RIP

[Orema]

Marcia Lipetz, leader in the LGBT community, dies at 71

By Graydon Megan
Chicago Tribune


Marcia Lipetz was the first full-time executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and helped establish the Center on Halsted. (Hal Baim/Windy City Times)

Marcia Lipetz had a knack for recognizing issues early and tackling them head-on, whether it was the AIDS crisis, challenges facing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community or the fight for women’s rights.

Lipetz was the first full-time executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago in the 1980s and also helped establish the Center on Halsted, which describes itself as the Midwest’s largest LGBTQ social service agency.

In 2009, Lipetz was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame, which cited her “leadership, energy, passion, and vision for Chicago’s LGBT community and the institutions affiliated with it, especially for her work with the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, the WPWR-TV Channel 50 Foundation, and Center on Halsted.”

“She really was a foundational person in our community,” said Tracy Baim, longtime editor of the Windy City Times who was recently named publisher and executive editor of the Chicago Reader. “She never sought the limelight. She just did the work day in and day out. She really helped build the community as it is today by creating these long-lasting institutions.”

Lipetz, 71, died Sept. 11 in her Evanston home of cancer, according to her spouse, Lynda Crawford.

She was born and grew up in Louisville, Ky. Both of her parents were social workers, and she grew up with an orientation to the Jewish concept of “tikkun olam,” or repairing the world, Crawford said.

She went to Douglass College of Rutgers University in New Jersey for her undergraduate degree, then got a master’s in sociology from Ohio State University in Columbus. She came to Chicago to get a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University.

Fred Eychaner, chairman of Newsweb Corp., met Lipetz around 1980 when both were on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

“She was a relentless defender of the Bill of Rights and a woman’s right to free choice unhindered by government dictates,” Eychaner said.

As the AIDS crisis unfolded in the 1980s, she was among those who saw the epidemic both as a health disaster and a threat to civil liberties.

“Marcia struggled fearlessly to protect everyone affected by that horrible disease,” Eychaner said. “She fought fiercely against those who saw the epidemic as an opportunity to moralize and blame rather than a true public health emergency.”

Lipetz soon became the first full-time director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. She later became the first executive director of what is now the Alphawood Foundation, where Eychaner is president.

Patrick Sheahan worked with Lipetz when she was with the WPWR Foundation. Lipetz had been on the board of Horizons in the mid-1980s, formerly Gay and Lesbian Horizons, and Sheahan recruited her to help with plans and fundraising for what would become the Center on Halsted.

“I twisted her arm,” Sheahan said, “and she graciously agreed to serve on the steering committee.”

Sheahan said Lipetz was an invaluable resource whose strengths included “her remarkable standing in the community, a rich history of creating organizations and a deep knowledge not only about Chicago’s LGBT community but the broader Chicago philanthropic community.”

In an interview on the website Chicago Gay History, Lipetz offered her own version of her contributions. “I guess I’m a builder — solid hard work that builds for the future — and I’m enormously proud of the work of the ACLU and the future of Center on Halsted.”

Lipetz later was president and CEO of the Executive Service Corps of Chicago, working with local nonprofits. Most recently, according to Baim, Lipetz started Lipetz Consulting, where her clients included the Chicago Community Trust, working as an adviser on the LGBT Community Fund.

“I don’t think people realize how much of a teacher she was,” Crawford said. “She just quietly helped people — teaching and mentoring.”

Lipetz is also survived by a sister, Judith Graham.

A memorial service will be at noon Sept. 23 in the Skokie chapel of Chicago Jewish Funerals, 8851 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o...14-story.html#

[Orema]

Jinx Beers — pioneering feminist, Lesbian News founder — dies at 84



Jinx Beers, the pioneering lesbian activist who founded the long-running Southern California magazine Lesbian News, has died at age 84.

Beers died Friday at Nazareth House Los Angeles, a senior living facility, her friend Wendy Averill told Q Voice News. She had been suffering from renal failure for several months and was in hospice care.

“At a time when our community needed a voice, Jinx was there,” Averill said in a statement to Q Voice News. “She created the Lesbian News at a time when our community was not organized and needed someone, something to help us rally.”

“Jinx was never a part of our history for her own gain. She did it for our community,” Averill added. “She kept such a low personal profile that some people thought she didn’t really exist.”

Beers started Lesbian News in 1975, and it still operates as both a print and an online publication. From its beginnings as a four-page monthly newsletter, it “grew into a tabloid-sized magazine that covered Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Diego,” Q Voice News reports.

“I never planned to have a publication. I had to learn everything along the way,” Beers once said, according to Q Voice News. “My point of view was it would be open to anyone in the lesbian community, and it would be free.”

“If you wanted to know where there was going to be a demonstration, how to find a therapist, locate a partner or job and a myriad of other opportunities, the LN was there,” Averill said.

Before founding the publication, Beers, a California native, had served four years in the U.S. Air Force, which she joined at age 18 in 1951, and 12 years in the Air Force Reserve. She left the military in protest of the Vietnam War and to become a more vocal lesbian activist. She was out to her military colleagues but not her commanding officers, and at the time being gay or lesbian could result in a dishonorable discharge.

