Fred Goldhaber

Fred Goldhaber has died. He was 63, reports the New York Times. Mr. Goldhaber – or Mr. G, as he was known – was the first and for four years, the only teacher at the Harvey Milk School in Manhattan, the first school in the United States whose explicit mission was to provide a safe, supportive space for gay and lesbian students, and he died Monday night at his home in Jersey City of liver cancer. He had lived with AIDS for almost 30 years. The school, named for the iconic gay rights advocate and San Francisco city supervisor, assassinated in 1978, was founded in 1985 by the then called Institute for Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, which is now the Hetrick-Martin Institute. Mr. Goldhaber, an English and remedial reading teacher at Wingate High in Brooklyn for 17 years, volunteered to teach the incoming class of 22 students. Among them were homeless youth, including one boy who had hitchhiked from Ohio after eight teenagers dragged him into a bathroom at school, bashed his head against a toilet, and burned his arm with a cigarette lighter. Another boy, from New York City, was savagely abused by his parents after a teacher told them he had been “acting like a faggot.” He was kept home for a year, chained to a radiator, beaten, and taken by his father to work as a prostitute along 42nd Street. His father was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. It would be unarguably impossible to calculate how many young men and women were rescued by Mr. G, who survived and thrived under his tutelage, simply because he came to touch the lives of so many with a generosity and strength of spirit.