A gay YA fantasy writer and the last gay concentration camp survivor passed away

The gay fantasy YA/children's writer William Sleator passed away this week.  I loved his book Angry Moon as a child.  I didn't know the author was gay until reading the NYT obit this weekend, but I'm not surprised because my gay uncle gave it to me back in the day.  He may well have known WS, or known about him. 

From the NYT obit by Margalit Fox:  "Critics praised his spare, stylish, often darkly comic prose; hurtling plots; and deliciously strange characters, among them a gasbag-like flying octopus." Awesome...

There's a good write up in the  School Library Journal Obituary.  Wikipedia had links to a copy of the book Oddballs on his brother's site.  The NYT obit has the text of a novel he wrote at age 6.

The last person who was forced to wear a pink triangle by the Nazis also died this week.  Rudolf Bravda, imprisoned in Buchenwald three years, was 98.   NYT obit:

"Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both worked in the coal mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph 175."  Two books were written about him, and the obit contains a good, succinct history of the treatment of gay men by the Third Reich,  with quotes from writer and archivist Gerard Koskovich, who was a stellar queer activist even back when I lived I'm books...

And browsing the online obits, there is a 1950s test pilot and the first black federal judge in the Deep South, whose story is quite interesting.  For starters:

"Matthew J. Perry Jr., who as a young lawyer had to wait in the balcony of his segregated local courthouse before a judge would hear his case, then went on to win hundreds of civil rights legal battles and to becomgr the first black federal judge from the Deep South, died on July 29 at his home in Columbia, S.C. He was 89."

It may be somewhat morbid to read the obits, but I find people's stories and old photos fascinating, and it's an old habit from the days when every day somebody from the gay community, often influential in some way to many of us, was in the obits...  I always learn something new.