“I couldn’t support the military because I didn’t believe in why we were in Vietnam,” she said recently, according to Q Voice News. “I also knew it was just a matter of time before someone would connect the dots about my being a lesbian. I didn’t want to be dishonorably discharged.”

After leaving the service, she earned a psychology degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and then worked in the UCLA Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering. She also taught a class called the Lesbian Experience. She eventually became active in a variety of political groups.

She was inducted into the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame in Philadelphia in 2017 for her work with Lesbian News.

A memorial service is being planned for December at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood. Details are forthcoming.

https://www.advocate.com/media/2018/...n-news-dies-84

[CherylNYC]

Wow! This woman is a divine inspiration. A remarkable mind and true grit. Plus she was beautiful. You'll have to follow the link to see her glam photo. She looks like Eartha Kitt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/o...=headline&te=1

Raye Montague, the Navy’s ‘Hidden Figure’ Ship Designer, Dies at 83


Oct. 18, 2018

During World War II, when Raye Montague was 7 and growing up in Arkansas, her grandfather took her to see a traveling exhibit of a German submarine that had been captured off the coast of South Carolina. She was enchanted.

“I looked through the periscope and saw all these dials and mechanisms,” she recalled years later. “And I said to the guy, ‘What do you have to know to do this?’ ”

His response: “Oh, you’d have to be an engineer, but you don’t have to worry about that.”

The clear implication was that as a black girl she could never become an engineer, let alone have anything to do with such a vessel.

She would go on to prove him very wrong.

The girl who faced racism and sexism in the segregated South, where she rode in the back of the bus and was denied entry to a college engineering program because she was black, became an internationally registered professional engineer and shattered the glass ceiling at the Navy when she became the first female program manager of ships. She earned the civilian equivalent of the rank of captain.

In a breakthrough achievement, she also revolutionized the way the Navy designed ships and submarines using a computer program she developed in the early 1970s.

It would have normally taken two years to produce a rough design of a ship on paper, but during the heat of the Vietnam War Ms. Montague was given one month to design the specifications for a frigate. She did it in 18 hours and 26 minutes.

At the height of her career, she was briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff every month and teaching at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. Many of her ship designs are still in use.


She died of congestive heart failure on Oct. 10 at a hospital in Little Rock, Ark., her son, David R. Montague, said. She was 83.

Although she was decorated by the Navy, Ms. Montague, who retired from the service in 1990, was not acknowledged publicly until 2012, when The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote an in-depth profile of her.

She was not recognized nationally until the publication in 2016 of “Hidden Figures,” Margot Lee Shetterly’s best-selling account of the black female mathematicians at NASA who facilitated some of the nation’s greatest achievements in space. Their acclaim was amplified later that year when the book became an Oscar-nominated movie.

The Navy honored Ms. Montague as its own “hidden figure” in 2017. She was inducted into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame this year.

Like her counterparts in the space program, Ms. Montague faced enormous obstacles — or what she called challenges, since she believed she could always find ways to work around anything that stood in her way.

She grew up in Arkansas in the racially fraught 1950s, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., and Gov. Orval E. Faubus of Arkansas called up the National Guard to bar nine black students from the all-white Little Rock Central High School.


But Ms. Montague had a certain confidence about herself, she said, instilled by her mother, who raised her alone.

“You’ll have three strikes against you,” her mother, Flossie (Graves) Jordan, told her, Ms. Montague recalled last year in an interview on the ABC program “Good Morning America.” “You’re female, you’re black and you’ll have a Southern segregated school education. But you can be or do anything you want, provided you’re educated.”

Raye Jean Jordan was born in Little Rock on Jan. 21, 1935. Her father, Rayford Jordan, was not in the picture for long, and her mother raised her on her income from a cosmetology business. Ms. Montague graduated from Merrill High School in Pine Bluff, Ark., in 1952.

A bright student who loved science and math, she wanted to study engineering at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. But because Arkansas colleges would not award such degrees to African-Americans in those days, she attended Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff). She graduated in 1956 with a degree in business.

Still determined to become an engineer, she headed to Washington and secured a job with the Navy as a clerk-typist. She worked her way up, becoming a digital computer systems operator and a computer systems analyst in a male-dominated field.

“I worked with guys who had graduated from Yale and Harvard with engineering degrees and people who had worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atom bomb,” Ms. Montague told The Democrat-Gazette.

She took computer programming at night school and after a year asked for a promotion.

Her boss, by her account, told her that if she wanted a promotion, she would have to work nights. That was tough for her. There was no public transportation at night, and she didn’t have a car. In fact, she didn’t know how to drive.

But she went out and bought a 1949 Pontiac for $375 and had the salesman drive it to her house. She then taught herself to drive, leaving her house at 10 o’clock at night and creeping along the roads until arriving at work for the midnight shift. She got the promotion and returned to working days.

