Ed Sedarbaum, a pioneer in the LGBTQ+ rights movement in New York City’sQueens borough, has died at age 78.

Sedarbaum died November 20 in Williamstown, Mass., but his death is just now being reported by New York’s Gay City News. He was the widower of famed gay cartoonist and onetime Advocate contributor Howard Cruse, who died in 2019, aged 75.

Sedarbaum was motivated to start Queens Gays and Lesbians United, a.k.a. Q-GLU, in 1991 in response to the murder of Julio Rivera in an antigay crime in Queens the previous year. As the New York City Council had just expanded from 35 to 51 members, “it seemed a great time to make our local candidates declare their positions on our lives,” he once said, according to Gay City News. “So I organized a candidates night at a local church, and everyone was shocked that over 100 people showed up. Of course I took names and addresses (remember when addresses were useful in organizing?) and invited them to my apartment to talk about what kind of organization they wanted and needed. And that’s how Q-GLU was born.”

At the candidates night, “John Sabini won over the audience in a walk,” Sedarbaum recalled. “His chief opponent, [incumbent] Helen Sears, doomed herself with us by saying she cared for our community but opposed domestic partnership because it would ‘undermine something we all believe in — the family.’ The sound of 100 people gasping in disbelief was powerful.” Sabini won the primary over Sears.

Sedarbaum ran for New York State Senate in 1998, challenging incumbent George Onorato in the Democratic primary. Sedarbaum did not win, but he was endorsed by The New York Times, and his candidacy “put the LGBTQ community on the map in Queens,” former New York City Council member Jimmy Van Bramer told Gay City News. Van Bramer and Daniel Dromm were elected to the City Council from the borough in 2009, and Lynn Schulman and Tiffany Cabán in 2021, all members of the community.

When the “Coming Out in Queens” exhibit opened at the Queens Museum in 2017, Dromm called Sedarbaum “the grandfather of the Queens movement.”

Sedarbaum’s activism included a stint with the New York City Anti-Violence Project, where he trained police on how to have better relations with LGBTQ+ Queens residents, and coordinating the AVP’s Hate Crimes Bill Coalition to lobby for the New York State Hate Crimes Act, which finally passed in 2000. Among his other positions were associate director of the Anti-Defamation League, founder and first CEO of the SAGE/Queens GLBT Senior Center, and executive director of the Loft LGBTQ+ Center in New York’s Westchester County.

“Ed was tireless, fierce, and funny,” Matt Foreman, who was executive director of the AVP during Sedarbaum’s time there, told Gay City News. Foreman recalled Sedarbaum’s protests against Mary Cummins, the anti-LGBTQ+ head of Queens Community School District 24, over her opposition to an inclusive curriculum called Children of the Rainbow in the early 1990s. “After insulting and fruitless conversations with Mary Cummins over her hate-based attacks against the Children of the Rainbow curriculum, it was his idea to organize protests in all five boroughs, culminating with a march through her own neighborhood,” Foreman said. “It was a great slap in her face and inspiring for us all. That was Ed.”

Sedarbaum and Cruse moved to North Adams, Mass., in 2003 and married in 2004, when Massachusetts became the first state with marriage equality.Sedarbaum formed Rainbow Seniors of Berkshire County in Massachusetts in 2015. The Queens apartment building where he and Cruse lived from 1979 to 2002 is on the list of New York City LGBT Historic Sites. The New York City Council is considering a proposal to name a street near there for the two men.