Born October 15: Michel Foucault

Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France, leftist gay activist, and S&M enthusiast, Michel Foucault is a towering figure in queer thought. Years of brilliant, turbulent studies -- he said he only became smart by doing homework for a beautiful, stupid classmate -- culminated with moving from Poitiers to Paris at nineteen and enduring a breakdown at twenty-one and the first of several suicide attempts. Six years later he published his debut book. His doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne became his second, Madness and Civilization in 1961, followed two years later by The Birth of the Clinic. That year, 1963, he met philosophy student Daniel Defert (still living, 76) who was his partner for the rest of his life. While those early works were highly praised, Foucault's breakout success came in 1966 with The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, which "offers a global analysis of what knowledge meant—and how this meaning changed—in Western thought from the Renaissance to the present."  Ever alive to the social constructs demanding "normal" behavior and conformity, he sees queer lessons everywhere, especially in his Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. His gayest book is the first in his groundbreaking series The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. While guest lecturing at Berkeley in 1983, he was an avid patron of San Franciso's bathhouses and sex clubs, where he may have contracted the hiv that killed him in June 1984. The official statement on his death at 57 did not mention aids. Defert, who co-founded France's first aids awareness organization AIDES, officially confirmed the cause on the second anniversary of Foucault's death in June 1986. The most gay-inclusive of the major biographies is David Macey's The Lives of Michel Foucault.

The New Press collects Foucault's essential works in Vol. 1 Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Vol. 2 Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology , Vol. 3 Power.