Minnie Bruce Pratt, "a prominent poet and essayist who explored issues of gender fluidity, the friction between acceptance and intolerance and personal struggles such as living apart from her sons after coming out as lesbian in the 1970s," died July 2, the Washington Post reported. She was 76. Pratt "moved between the worlds of literature, scholarship and activism over nearly five decades as the LGBTQ+ community achieved gains such as legalization of same-sex marriage and greater recognition of trans and nonbinary identities."
The author of more than 10 books and anthologies, Pratt said her work was about trying to connect the dots. She called it the "understandings of the intersections," such as how laws can codify discrimination or how views can be shaped by culture and social class, noting: "None of us is just one thing."
Pratt took part in early pride events and other outreach projects in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1984, she co-founded LIPS, a lesbian-led activist group in Washington, and joined other organizations including the National Women's Fightback Network.
Her years in Washington also marked some of her defining works including Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991 (1991), a mix of autobiography and observations that have been incorporated in many college feminist studies programs, and Crime Against Nature (1990), a collection of poems on her relationship with her sons as a lesbian mother of boys who lived with their father. Her other books include Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (1984), co-authored with Elly Bulkin and Barbar Smith; The Sound of One Fork (1981); Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999); and The Dirt She Ate (2003).
Her long relationship with author and activist Leslie Feinberg, which began in the early 1990s, provided a grounding for some of Pratt's meditations on gender and her own place in the spectrum. Pratt's 1995 volume of memoir-style essays, S/He, "takes readers through her girlhood questions over gender roles, her contempt for a society that she feels shackles women and the fateful moment when her husband finds her 'love notes' to another woman. It leads to the pivotal tale about a lover who is not named but clearly an homage to Feinberg," the Post wrote.
In Magnified (2021), which was dedicated to Feinberg (who died in 2014), Pratt deals with subjects of mortality and memory. Pratt and Feinberg became domestic partners in New Jersey in 2004 and had a civil union in 2007. In 2011, they were married in Massachusetts.
In a remembrance at Lambda Literary Review, Julie R. Enszer wrote, in part: "There are so many ways Minnie Bruce's life and work persist beyond her death. She leaves us a rich legacy from which we can challenge oppression and bigotry. Through her life we can model our own profound commitment to anti-racist work; we can imagine our own strategies of facing and reckoning with the systems in which we were raised and challenging them for systemic change. We can participate in activism like her work with LIPS and Camp Trans. We can read and learn and speak and act. Perhaps most profoundly we can engage in the family and community building work that Pratt did throughout her life. During her sickness and as the news of her death reached out into various communities, the ways that she knit kinship have been visible and profoundly moving. She was in her life surrounded by family in the most expansive sense of the word. Her sons and their partners, her grandchildren, chosen family, women and men that she mentored, offering support and advice as they found and did their work in the world, comrades, confidants, and more. Minnie Bruce created a world with vibrant social, political, and emotional connections."