Dr. Walter Lear was a life-long public health activist and a founding member of the Policy Council which steered the early development of the Gay Community Center of Philadelphia, now the William Way LGBT Community Center. In his later years, Walter was especially dedicated to the preservation of the history of health activism and a gift from his estate was a critical support to the creation of this website dedicated to the history of the AIDS epidemic in Philadelphia. In acknowledgement of his many good works as well as his own specific activities to meet the challenges our communities experienced during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, we offer this short biography with much gratitude for his many contributions to the LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS communities.

—John Cunningham, Chair, Community Advisory Committee, Philadelphia AIDS Oral History Project

Born in 1923 in Brooklyn, Walter grew up in Miami Beach. His parents were Dr. Edward George Lear, an ophthalmologist who retired early due to ill health, and Ida Rubin Lear, an educator, who founded and directed the well-regarded Lear School, a private K-12 school in Miami Beach. Walter completed his undergraduate education at Harvard in 1943 and received his MD from the Long Island College of Medicine in 1946. Following his medical degree, he enrolled in the Hospital Administration program at Columbia University’s School of Public Health receiving a master’s degree in 1948. Upon graduation, he worked for the U.S. Public Health Service in New York City for several years.

Walter moved to Philadelphia following his appointment by Mayor James Tate as Deputy Health Commissioner from 1964 to 1971. He then served as the State Regional Health Administrator for Southeast Pennsylvania during the administration of Governor Milton Shapp. In this position, he grappled with the emergence of Legionnaire’s Disease when the first cases appeared at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in 1976 during Philadelphia’s celebration of the Bicentennial.

There was a notable political component to Dr. Lear’s public health concerns. He felt that poverty, discrimination and oppression had major adverse health consequences. This understanding first led to his active involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In 1963 during the American Medical Association’s annual conference, Walter participated in the historic boardwalk protest in Atlantic City by doctors opposing racism within the American Medical Association. In 1964 he was a co-founder of the Medical Committee for Human Rights to support civil rights workers in the South and to protest the segregationist practices of the American Medical Association. Throughout his life, Walter was also an advocate for reforming the American healthcare system toward a national single-payer program in which healthcare would be recognized as a basic right for all. In addition, Walter was active in various peace and anti-war groups throughout this period.

Walter’s marriage (1945-1952) to opera singer Evelyn Lear ended in divorce. During his work with the U.S Public Health Service, Walter met his life-partner James Payne in 1953. James was an accomplished pianist most known as the accompanist for prominent African American lyric soprano Adele Addison. During their time in New York, Walter and James became very good friends with Dr. Howard Brown who revealed he was gay in 1973 while he was Health Commissioner for New York City. The announcement made front-page news in the New York Times and was a lead story carried by all the city’s television stations. This spotlight brought national attention to Howard Brown and he shortly thereafter led a small group of gay activists to found The National Gay Task Force in 1973. Sadly, Brown’s leadership was cut short when he died of a heart attack in 1975.

Brown’s death was mourned beyond New York and Gays at Penn under the leadership of John Mosteller, then a first-year graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, organized a public memorial program. Mosteller had heard of Walter’s long friendship with Dr. Brown and he asked Walter to speak at the memorial. This request ultimately sparked Lear’s own public coming-out and led to his appearance on the front cover of the first issue of the Philadelphia Gay News in 1976. While Walter’s coming out occasioned some unfavorable commentary, he was supported by Governor Shapp and his job was never in jeopardy. He served as the Health Department’s representative to Shapp’s Governor’s Council for Sexual Minorities from 1976 to 1979. Once out of the closet, Dr. Lear’s traditional activism expanded into community organizing within the gay community in the decade following the Stonewall Riots.

Walter’s major accomplishments with regard to addressing the AIDS epidemic emerged from his early efforts to develop a healthcare infrastructure within the gay community both locally and nationally. In 1975, he founded the Gay Health Workers Caucus of the American Public Health Association. In 1976 he convened the first National Gay Health Coalition meeting made up of representatives from the various newly formed gay/lesbian health care organizations and professional association caucuses. The first major project was a national conference in 1978 in Washington, DC, for lesbian and gay health workers to share ideas, plan joint projects and research, as well as to share mutual support. As a member of Philadelphia’s Gay Community Center Policy Council, he was a founder of the Lavender Health Project in 1979, implementing early public education and testing for sexually transmitted diseases among gay men. This work expanded as a vaccine for Hepatitis B was developed and the Lavender Health Project became independent from the Community Center, first as Philadelphia Community Health Alternatives, which later launched the Philadelphia AIDS Task Force. Today, this work continues under the banner of the Mazzoni Center.

