Michael Rumaker

Michael Rumaker (born March 5, 1932, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died June 3, 2019, Sewell, New Jersey) was an American author whose works were often semiautobiographical and featured gay protagonists.

Rumaker graduated with honours from Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1955. He then lived for more than a year in San Francisco, where he became involved in the Beat movement. In 1958, after moving to New York City, he suffered an emotional breakdown, for which he was hospitalized until 1960. He later received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University (1969) and afterward taught at several New York colleges and universities.

From the late 1950s Rumaker’s short stories, such as “The Desert” (1957), were frequently anthologized. His semiautobiographical novel The Butterfly (1962) tells of a young man’s struggles to gain control of his life following an emotional breakdown. Exit 3, and Other Stories (1966; U.S. title, Gringos and Other Stories) contains short fictions rife with marginal characters and random violence. A Day and a Night at the Baths (1979) and My First Satyrnalia (1981) are semiautobiographical accounts of initiation into New York’s homosexual community. His later novels included To Kill a Cardinal (1992), which was inspired by the ACT UP protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in 1989, and Pagan Days (1999), a semiautobiographical work about a young boy discovering his homosexuality.

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Rumaker’s nonfiction works included the memoirs Robert Duncan in San Francisco (1996)—which details the city’s gay community in the 1950s and his relationship with various Beat writers, especially Duncan—and Black Mountain Days (2003). He also wrote poetry.