| On Thursday, news broke about the death of Anita Bryant, a singer and former beauty queen who was probably best known for her opposition to gay rights. Bryant’s activism began with a protest against a Florida ordinance barring discrimination based on sexual orientation—a stance that suggests she might have benefitted from a chat with Dorothy Dean. If you haven’t heard of Dean, you’re not alone. An odd, exceptional, and somewhat reclusive figure, Dean was the daughter of a reverend and spent much of her life in New York City before her early death, in the mid-eighties. In 1995, The New Yorker’s Hilton Als revisited her life. After graduating from Radcliffe College, Dean moved down the street for grad school, at Harvard, where she joined a mostly white circle of gay male friends, whom she nicknamed the Lavender Brotherhood. At a time of open government discrimination against L.G.B.T. people, and a nearly universal social stigma against the community, Dean “served as confessor, thesis adviser, and ‘cruise’ director,” Als wrote. Dean, whose many later jobs included a stint as a bouncer at Max’s Kansas City, the famed Manhattan night club, could be alienating and provocative; a stretch as a New Yorker fact checker, Als notes, did not end well. Like Als’s remembrance, Dean’s story is too complex to offer an easy moral, but this account of her friendships—across boundaries of gender, sexuality, and race—remains well worth preserving. | 
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