fiction.wikisort.org - Writer

Michael Lynch (1944 – July 9, 1991) was an American-born Canadian professor, journalist, and activist,[1] most noted as a pioneer of gay studies in Canadian academia and as an important builder of many significant LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS organizations in Toronto.[1]

Born and raised in Harnett County, North Carolina,[2] he studied at Goddard College and the University of Iowa.[1] He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens.[1] He moved to Toronto in 1971 with his then-wife Gail Jones,[1] and from 1971 to 1990 he taught in the Department of English at the University of Toronto at both the main and Erindale College campuses.[3]

After coming out as a gay man in 1973,[1] Lynch was a writer and a contributing editor for The Body Politic.[4] In 1974, he taught the first gay studies course offered at a Canadian university, through the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Education.[3] He was a founding member of the Toronto chapter of Gay Alliance Toward Equality and the Gay Academic Union.[5] In 1980, he convened the first academic conference on the topic of Walt Whitman's 1880 visit to London, Ontario.[2] He helped found the Toronto Centre for Lesbian and Gay Studies,[3] which continues to offer an annual academic grant in his name.

Lynch was a committed AIDS activist from the dawn of the AIDS crisis in 1981 until his death in 1991,[6] including as a founding member of AIDS Action Now!,[7] the AIDS Committee of Toronto[7] and the AIDS Memorial in Toronto's Barbara Hall Park.[8]

In 1989 he published the poetry collection These Waves of Dying Friends.[9]

At the time of his death, he had an unfinished gay studies manuscript, The Age of Adhesiveness: From Friendship to Homosexuality, in development.[1] The book was an expansion of an earlier academic paper, for which he won Crompton-Noll Award from the Lesbian and Gay Caucus of the Modern Languages Association in 1981.[1] He also served as the editor of the Lesbian and Gay Caucus's Gay Studies Newsletter.[1]

Honours and awards

In honour of his role as a significant contributor to LGBT culture and history in Canada, a portrait of Lynch by Gerald Hannon is held by The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives' National Portrait Collection.[6]

A biography of Lynch, AIDS Activist: Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community, was published by Ann Silversides in 2003.[10]

References

External links

• Michael Lynch fonds - Archival records at The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives

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