Michael Lynch

Michael Lynch (1944 – July 9, 1991) was an American-born Canadian professor, poet, journalist, and activist, most noted as a pioneer of gay studies in Canadian academia and as an important builder of many significant LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS organizations in Toronto. He studied at Goddard College and the University of Iowa and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

From 1971 to 1990, Lynch taught in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Initially a professor at St. Michael's College, he taught the first gay studies course offered at a Canadian university in 1974, through the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Education.

He was a founding member of the Toronto chapters of Gay Alliance Toward Equality and the Gay Academic Union, and a founding member of Gay Fathers Toronto. He helped found the Toronto Centre for Lesbian and Gay Studies (now the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies),

He published a collection of poetry, These Waves of Dying Friends, in 1989.

At the time of his death, he had an unfinished gay studies manuscript, The Age of Adhesiveness: From Friendship to Homosexuality, in development. Lynch ultimately died later that same year, on July 9, 1991. the AIDS Committee of Toronto

Honours and awards In honour of his role as a significant contributor to LGBT culture and history in Canada, a portrait of Lynch by Gerald Hannon is held by The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives' National Portrait Collection.