William Armstrong Percy III (December 10, 1933 – October 30, 2022) was an American professor, historian, encyclopedist, and gay activist. He taught from 1968 at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and started publishing in

gay studies Queer studies, sexual diversity studies, or LGBTQ studies is the study of topics relating to sexual orientation and gender identity usually focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender dysphoric, asexual, aromantic, queer, questi ...

in 1985.

Early life and education

Bill was born to Anne Minor Dent and William Armstrong Percy, II, of the Mississippi Percy family. His mother was raised by her widowed uncle, the distinguished Memphis lawyer Dent Minor. He was a descendant of 17th-century Dent settlers in

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It borders the states of Virginia to its south, West Virginia to its west, Pennsylvania to its north, and Delaware to its east ...

and the Minors in

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

. Dent's great-uncle John B. Minor taught law at the

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a Public university#United States, public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson and contains his The Lawn, Academical Village, a World H ...

from 1845 to 1895 and served for decades there as dean of the Law School.\

Career

Percy taught at the

University of New Orleans The University of New Orleans (UNO) is a Public university, public research university in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. First opened in 1958 as Louisiana State University in New Orleans, it is the largest public university and one of t ...

Louisiana State University Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as Louisiana State University (LSU), is an American Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louis ...

, and the

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou or MU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri, United States. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus Univers ...

St. Louis St. Louis ( , sometimes referred to as St. Louis City, Saint Louis or STL) is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It lies near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a populatio ...

for two years each. In 1968 he moved to the

University of Massachusetts The University of Massachusetts is the Public university, public university system of the Massachusetts, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The university system includes six campuses (Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts Lowell ...

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

. After gaining tenure and promotion to full professor there, in 1975 Percy "came out" to colleagues. He joined the fight for equal rights for gays in 1982 after meeting gay activist Charley Shively. Percy served as the other associate editor with

Warren Johansson Warren Johansson (February 21, 1934 – June 10, 1994) was a philologist, author and a leading American gay scholar during his lifetime. He was founding member of the Scholarship Committee of the Gay Academic Union. Biography Warren Johansson ...

of the ''

Encyclopedia of Homosexuality The ''Encyclopedia of Homosexuality'' (1990) was edited by Wayne R. Dynes, with the assistance of associate editors William Armstrong Percy III, William A. Percy, Warren Johansson, and Stephen Donaldson (activist), Stephen Donaldson. It was publis ...

'' (1990), which won six prizes. It has recently been reprinted by Rutledge, costing $500 for the two volumes. Paul Cartledge, of the University of Cambridge, described Percy's ''Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece'' (1996) as the first work to try to go beyond Kenneth Dover's "groundbreaking" ''Greek Homosexuality.'' Dover's work, influenced by pseudo-Freudianism, was very homophobic. Cartledge noted there were finer works in German that were translated into English before Dover wrote. Percy published ''The Age of Marriage in Ancient Rome'' (2003), arguing that Roman males married at younger ages than concluded by historians, and to younger women. The earlier average dates were found by Percy among his personal trove of ancient Roman wedding licenses and divorce papyri. Of all ancient people studied by Percy, only Greek males waited until about 30 to marry. In Sparta, they normally married females of 18, but in other free cities, they married females aged from 14 to 16, soon after the passage to puberty. William Armstrong Percy III died on October 30, 2022, at the age of 88.

Notes

Works by Percy

* ''The Age of Recovery: The Fifteenth Century'' (Vol. X, ''The Development of Western Civilization'' series), with Jerah Johnson. New York: Cornell University Press, 1970. * ''Encyclopedia of Homosexuality'', Ed. Wayne R. Dynes. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1990. * ''Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence'', with Warren Johansson. New York: Haworth Press, 1994. * ''Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece''. Champaigne/Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. * ''The Age of Marriage in Ancient Rome'', with Arnold Lelis and Beert Verstraete. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.

External links

Biography of William Armstrong Percy
personal website
"William A. Percy"
University of Massachusetts-Boston, Faculty webpage {{DEFAULTSORT:Percy, William Armstrong III 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers American LGBTQ rights activists American LGBTQ writers LGBTQ people from Tennessee 1933 births 2022 deaths Cornell University alumni Historians of LGBTQ topics Defense Language Institute alumni Middlesex School alumni People from Memphis, Tennessee American male non-fiction writers