Joseph Lawrence Cady (1938-2021) was an author, poet, and psychotherapist who published widely in a number of fields, including especially nineteenth-century American and English literature, AIDS literature, and the history and literature of homosexuality. A native of Hastings, New York, he attended Hastings High School and also the Shawnee Leadership Institute, where he developed a strong sense of social justice. He graduated from Amherst College in 1960, and was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to attend graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in nineteenth-century American literature. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1968, he taught literature and creative writing at Columbia and Rutgers Universities.
He subsequently trained as a psychotherapist and developed a specialty in medical education. He taught medical humanities at several medical schools, including at the University of Rochester School of Medicine where he received several teaching awards.
His poetry appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. A pioneer in gay studies, he was a founding member of the Gay Academic Union and of the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the Modern Language Association. Particularly significant are his seminal essays on Whitman, on "Masculine Love" in the Renaissance, and his forceful challenges to extreme constructivist views of homosexuality.
At his death he was working on a book under contract with Oxford University Press, tentatively entitled Not to be Named: Keeping Homosexuality Unspeakable. He lived for more than 40 years at Westbeth, New York City's pioneering site of cooperative housing for artists in Greenwich Village.
