Openly Gay Author And Producer Perry Moore Dead At 39

Terribly sad news, author Perry Moore has died, reports the New York Times. He was 39. An executive producer of The Chronicles of Narnia and the author of Hero, a book about a gay superhero, he died Thursday after being found unconscious in his Greenwich Village apartment. A police spokesman, Detective Joseph Cavitolo, said that investigators were waiting for a medical examiner’s report on the cause, but that there was no suspicion of a crime. The Times writes that “Mr. Moore helped produce the three “Narnia” movies, based on novels by C. S. Lewis, about the adventures of a group of children guided by a talking lion who is in fact the king of Narnia. The series grossed over $1.5 billion and is the 16th-highest-grossing film series in history, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. For several weeks in December 2005 and January 2006, an illustrated book written by Mr. Moore about the making of the first movie in the series, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” was on The New York Times’ paperback best-seller list. But Mr. Moore, who was gay, had a more personal mission: although he was glad that comic books had been introducing gay superheroes for some time, he wanted to see them portrayed in a better light. What particularly disturbed him was the death of Northstar, a member of Marvel Comics’ X-Men, whose announcement in a Marvel comic book that he was gay made headlines in 1992. In 2005 Northstar was killed by a brainwashed Wolverine. Mr. Moore said he felt that the murder of Marvel’s biggest gay hero by one of its most popular characters had sent the wrong message. He began giving speeches in which he cited his own research showing that more than 60 gay and lesbian comic-book characters had been ignored, maimed or murdered. “Yes, bad things do happen to all people,” Mr. Moore said. “But are there positive representations of gay characters to counterbalance these negative ones?” Not enough, he said. So he wrote “Hero” (2007), a novel about Thom Creed, a teenager coping with high school, a strained home life and his budding superpowers as well as his sexual orientation. In May 2008 “Hero” won a Lambda Literary Award as the best novel for young gay and lesbian adults.”