Website—Biographies: Activist Biography

Activist Biographies

Activist Biography (short)

Eric Rofes is a long-time progressive activist who works on issues related to gay and lesbian liberation, HIV/AIDS prevention and gay men's health, racial and economic justice, and poor people's access to education. Currently, Rofes is a founding member of perfectunion.net, a collective of activists who use web-based organizing to support the movement to democratize marriage.

He is also on the board of directors of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation in Washington, D.C., which organizes around the issue of sexual freedom as a fundamental human right and Womanvision, a San Francisco-based feminist cultural production and activist organization.

Activist Biography (long)

Eric Rofes is a long-time progressive activist who works on issues related to gay and lesbian liberation.

He became an activist in the 1970s in Boston when he joined the Gay Community News collective, a group of men and women publishing the nation's only weekly newspaper for sexual minorities seeing their work as part of a broad movement for social justice. During these years he founded Boston's first group for LGBT teachers (Boston Area Gay & Lesbian Schoolworkers), two of the first queer youth groups in the country (Out Here for Gay Youth; Committee for Gay Youth), and the first Boston-based group focused on organizing gay & lesbian voters (Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance). He was a founding member of the Boston Men's Childcare Collective, which provided childcare at women's music concerts and shelters for battered women. He was an elected delegate to the 1980 White House Conference on the Family, where he was elected leader of the progressive caucus and worked on issues related to welfare reform, violence against women, and alternative family structures.

During these years, he was a sixth-grade teacher and was fired from his position when he came out as a gay man to the principal and school board. He was then hired by the Fayerweather Street School in Cambridge, where he taught for five years and served as coordinator and lead teacher for their middle-school program. At Fayerweather, he and his students published three books on young adults' perspectives on controversial issues, including the best-selling book The Kids' Book of Divorce: By, For, and About Kids (Lewis/Stephen Greene, 1983).

In 1985, Rofes was hired to serve as executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, the largest gay non-profit organization in the world. The Center initiated some of the nation's first HIV prevention programs, created some of the first shelters for LGBT and homeless youth, pioneered a peer-based mental health and addiction recovery program, and opened the first and largest HIV testing site in California. In 1989, he moved to San Francisco where he became executive director of Shanti Project, a pioneering AIDS service group which provided practical and emotional support, hospital-based counseling, housing, and transportation to people with AIDS.

During these years, Rofes served as a member of the Los Angeles AIDS Commission and the San Francisco Ryan White Council; a board member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Lesbian & Gay Health Association, and the Funding Exchange's OutFund for Gay Liberation; and as a grassroots leader and co-chair of the Southern California No on LaRouche Committee, which successfully defeated a statewide AIDS quarantine initiative.

In 1994, Rofes began graduate school at U.C. Berkeley and began volunteer organizing work in the nascent gay men's health movement, work which he continues to this day. He led the organizing of three national summits focused on the health and wellness of gay male communities, and founded the National LGBTI Health Summit in 2000 in Boulder, Colorado. He also joined the Board of Directors of Womanvision, a feminist media production and organizing committee, and serves as chair for the San Francisco Bay Area annual fundraiser for Highlander, a popular-education center in rural Tennessee.

Rofes has published twelve books, including Opposite Sex: Gay Men on Lesbians and Lesbians on Gay Men, with Sara Miles (New York University, 1998), Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in an Ongoing Epidemic (Haworth, 1996); Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (Haworth, 1998).

Currently, Rofes is a founding member of pefectunion.net, a collective of activists who use web-based organizing to support the movement to democratize marriage.

He is also on the board of directors of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation in Washington, D.C. which organizes around the issue of sexual freedom as a fundamental human right.