Michael Rumaker

1932 - 2019

Michael Rumaker

Nyack - The author Michael Rumaker, 87—a longtime Rockland County resident—died on June 3, 2019, at Jefferson Washington Township Hospital in Sewell, New Jersey. Rumaker, who moved to Rockland from New York City in 1960, was born in Philadelphia on March 5, 1932, to Michael Joseph and Winifred Marvel Rumaker.

After graduating from Woodbury High School in Gloucester County, New Jersey, in 1950, he studied journalism at Rider College (now Rider University) in Trenton. In 1955 he graduated from Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he studied with the writers Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Rumaker's short stories were published in literary magazines and were frequently anthologized. Between 1955 and 1957 he lived in San Francisco, where his writing began to be identified with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and Laurence Ferlinghetti at the City Lights Book Store.

In 1958, after moving to New York City, Rumaker suffered an emotional breakdown. His fictionalized memoir, The Butterfly (published by Charles Scribner in 1962), is about that breakdown and about his affair with Yoko Ono.

In 1967 Grove Press published his Gringos and Other Stories—realistic, short fictions about marginal characters living in America during the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1969 he received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University and began to teach in the English Departments at Rockland Community College, the New School, and the City University of New York.

While living in Grand View and Nyack in the 1970s, he began to write directly about his life as a gay man in books published by Donald Allen at Grey Fox Press in San Francisco: A Day and a Night at the Baths (1979) and My First Satyrnalia (1981).

In the 1990s he wrote two novels: To Kill a Cardinal (1992)—which was inspired by the ACT-UP protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City in 1989; and Pagan Days (1999)—a semiautobiographical story about a young boy discovering his homosexuality while growing up in a working-class family in National Park, New Jersey, during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Rumaker's nonfiction works include the memoirs Robert Duncan in San Francisco (1996, 2013)—which details the city's gay community in the 1950s and Rumaker's relationships with Robert Duncan and various Beat writers; Black Mountain Days (2003)—about the last years of Black Mountain College—which includes portraits of the poets Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Jonathan Williams during the years 1952 to 1956; and Pizza: Selected Poems (2005), published by Circumstantial Productions in Nyack.

Michael Rumaker is survived by his brothers George, William, Paul, and David. He is predeceased by his sister Mary and brothers Joseph, Robert, and John. He had twenty seven nieces and nephews, including his nephew Patrick Rumaker, with whom he developed a special bond that began in 1984 when Patrick came out to his parents as a gay man and sought Michael's wisdom and guidance.

Michael requested that there be no religious ceremony of any kind at his funeral and asked that his funeral be a "joyous and gay occasion and a celebration" of his life. Several such celebrations are being planned.

Burial of Michael's remains will occur after the conclusion of the celebrations at Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack.

Details will be forthcoming and shared with family and friends.

Photo credit: Michael Rumaker, Nyack, New York, 1984 by Kathy Gardner