Victor Navasky, who died this week aged 90, was famous for his books about the McCarthy period in the 1950s and Robert Kennedy’s justice department in the 1960s, his longtime editorship of the Nation magazine, and positions at Columbia University including chairing the Columbia Journalism Review.
What almost no one remembers is how his homophobic reaction to a famously homophobic article in Harper’s magazine led him to commission the most pro-gay piece the New York Times had published up to that time – a foundational document which appeared in 1971, at the dawn of the movement for gay liberation.
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