R.I.P.: Writer Thomas M. Disch
Jesus Christ!
Just learned via Warren Ellis that writer Thomas M. Disch committed suicide on July 4th!
Locus has an obit that leads with this:
SF author, critic, and poet Thomas M. Disch, born 1940, died July 4, 2008, of suicide in his New York City apartment. Ellen Datlow reports that Disch had been depressed for several years, especially by the death of long-time partner Charles Naylor, and worries of eviction from his rent-controlled apartment. Biographical details shortly.
Emphasis added by me.
Double and triple Jesus Christ!
There is your so-called “free marketplace,” you Dollar Uber Alles bastards. That being able to have a roof over your head should have to figure into the Life vs Death equation. He was in enough pain as it was over a lost love. And then the criminally-insane levels of rent come along to further threaten his life! You bastards have murdered an artist!
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Mike Cane 2008 
July 7, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Very, very sad about Tom Disch. He dies the same day as Jesse Helms–Disch would’ve appreciated the irony of that. A talented and smart man, one who didn’t follow trends or suffer fools. It didn’t make him a popular figure with publishing types and his cutting comments on SF didn’t endear him to fans. But he backed up his words with a canon of work that would be the envy of any decent scribbler. A depressing end for a brilliant and iconoclastic individual…
July 7, 2008 at 7:23 pm
There’s no real way I can discuss this without going into Total Apeshit Mode.
1) It’s a crime that because he was gay, he wasn’t considered “related” to his life partner, the leaseholder, and was therefore denied apartment rights
2) It’s a crime that ebooks have been so fucked up and not standardized, because those sales could have helped him
3) It’s a crime that being elderly, gay, and ill, he was left to the wolves
4) It’s a crime that rents in NYC are more than most of the American population pays as a *mortgage* payment
I better stop now.