Howard Zinn, liberal activist and friend to gays, dies at 87

Historian, author, playwright, and activist Howard Zinn passed away on Wednesday, Jan. 27 at the age of 87. The apparent cause of death is a heart attack.

Best known for his 1980 historical text A People's History of the United States, Zinn was an ardent anti-war and civil rights activist. His support for and interest in civil rights -- which originated with his 1956 appointment to the position of chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College -- extended to include the LGBT community.

In a 2003 interview with Paul Glavin and Chuck Morse that appeared in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Zinn said, "The recent developments in the study of social history which are important to me are the burgeoning of literature about social movements -- the women's movement, the labor movement, the African American and Chicano movements, the gay and lesbian movement."

The Zinn Education Project (an organization that supports and promotes the use of A People's History, as well as other socially forward-thinking texts, in middle and high school classrooms) offers a section on LGBT education material on their Web site (www.zinnedproject.org) that includes Women, Gays, and Other Voices of Resistance, documentary Out of the Past, and links to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).

In the wake of Zinn's passing, and in the emotional throes of the California trial that could determine the future of federal marriage equality -- for at least another generation -- it is perhaps most pertinent to remember a 2004 essay called "The Optimism of Uncertainty," which Zinn penned for alternative media source ZSpace. Zinn wrote, "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

"If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."