The project that would be her signal achievement seemed to be an impossible task when it was assigned — to lay out, step by step, how a Naval ship might be designed using a computer. That had never been done before.
Image
Ms. Montague receiving a plaque in 2017 from representatives of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. She was publicly and nationally recognized only later in life.

Her boss (who didn’t like her, she said) gave her six months to complete the project, not telling her that his department had been trying to do it for years without success.

Ms. Montague learned the computer system on her own and then told her boss that to install her program she would have to tear down the Navy’s computer and rebuild it. And that would mean working at night, she said.

He told her she could work nights only if she had someone else with her, and then made it clear that he wouldn’t pay any of her colleagues overtime. She thought that his demand was frivolous and that he intended her to fail.

Not to be deterred, Ms. Montague brought along her mother and her 3-year-old son. Finally impressed by her determination, her boss gave her extra staff. She met the deadline and presented him with her computer-generated designs for a ship.

President Richard M. Nixon, who wanted the Navy to be able to produce ships at a faster pace, heard about her accomplishment and sent word for her to design a rough draft of an actual ship. They gave her all the staff she needed and an unlimited budget, her son said. It led to her designing the first Navy ship with a computer program, in less than 19 hours.

For that feat she received the Navy’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1972. The Navy began using her system to design all its ships and submarines. Her achievement put her on the map, and she began advising other government agencies and the private sector, including the automobile industry. Her last Navy project was the nuclear-powered Seawolf submarine.

Along the way she was married three times, to Weldon A. Means in 1955, to David H. Montague in 1965 and to James Parrott in 1973. She had her only child, David, with Mr. Montague, who has since died. When her third marriage ended, she returned to using the name Montague. In addition to her son, she is survived by a granddaughter.

After she retired, Ms. Montague moved back to Little Rock to be near her family. There she took part in civic organizations; mentored young people, including prison inmates; organized clothing drives; gave motivational talks; and played bridge.

“She was busy opening doors for people and inspiring them,” her son said. “Her message was always the same: ‘Don’t let people put obstacles in front of you, but understand you also have to put in the work.’ She didn’t have any patience for people who weren’t willing to go the extra mile.”

[CherylNYC]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/o...ion=Obituaries

Ruth Gates, Who Made Saving Coral Reefs Her Mission, Is Dead at 56

By Katharine Q. Seelye
Nov. 5, 2018

Ruth Gates, a renowned marine biologist who made it her life’s work to save the world’s fragile coral reefs from the deadening effects of warming water temperatures, died on Oct. 25 in Kailua, Hawaii. She was 56.

The Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology in Manoa, where Dr. Gates was director, announced her death, at Castle Hospital. Robin Burton-Gates, her wife, said that the cause was complications of surgery for diverticulitis. Dr. Gates also had cancer that had spread to her brain, she said...

[CherylNYC]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/o...neil-dead.html


Kitty O’Neil, Stuntwoman and Speed Racer, Is Dead at 72

By Richard Sandomir
Nov. 6, 2018

1
On a dry lake in the Alvord Desert in Oregon in December 1976, Kitty O’Neil wedged herself into a three-wheeled rocket-powered vehicle called the SMI Motivator. She gave the throttle two taps to awaken the engine and then watched an assistant count down from 10 with hand signals. At zero, she pushed the throttle down.

“During a sliver of a second, the howling machine stood motionless, as if stuck in time,” Coles Phinizy wrote in Sports Illustrated. “In the next instant, it was gone, a shrinking blur lost in its own trailing noise.”

The Motivator accelerated rapidly, though silently for Ms. O’Neil; she was deaf. Her speed peaked briefly at 618 miles per hour, and with a second explosive run measured over one kilometer, she attained an average speed of 512.7 m.p.h., shattering the land-speed record for women by about 200 m.p.h.

For Ms. O’Neil, her record — which still stands — was the highlight of a career in daredevilry. She also set speed records on water skis and in boats. And, working as a stuntwoman, she crashed cars and survived immolation.


In one stunt, as a double for Lindsay Wagner, she flipped a dune buggy on the television series “The Bionic Woman”; in another, she leapt 127 feet from a hotel balcony onto an inflated airbag as Lynda Carter’s stunt double on “Wonder Woman.”

Ms. O’Neil died on Friday at 72 in Eureka, S.D., where she had lived since 1993. The cause was pneumonia, said Ky Michaelson, a close friend who built rocket-powered vehicles, including some for Ms. O’Neil...

[GeorgiaMa'am]

Stan Lee Dies at the Age of 95

Stan Lee was responsible for bringing many Marvel comics to fruition. Among those were X-Men (a haven for many a queer kid), Black Panther, Spiderman, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Daredevil and the ones that started it all, the Fantastic Four. He brought Marvel Comics back from almost dead in the 1960s with these characters. In later years, he became a guru of sorts, the main cheerleader for Marvel fans everywhere. He was the public face of a company that grew into today's Marvel Universe and movie and Netflix franchises.

We'll miss you Stan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/o...-lee-dead.html

[Orema]