With the public appearance of a new deadly disease primarily among gay men in 1981, Walter was among the convenors of the first national gay conference on what was being call GRID, gay-related immunosuppressant disease. The National Gay Task Force and the National Gay Health Coalition gathered in Dallas in 1982 to strategize a coordinated response. Among the accomplishments of the gathering was convincing the Centers for Disease Control to change the disease’s name to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS. National leadership around AIDS issues quickly moved to medical personnel in the first-wave cities: New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. By 1983 Walter turned his attention to the AIDS response in Philadelphia and actively recruited David Fair to be point-person advocating on AIDS issues as Wilson Goode campaigned to become Mayor in 1984. Once in office Goode created the AIDS Activity Coordinating Office within the Health Department and appointed David Fair as Director. In 1984, Goode appointed Lear to the City’s Human Relations Commission, the first openly gay member. Discrimination against people with AIDS soon became outlawed in Philadelphia and part of the Human Relations Commission charge.

While Walter devoted considerable time to addressing AIDS, he was also active on other fronts. In 1980, he was a cofounder of the Maternity Care Coalition to address better health outcomes for new mothers and the high infant mortality rate in Philadelphia. In 1982, Walter was among the successful activists pushing for the passage of the gay rights bill in Philadelphia’s City Council. He remained active on the Board of Directors of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center and recruited city planner Bill Way to join the Board and lead a study to create a new vision for the Center. Walter was among the Community Center leaders who founded From All Walks of Life, now the AIDS Fund, which began an annual fundraising walk to raise money for AIDS. By the mid-1990s, once drug therapies emerged to successfully treat AIDS, Walter was instrumental in creating the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund, a donor-advised fund at the Philadelphia Foundation, to support the long-deferred needs and services of the LGBT community.

Walter’s lifetime of activism and leadership was honored by several prestigious awards. In the 1990s Walter received the Paul Robeson Social Justice Award from the Bread and Roses Community Fund and the Paul Cornely Award of the Physicians Forum. In 2006, he received the Helen Rodriguez-Trias Social Justice Award from the American Public Health Association.

There was also a lighthearted, playful side to Walter. He was active in the Philadelphia Faeries since their founding and often attended Euro-Faerie gatherings in France. Walter’s faerie moniker was “Tufflebird,” as in Tough Old Bird. Walter also appreciated the importance of physical culture to good health and for much of his life he swam regularly. He attended the 1998 Amsterdam Gay Games and won a swimming gold medal in his age category for the 200-meter freestyle. Walter also loved to dance. And he always made time to mentor younger activists.

Walter’s later years focused on activities centered in his Institute for Social Medicine and Community Health which he founded and operated from his home at 206 N 35th Street in the Powelton Village neighborhood in West Philadelphia. At the Institute, much of his work focused on his role as historian and archivist of the medical left. He wrote and published a number of historical papers and actively participated in conferences. Walter was a voracious and joyful collector of articles, books, pamphlets, photographs and ephemera related to health care activism, and he personally undertook the tape recording of interviews with key activists across the country. Walter was a founding member of the Siegrist Circle, a group of medical historians. His later years were devoted to preparing his collection for transfer to the University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt-Dietrich Library where it comprises the US Health Activism History Collection in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Book and Manuscripts. Following his death, Walter’s memorial service was hosted at Penn’s Library where an exhibit drawn from his collection was mounted. Walter also donated LGBTQ materials to the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at William Way LGBT Community Center.

Much of Walter’s success in community building was attributable to his boundless capacity to attend and actively engage in meetings. Equally, he inspired many friendships and collaborations. Just as John Mosteller was instrumental to Walter’s coming out, the life-long friendship that sprung from that initial meeting was critical to both Walter and James’ later years. This friendship deepened as John lived for ten years with Walter and James on the third floor of their enormous house. And thereafter when John, and ultimately his partner Dominic DiBernardi, moved into a house one block away, they all remained part of “the family” that Walter and James had forged and treasured. Given this bond, when Walter’s bone cancer reasserted itself, it was to John that he turned to serve as both his power of attorney and ultimately his executor. With Walter’s passing in 2010, John and Dominic turned their attention to helping and protecting James so that he could live out his life in the house he and Walter had shared together for forty years. Thanks to their efforts James only had to spend his last five days in a hospital, dying at the beginning of October 2019 a few months shy of his 93rd birthday.