Justin Raimondo, a longtime gay rights advocate and anti-war activist, has died. He was 67.
Raimondo, who lived in the Northern California community of Sebastopol, died Thursday after battling lung cancer, said Eric Garris, his friend and co-founder of the website Antiwar.com.
Raimondo and Garris co-founded the website in 1995. He also wrote for conservative publications and criticized the U.S. involvement in Iraq and other conflicts, the San Francisco Chronicle reported .
Raimondo was active in San Francisco politics in the 1970s and 1980s and pushed the Libertarian Party to support gay rights, Garris said. Later, they both left the party and started a libertarian group within the Republican party, Garris said.
“He was very strongly part of the gay community in San Francisco and yet he broke the mold,” Garris told The Associated Press. “He was somebody who believed that gay liberation had to be more than just joining the Democratic Party.”
Raimondo grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York. He loved to read newspapers and science fiction from a young age and in his teens admired writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, his sister Diane Raimondo told the Chronicle.
He is survived by his husband and two sisters.
