Larry Mitchell (1939–2012) was born in 1939 in Muncie, Indiana and died of cancer in 2012 in Ithaca, New York. He is the author of many works of fiction that explored queer life and radical politics in New York City’s Lower East Side and East Village in the 1980s and 90s. Mitchell founded Calamus Press, an early small press devoted to gay literature, and with Felice Picano and Terry Helbing, co-founded Gay Presses of New York in 1981. Mitchell received a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University, and was a professor at the College of Staten Island for 25 years. In addition to The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977), his novels include The Terminal Bar (1982), In Heat (1986), My Life as a Mole and Other Stories (1988), which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Acid Snow (1993). He helped form multiple communes, including one on Staten Island—which collectively wrote the Great Gay in the Morning: One Group’s Approach to Communal Living and Sexual Politics, published in 1972 by Times Change Press—and one outside of Ithaca, NY, called Lavender Hill, which is the subject of a 2013 documentary by Austin Bunn.