Michael Seltzer, prominent LGBTQ+ activist and fundraiser in fight against AIDS, dead at 78

Michael Seltzer, a longtime LGBTQ+ rights activist one of the first people to raise funds for the fight against HIV and AIDS, has died at age 78.

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Seltzer died of cardiac arrest July 31 during a vacation on Governor Island, near Branford, Connecticut, The New York Times reports. His death is just now being widely publicized.

“When Michael Seltzer first got involved in progressive and then gay activism in the 1970s, it was mostly funded through passing the hat at meetings and through low dollar fundraisers,” Gay City News notes. “More than any other individual, Seltzer turned that around over the course of decades of work, from serving on boards of major gay organizations from 1980 onwards to creating and running organizations that exponentially increased philanthropy to gay and AIDS causes.”

Seltzer, a native New Yorker, worked for a variety of foundations after graduating from Syracuse University in 1968. His volunteer activism included becoming cochair of Lambda Legal’s board of directors in 1981. He was spurred to raising funds to deal with the AIDS crisis partly by a 1985 visit with a friend, Bob White, who was being treated for the disease at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

“Bob eventually went back to San Francisco and died,” Seltzer’s husband, writer and editor Ralph Tachuk, told the Times. “Michael continued working in the fight against AIDS.”

“In a time when most LGBTQ+ philanthropy professionals were in the closet, Michael was out and proud,” Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings said in a press release. “In the ’80s and ’90s, mainstream philanthropy simply did not prioritize LGBTQ+ people or those living with HIV, and Michael wouldn’t accept that. He spent decades agitating to change priorities in the sector, and hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into organizations serving our communities as a result.”

Seltzer cofounded Funders Concerned About AIDS in 1987 and was its executive director until 1997. Thanks partly to his efforts, “private HIV-related giving rose from $18 million in 1987 to nearly $59 million by 1996 — laying the groundwork for a philanthropic HIV response that has now grown to $722 million,” according to a release from Funders Concerned.

He was also a cofounder of Funders for LGBTQ Issues and a cochair of the board of the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. He spent 12 years as a professor at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, where he helped establish a fellowship program for the New York Community Trust, a philanthropic organization. Additionally, he chaired the master’s degree program in nonprofit management at the Milano School of the New School University.

Seltzer wrote books and articles on philanthropy, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, he urged responders to learn from the fight against AIDS. He remained an activist up until shortly before his death, joining in protests against Donald Trump’s administration.

Seltzer and Tachuk were partners for 43 years and married in 2013. They had a home in the Fire Island Pines. Other survivors include a half-brother, Richard Seltzer.