Harry Wieder, the diminutive activist for gay and disabled rights, died yesterday after being struck by a taxi on New York's Lower East Side as he left a community-board meeting. He was 57. The NY Post says Wieder, who had difficulty walking and lived in a home for the deaf, got his start as an activist in the early 1980s when he came out as gay and got involved in ACT UP, soon becoming a fixture at community-board meetings, rallies, and hearings and well-known on the city's political scene. Gothamist recalls that Wieder was profiled in Betty Adelsen’s 2005 book, The Lives of Dwarfs: Their Journey from Public Curiosity Toward Social Liberation, and also the subject of a Jimmy Breslin piece in Newsday that captured his "combative, roguish nature and his penchant for truth.” Obviously, he will be missed.
