Robert Carter Priest and Gay Activist Dies at 82

The Rev. Robert Carter, one of the first Roman Catholic priests to come out in the 1970s, died on February 22 at age 82. The Chicago native lived and worked in New York City, where he helped found the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Dignity USA, the support group for gay Catholics.

The New York Timespublished an obituary for Carter, who passed away in the Bronx.

"For him, there was no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity," reports the Times.

"In his memoir, Father Carter wrote: 'Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a 'companion of Jesus,' when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society's negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance.'"