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Rodger McFarlane (February 25, 1955 – May 15, 2009)
Rodger Allen McFarlane (February 25, 1955 – May 15, 2009) was an American gay rights activist who served as the first paid executive director of the Gay Men's Health Crisis and later served in leadership positions with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Bailey House and the Gill Foundation.McFarlane was born on February 25, 1955 in Mobile, Alabama and was raised on the family's soybean and chicken farm in Theodore, Alabama. The 6-foot, 7-inch McFarlane played football in high school, where he was "a monster, a legend", who was "big enough to get past the gay thing" playing football and could then "go jump rope with the girls." He attended the University of South Alabama. He enlisted in the United States Navy in 1974, serving on a submarine as a nuclear reactor technician. Following his military service, McFarlane moved to New York City, where he worked as a respiratory therapist.
In the early 1980s, McFarlane walked into the offices of Gay Men's Health Crisis, offering to serve as a volunteer. He began a crisis counseling hotline that originated on his own home telephone, which ultimately became one of the organization's most effective tools for sharing information about AIDS. Shortly thereafter, he was named as the first paid executive director of GMHC, helping create a more formal structure for the nascent organization, which had no funding or offices when he took on the role. Larry Kramer, the playwright and gay rights activist who was one of the six founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1982, became a friend of McFarlane's, describing that by the time of his death, "the G.M.H.C. is essentially what he started: crisis counseling, legal aid, volunteers, the buddy system, social workers" as part of an organization that serves more than 15,000 people affected by HIV and AIDS.
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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodger_McFarlane
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More LGBT History at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Gay Classics
The Book: Tommy is twenty-nine, lives and loves in London, and has a morbid fear of the c word (commitment), the b word (boyfriend), and the f word (forgetting to call his drug dealer before the weekend). But when he begins to feel the urge to become a father, and the pressure from his boyfriend to make a real commitment to their relationship, Tommy starts to wonder if his chosen lifestyle can ever make him happy.
The Author: Alan Cumming, OBE (born 27 January 1965), is a Scottish stage, television and film actor, singer, writer, director, producer and author. His roles have included the Emcee in Cabaret, Boris Grishenko in GoldenEye, Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United, Mr. Elton in Emma, and Fegan Floop in the Spy Kids films. He has also appeared in independent films like The Anniversary Party, which he co-wrote, co-directed and co-starred in; and Ali Selim's Sweet Land, for which he won an Independent Spirit award as producer.