Arthur Evans

Arthur Scott Evans (October 12, 1942 – September 11, 2011) was an early gay rights advocate and author, best known for his 1978 book . Politically active in New York City in the 1960s and early 1970s, he and his partner began a homestead in Washington state in 1972,

Early life and education Evans was born on October 12, 1942 in York, Pennsylvania. His father was a factory worker, while his mother ran a beauty shop in the front of their family home. He also participated in the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. with a more aggressive ethos than GLF and 12 starting members. Evans wrote the group's statement of purpose, as well as much of its constitution. Evans has described the group as bringing together "gay sensibility, neo-paganism, and a sheer Whitmanesque celebration of the body and of sex." in early 1976 he gave a series of public "Faeries" lectures based on his research on the historical origins of the gay counterculture.

In 1978 he published his recent research in Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture: A Radical View of Western Civilization and Some of the People it Has Tried to Destroy, which analyzed evidence that many people accused of "witchcraft" and "heresy" during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were specifically persecuted for their sexuality and ancient pagan practices. Historian Rollan McCleary has referred to the book as an "influential cult classic." Others have noted the book's cultural import, describing it "less a history of persecution than it is an invocational litany or an aggrieved magical treatise on the failures of patriarchal liberalism and industrial socialism to adequately recognize and protect the lives of gay people." Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture was "an apposite resource on the history of social oppression." A planned re-release with the title The Lady Rises in the East

Among other groups, Evans was involved with the Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) and the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club.

Personal life He became romantically involved with Arthur Bell in 1964, and the two separated in 1971. He met Jacob Schraeter in 1972 and they spent two years homesteading together in Washington state. The two moved to San Francisco in 1974, and although Schraeter returned to New York in 1981, Evans remained at the apartment at the corner of Haight Ashbury for the remainder of his life. and his best friend Naphtali Offen.