alexander wrote more than 700 columns over 27 years for Between The Lines.
January 2, 1897 – October 11, 1964
Harold Clement Auer was born in Cadillac. In 1921, while working as a writer for the Detroit Free Press, he wrote a fan letter to famed British author Edward Carpenter, correspondence later included in Jonathan Ned Katz’s 1983 book Gay/Lesbian Almanac. Auer spent the last 20 years of his life in the Eloise Psychiatric Hospital in Westland, later known as Wayne County General Hospital and Infirmary.
No known obituary
June 26, 1939 – July 3, 1998
Police arrested 20-year-old Muskegon native John Leon Allen in January 1960 in a crackdown on homosexual activity at the University of Michigan. He was permitted to graduate, doing so with honors. He went on to earn his library science degree at the University in 1964 and his Ph.D. in 1974. Allen later served as longtime columnist for the Muskegon Chronicle, coming out to his readers in the early 1990s.
Muskegon Chronicle, July 4, 1998
February 27. 1958 – November 20, 2020
Deborah Jane “Deb” Price started college at the University of Michigan before transferring to Stanford, where she earned her B.A. and M.A. In 1992, while working for the Detroit News, she began writing a regular column on gay life, the first for a mainstream daily newspaper. The column was soon syndicated throughout the U.S. and continued for 18 years. Price was survived by her wife Joyce Murdoch.
November 26, 1936 – October 12, 2016
Originally from Flint, Wayne Friday served in the U.S. Navy following high school and later worked as a stock broker on Wall Street and in San Francisco where Friday became close friends with future gay supervisor Harvey Milk. He also tended bar and for more than three decades he wrote a political column for the Bay Area Reporter. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Friday took his own life at age 79.
March 31, 1943 – February 19, 1996
A native of Detroit and graduate of Mumford High School, Gerald Jhazel “Gerry” Fife won a Hopwood Award for his fiction at the University of Michigan and earned his B.A. in journalism there in 1965. After moving to California, he worked as a radio reporter for KSWO in Los Angeles and held positions with Crocker Bank and at the University of San Francisco.
January 23, 1937 – June 26, 1996
A native of the Isabella County town of Weidman, Bob Gross covered high school sports for the Lansing State Journal for 34 years and lived a largely closeted life. In 1996, he was murdered by a young man he picked up at Stober’s Bar. Gross was posthumously inducted into the Greater Lansing Sports Hall of Fame in 2016.
December 12, 1968 – January 18, 2014
Theresa Fabus was born in Alma and graduated from Ashley High School in 1987. She went on to attend Alma College and Lansing Community College and later worked as a sports writer for the Meridian Weekly. Fabus and her partner Traci Gulick shared a home in Ovid.
Michigan LGBTQ Remember 