Ed Sedarbaum (1945-2024) and Howard Cruse (1944-2019) were LGBTQ rights activists based in Jackson Heights, Queens. Howard Cruse was one of the first openly gay American comics artists and a prominent figure in the underground comics scene of the 1970s and 80s. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944 and went to Birmingham-Southern College, where he studied art and theater. After graduating, he worked as an art director and puppeteer for a local television station and began publishing comics. He drew the comic strip Tops and Button for the Birmingham Post-Herald and published Barefootz, the first of his comics to include a gay character, with Kitchen Sink Press, a publisher of underground comics. In the late 1970s, Cruse moved to NYC, began working as a full-time freelance cartoonist and illustrator, and met his long-term partner Ed Sedarbaum. In 1980, Cruse became the editor of Kitchen Sink Press’s Gay Comix series, a position he did not accept lightly: he worried that coming out would sink his illustration career, but he also felt that the series would provide the comics world with much-needed gay and lesbian representation. He drew the comic strip Wendel for The Advocate from 1983 to 1989, following a gay man and his lover against the backdrop of Reagan-era America and the AIDS epidemic. Cruse spent a large part of the 1990s drawing what would be considered his most complex and critically acclaimed work, the graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby. Described by the cartoonist Justin Hall as “perhaps the closest we’ve come yet to the Great American Graphic Novel,” Stuck Rubber Baby explores the experiences of a closeted gay man in the American South who finds a sense of purpose and community through his involvement with civil rights activism. Ed Sedarbaum was born in Brooklyn in 1945 and raised in Queens. He worked as a caseworker for the NYC Department of Social Services and had recently left his wife of ten years when he met Cruse in 1979. He became a freelance editor in 1981, editing Cruse’s work, and would pose for Cruse while he was working on illustrations. Sedarbaum was an advocate for the LGBTQ community for decades: he began volunteering with Gay Switchboard in the 1970s (now LGBT Switchboard, the oldest operating LGBTQ hotline in the world) and Identity House in Manhattan. In the 1990s, the focus of Sedarbaum’s activism shifted to Queens after the murder of Julio Rivera, a gay Puerto Rican bartender living in Jackson Heights. In response, Sedarbaum worked with the Anti-Violence Project to develop training to improve the relationship between the LGBTQ community and the police, and founded Queens Gays and Lesbians United and the Queens Center for Gay Seniors. In 2002, Sedarbaum and Cruse left their apartment in Jackson Heights to move to the Berkshires. They were married in 2004, the year that same-sex marriage became recognized in Massachusetts. Ed Sedarbaum & Howard Cruse Corner marks the block in Jackson Heights where Sedarbaum and Cruse lived for over twenty years.

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