Justin Raimondo — peace activist, writer
Justin Raimondo, a longtime Bay Area antiwar activist, writer and gay rights advocate, died Thursday at his home in Sebastopol. He was 67.
The cause of death was lung cancer, which Raimondo had been battling since 2017.
Raimondo was perhaps best known for cofounding the website Antiwar.com in 1995 with friend and collaborator Eric Garris. Raimondo wrote thousands of articles for the site, as well as for conservative publications, voicing criticism of U.S. involvement in Iraq and other conflicts.
He was active in San Francisco politics in the 1970s and 1980s, defending the White Night riots that protested Dan White’s manslaughter verdict and opposing the 1978 Briggs Initiative — an unsuccessful statewide ballot measure that sought to bar gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.
Raimondo cofounded the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus in the late 1970s and pushed the party to accept gay rights.
“In San Francisco I would say his biggest mark was breaking the mold for what a gay activist could be,” Garris said. “It did not have to be someone in the Democratic Party. He was an enigma to a lot of people because on one hand, he was a very outfront gay activist but on the other hand, he worked a lot with conservative magazines.”
Raimondo backed the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan in 1992, 1996 and 2000, over shared views against military action in Bosnia, which befuddled many LGBT activists riled by Buchanan’s antigay rhetoric.
Born in 1951, Raimondo grew up in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. From a young age, he loved to read newspapers and science fiction and developed an early passion for political writing, said his sister, Diane Raimondo.
“Before computers, you’d go into his room and he’d be surrounded by newspapers, stacked up around him, and you’d be like ‘Where is Justin?’ ” she said.
Using a mimeograph machine in the garage of the family home, he and a childhood friend printed a pamphlet of writings that blended science fiction and politics, she recalled. In his teens, he considered writer and philosopher Ayn Rand a hero and met her when he was 14.
“He was extremely passionate about everything,” Diane Raimondo said. “He had a hot temper, but he was the first to make up and say, ‘I love you.’ ”
He adored his cat Mina — named after the cat he and his sisters had as children, she said.
Raimondo is survived by his husband, Yoshinori Abe, and sisters Diane Raimondo and Dale Raimondo Flynn.