RIP Will Kohler of @BACK2STONEWALL — the longtime activist and blogger died August 21: https://t.co/kJXQrTJUSh pic.twitter.com/eSBfuRAxHA
— Matthew Rettenmund (@mattrett) August 26, 2023
Will Kohler, the gay activist and blogger at Back2Stonewall, died August 21 after a long series of health issues.
As of August 6, he was telling people he was okay, but clearly he was not, and he stopped posting on social media a week before his passing.
Will was very supportive of myself and other gay bloggers, extremely gracious toward people he respected and wanted to encourage. He also once was very helpful to me when a stalker tried to flip him against me just as a chaos agent; Will decided to contact me directly, for which I was so grateful.
He was, however, no pushover! He was unapologetically thorny about gay male issues — everything from excoriating gay guys living in Florida for not somehow stopping DeSantis to praising Red, White & Royal Blue while pining for the long-awaited The Front Runner adaptation.
Classic Will Kohler (Image via Back2Stonewall)
I did not agree with all of his beliefs (not including The Front Runner — come on!), including his becoming more LGB than LGBT and his angry rejection of the word “queer,” but he doggedly documented the gay-rights struggle and also did something to which I always related: he spent a lot of his online life reminding people.
His last blog post, on August 4, was a feature about the August 4, 1956, airing of NBC's Introduction to the Problem of Homosexuality, which — in spite of that title — was thought to have been fair to gays and lesbians to the point that the broadcast enraged Cardinal Francis Spellman. The video is considered lost, but a sound recording exists with OAC.
I'm sorry he missed seeing Trump's mug shot, and I'm sorry he died in a period when so many of our rights seem to be under attack again — like in the good old days, which were actually bad. It made him livid 24/7, the indignities gay people have faced and face again. His rage was such that he felt like the younger generation of gay men were shirking their responsibility to fight back — his tagline was: “The ONLY gay activist in the village. Or so it seems.”
I understand why he felt that way, but he was not entirely right — there are many people who are still acting up and taking action in myriad ways. But he may have been onto something regarding overall complacency, and feeling it couldn't happen to us again.
I think he was right that it could, and I think that is why the loss of his voice is a loss — because we need to be reminded of this loudly and often, and there are not very many people around who want to be the bullhorn.
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