New York Times Writer Dudley Clendinen Passes Away

Dudley Clendinen, a gay newspaper editor, book author, and cultural critic, passed away on Wednesday in Baltimore at the age of 67.

Clendinen was born into a Florida newspaper family and eventually edited newspapers including The Tampa Tribune and The St. Petersburg Times. Clendinen interests were broad, stretching from homeless issues to the evolution of the South. He would move on to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore Sun, and The New York Times.

Clendinen also wrote extensively about gay life, including the horrors of AIDS in the 1980s and '90s.

"You'd have dinner with a friend, or got to bed with someone you'd met, and next you knew, they were dead," the writer recalled in The New York Times in 2003.

Clendinen was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, which he nicknamed "Lou," and turned his writing toward death, and how to die properly.

"We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate," he wrote last year in The New York Times. "About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don't talk about how to die."

Clendinen is survived by a sister and a daughter he fathered before coming out. Read more about Clendinen here.