In memoriam: Eric Rofes.

When gays were still dying of AIDS complications in big numbers in the 1990s, pioneering gay activist and author Eric Rofes railed against those who suggested gay men should just "grow up" and reject public sexual culture. In the midst of a panic surrounding HIV, he said, there seemed to be a cultural amnesia about the lessons learned from gay liberation.

It was a provocative position, one that helped to define Rofes, who died at age 51 of an apparent heart attack while on a writing sabbatical in Provincetown, Mass., on June 26. "Our inability to continue confronting the ever-intensifying manifestations of AIDS has brought us to the point of paralysis," Rofes wrote in his 1995 book Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic.

An educator by profession, Rofes was editor of the Gay Community News in Boston in the 1970s, the only LGBT newsweekly at the time. He served as director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in the 1980s, then became executive director of the Shanti Project in San Francisco.

Rofes authored no fewer than 12 books, but he will likely be remembered for being an activist when activism was dangerous, says Richard Burns, executive director of New York City's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center. "He believed we needed to build a healthy community and respect adult sexual decisions and not pathologize or infantilize gay men's sexual lives," Burns says. "In the face of HIV/AIDS that was not always a popular view."

Rofes is survived by his longtime partner, Crispin Hollings.