This week’s passages | The Seattle Occasions

Kay Tobin Lahusen, 91, a prominent gay rights activist whose photographs documented the beginnings of the movement and showed lesbians outside when they were practically absent from popular culture, died Wednesday in a hospital in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Lahusen and her longtime partner Barbara Gittings were at the forefront of the lesbian rights movement and were determined to make the person they loved a source of pride rather than shame. They were early members of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization, and soon became open about their sexuality and demands for equality at a time when gay rights groups were less open. You helped organize protests in the 1960s at a meeting of the National Council of Churches, Pentagon, and White House, long before the Stonewall uprising in 1969.

They also helped lesbians realize that they were not alone by producing The Ladder, a newsletter published by the Daughters that was the first national lesbian journal in the United States. Lahusen also photographed many of the earliest protests for gay rights, providing important documentation of a time when many gay activists chose to stay in the closet.

John Warner, 94, the Republican Senator from Virginia, a distinguished ex-Navy secretary who shed the image of a dilettante to become a leading voice in military policy for 30 years in the Senate, died Tuesday night at home in Alexandria, Virginia. The cause was heart failure. For a while, Warner was perhaps best known nationwide as the dashing sixth husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor. The couple divorced in 1982 and remained friends.

Although Warner was a popular figure in his state, he was often at odds with the Virginia Conservatives. He angered the National Rifle Association with its support for a ban on assault weapons. He enraged some Republicans in 1994 when he refused to support Oliver North, the former White House advisor at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, in his bid for the Senate. And he opposed President Ronald Reagan’s ultimately unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination of Justice Robert Bork. In 2008 he retired.

Anna Halprin, 100, a dancer and choreographer who tried to push the boundaries of modern dance and whose experiments inspired, challenged, and sometimes amazed generations of dancers and audiences, died Monday at her home in Kentfield, Marin County, California.

In a career that began in the late 1930s and moved to San Francisco in the mid-1940s, Halprin sometimes attracted controversy. But it also attracted students, schoolchildren, and enthusiasts who were intrigued by the creative subjects she explored and how she explored them. The dancers and choreographers who studied with her before her successful career included Meredith Monk, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and the team from Eiko and Koma.

Samuel E. Wright, 72, a veteran stage actor who received two Tony Award nominations but was best known for voicing the idiosyncratic cancer Sebastian in the 1989 animated film “The Little Mermaid,” died Monday at his Walden, New York home. The cause was prostate cancer.

Wright appeared on eight Broadway shows, beginning with “Jesus Christ Superstar” in 1971. His most prominent role was that of Mufasa in the original cast of Disney’s “The Lion King,” which earned him one of his Tony nominations for Best Actor All in One Musical brought in in 1998. In 1984 he received another nomination for the same award for his role in “The Step Dance Kid”.

Eric Carle, 91, a popular children’s author and illustrator whose classics The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other works brought some of their earliest and most beautiful literary memories to millions of children, died on May 23rd at his summer studio in Northampton, Massachusetts. The cause was kidney failure, said his son Rolf when the death was announced on Wednesday.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Carle’s best-known book, has sold more than 55 million copies worldwide since it was first published in 1969, with only 224 words translated into more than 70 languages. It is one of more than 70 books that Carle published over the course of his career and has sold more than 170 million copies according to his publisher, Penguin Random House.

In 2003 he received the prestigious Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (now Children’s Literature Legacy Award) from the American Library Association, which recognizes authors and illustrators whose books have made lasting contributions to children’s literature.

Yuan Longping, 90, a Chinese scientist who developed higher-yielding rice varieties that helped feed people around the world, died on May 22nd in a hospital in the southern city of Changsha, Xinhua News Agency reported. Yuan spent his life researching rice. According to the World Food Prize website, which he won in 2004, one-fifth of all rice species worldwide come from species created after Yuan’s breakthrough discoveries of hybrid rice.

In the 1970s, Yuan made the breakthroughs that made him a household name. He developed a hybrid rice variety that had an annual yield 20% higher than existing varieties, meaning it could feed an additional 70 million people annually, according to Xinhua. His work helped transform China from “food shortages to food security” within three decades, according to the World Food Prize, established in 1986 by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, to recognize scientists and others who improve the quality and availability of food to have .

Roman city, 92, who endured the horrors of Auschwitz and other death camps as an orphaned teenager and later channeled his grief and anger to lead a U.S. movement to remember the Holocaust and make amends to aging Jewish survivors, died at home on May 21 in Manhattan. At the time of his death, Kent was chairing the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, which documents the lives of survivors and works with educators to teach about the Holocaust. He also served on the board of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which negotiated monetary arrangements for survivors.

Roger Hawkins, 75, who played drums on numerous pop and soul hits of the 1960s and 70s and was one of the architects of the funky sound identified with Muscle Shoals, Alabama, died on May 20 at his Sheffield, Alabama home, from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease diseases and other conditions. Hawkins was a member of producer Rick Hall’s house band at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals and starred on Percy Sledge’s gospel-soaked “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a No. 1 pop single in 1966. He was also a driving force Power behind Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, a number 1 pop hit next year, as well as her top 10 singles “Chain of Fools” (1967) and “Think” (1968).

William Shakespeare, 81, the first man to receive a clinically approved COVID-19 vaccine, has died of an unrelated disease, British officials said. He became the second person to receive a Pfizer jab after Britain approved the experimental shots in early December. The first person to get a stab was Margaret Keenan, 90. Shakespeare died of a stroke on May 20, according to the BBC. The Coventry resident reportedly worked for Rolls-Royce and served for many years as a councilor in the city’s Allesley parish. He made international headlines after vaccinating at Coventry University Hospital. His name helped draw even more attention – and jokes – to this special moment.

Mark York, 55, actor best known for playing Billy Merchant on NBC sitcom “The Office,” died of natural causes in a Dayton, Ohio hospital on May 19. From 2006 to 2009 he appeared in four episodes of “The Office” as the caretaker of the office park in which Dunder Mifflin, the fictional paper company at the center of the series, was at home. Kaufmann, who was paraplegic like York, was featured in season two when Michael Scott, the awkward store manager played by Steve Carell, took him to the office for a terrifying disability awareness meeting.

Michael Serkin-Poole, 65, a key figure in the decades-long struggle to legalize marital equality in Washington and one of the first gay couples to adopt with his partner, died of pancreatic cancer on May 15 at his Bellevue home.

Serkin-Poole and David Serkin-Poole were among six gay and lesbian couples denied their license to marry in King County. Their concerted efforts, which were part of a test procedure in 2004, was immediately followed by a lawsuit against the district, which was also joined by several legal groups. The case went to the Washington Supreme Court, but was defeated with the passing of the DOMA in 1998, which only recognized straight marriages.

Michael often faced tough battles for social advancement by asking the authorities a simple question: Why not? Little did they know that when he and David decided to adopt children after their engagement ceremony in the mid-1980s, they would be among the first same-sex Washington couples to apply. The “boring, bourgeois Bellevue family life” that Michael and his partner created helped promote gay acceptance.

Rahul Vohra, 35, an Indian actor, vlogger and YouTube star, died on May 9 in a hospital in New Delhi as a result of COVID-19. After he and Jyoti Tiwari got married in December, she worked with him to produce short, scripted videos in Hindi on topics such as gender differences, rising gasoline prices and the difficulty of working from home during the pandemic. Some received more than 1 million views and Vohra quickly became one of India’s most popular YouTube stars.

Seattle Times staff and news services