Arnie Kantrowitz - Nominee

“When I see young men and old women come out of the closet and face being called faggots and dykes and pariahs and betrayers of the family dream, then I am honored to be gay because I belong to a people who are proud.”

– Arnie Kantrowitz

Trailblazing LGBTQ+ activist, author and college professor Arnie Kantrowitz was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1940 and spent his childhood and adolescence there. He graduated from Rutgers University-Newark in 1961 with a BA degree and a received his master’s degree from New York University in 1963, both in English Literature. While at Rutgers, Kantrowitz was the English Club president and ‘Gallery’ student literary magazine editor. Kantrowitz taught in the English departments at New York State University College at Cortland from 1963-1965 and then at the CUNY College of Staten Island from 1965 until his retirement in 2006. In 1970, Kantrowitz came out publicly as a gay man and immediately got involved in LGBTQ+ activism. He was the Gay Activist Alliance’s vice president in 1970 and co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) in 1985. In, 1973, Kantrowitz became one of the first people to teach gay literature courses beginning with his “Homosexuals and Literature” focused class. He became chair of the CUNY English department in 1999 and was active in the now-defunct Gay Academic Union there. Kantrowitz wrote the revolutionary Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay in 1977 which combined his life story where he disclosed that he attempted to die by suicide twice and LGBTQ+ activist work as well as the difficulties he and other LGBTQ+ people faced in mid-century America and historical events such as the Stonewall Uprising and New York City’s first Pride March into one memoir. He also wrote Walt Whitman: Gay and Lesbian Writers in 2005 to raise awareness about him and his literary works and the novel Song of Myself. Kantrowitz also contributed to many anthologies, had many articles published in a variety of LGBTQ+ press entities for over three decades, and conducted many interviews about LGBTQ liberation and the AIDS epidemic. He was also one of the first out gay guests who was invited to speak about LGBTQ+ issues on popular radio and TV talk shows in the 1970s including Jack Parr, Geraldo Rivera, Bill Boggs and Sally Jesse Raphael. In late 1981, Kantrowitz met his life partner, writer and Gay Men’s Health Crisis co-founder Dr. Larry Mass and shortly after that they became a couple and moved in together in 1983. Kantrowitz was chosen as the Staten Island Pride Parade grand marshal in 2009. The New York State Assembly awarded Kantrowitz a testimonial citation in recognition of his decades of LGBTQ+ activism. His personal papers from 1951 to 2008 can be found at the New York Public Library. Kantrowitz died at the age of 81 in New York City’s Upper East Side Rehabilitation Center with Mass by his side in 2022 due to complications from COVID-19.