Deceased November 15, 2021
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In Memory
Joseph Cady led a remarkable and versatile and, one may also say, brave life. He charted his own course, excelled at several different careers and found his vocation in the end.
A distinctive personality, Joe could brighten an occasion with flashes of wit and good humor, even as he retained a certain gravitas that set him apart. He had grown up in difficult circumstances in a family that grappled with genuine poverty, illness and unemployment, and he was in foster care and supervision throughout much of his childhood. His matriculation at Amherst was something of a miracle, and the College provided him significant support. He was no complainer, and few of the classmates, among whom he was an affable presence, had any idea of his unusual travails.
Like many of his classmates, Joe determined on a literary career and sought and received his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley … in what turned out to be the colorful 1960s. Writing on American literature, he attracted notice and support from leading academics of his day, including Ian Watt and Henry Nash Smith.
His first professional post was at Columbia University, and his years there were formative and rather dramatic. Those were days of upheaval at Columbia, and Joe—who had been a supporter of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley—plunged into similar activity at Columbia, joining student rebels and displaced residents of Morningside Heights in their protests. For Joe, those would also be years of introspection and new self-understanding, culminating in full embrace of his gay identity and his emergence as a significant participant in the struggle for gay rights in the society at large. He was a founding member of the precedent-setting Gay Academic Union and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Martin Duberman and other leaders of the cause. He would, in the ’70s and ’80s, be an alumnus founder of GALA, an Amherst gay-lesbian alliance, and frequently addressed gay topics at class reunions as well as other College occasions.
Joe’s personal and political commitment then became his scholarly commitment as well, and he launched the study that would become the keystone of his academic, and also his personal, life: first an excavation of the then-mainly buried history of gay American writing—including Whitman and others—and, eventually, a greatly enlarged project involving persisting themes of gay letters in the entire European-American tradition. He would finally become a controversialist within gay culture itself, strenuously arguing for certain essentials in what he regarded as a stable—rather than evolving—body of gay male traits and practices, throughout the long duration of European history.
The daunting dimensions of the project he had taken in hand would, finally, burden him, and he was still working on it at the end—but he never wavered in his commitment to the vision he wished to convey. He published a number of substantial articles on his subject. When his term at Columbia ended, he moved on to Rutgers, and, after that, to a post in medical humanities at the University of Rochester. He found a settled home at Westbeth, an artists’ foundation in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. (Its subsequent development as a high-fashion neighborhood was a matter of supreme indifference to Joe, except as an occasional target for his mirth.) And from there, in the latter decades of his life, he pursued his chosen subject—his vocation, his avocation and, seen in the perspective of his whole life, his cause.
So much goes unsaid. Hardly room in this short biography to mention that, along the way, Joe was a recognized and well-published poet. Or that he attended and received certification from the Ackerman Family Institute and practiced for a decade, in the challenging AIDS aftermath, as a Manhattan psychotherapist. Or that he was honored as a New York Public Library Fellow. Or that he maintained rich relationships, some with eminent figures like poet and translator Richard Howard, and also with loyal friends from a wide range of interests and vocations, all of whom honored his integrity even as they delighted in his exceptional, and indelible, charm.
Paul Strohm ’60