Evans Arthur1942

American early gay rights advocate and author, best known for his 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. In 1975, he formed the Faery Circle in San Francisco. The gay pagan-inspired group was devoted to ritual play, and later influenced the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated worldwide network and countercultural movement seeking to redefine queer consciousness through secular spirituality. Politically active in New York City in the 1960s and early 1970s, Evans joined the Gay Liberation Front and co-created a cell called the Radical Study Group to examine the history of homophobia and sexism, with participants including Evans, Bell, John Lauritsen, Larry Mitchell, and Steve Dansky. Although not yet out as gay to his family, in November 1970, he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show with other leaders Marty Robinson, along with Dick Leitsch of the Mattachine Society, making them among the first openly gay activists to be prominently featured on a national TV program. He and his lover Jacob Schraeter began a 40-acre homestead in Washington state in 1972, naming the land New Sodom and living in tents during the summers. Evans, Schraeter, and a third member formed the Weird Sisters Partnership group, named after the trio in Macbeth, a homesteading collective seeking self-sufficiency, with the group living off wild berries and vegetables. He later moved to San Francisco where he became a fixture in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. In his later years, Evans remained politically active and continued as a translator and academic. His 1997 book Critique of Patriarchal Reason argued that misogyny had influenced "objective" fields such as logic and physics. In 1964 he became lovers with Arthur Bell, and they separated in 1971. In 1972 in New York he became romantically involved with Jacob Schraeter, and they spent two years homesteading together in Washington state. In 1974 they moved to San Francisco, with Evans living in an apartment at the corner of Haight Ashbury for the remainder of his life, although Schraeter returned to New York in 1981. Diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm in October 2010, Evans died in his Haight-Ashbury apartment of a massive heart attack on 11 September 2011 at age 68. Link to Wikipedia biography Read less