Dlugos, Tim

Born in Springfield, Mass. on August 5, 1959, Francis Timothy Dlugos later grew up in Arlington, Virginia. He joined the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order, in 1968 and entered their college, La Salle, in Philadelphia. He left the Brothers a few years later in 1971 to openly embrace a politically active, gay lifestyle. He eventually left La Salle before graduating. In Washington, D.C., Dlugos worked on Ralph Nader's Public Citizen and became heavily involved with the Mass Transit poetry scene. Dlugos moved to New York in the late seventies where he edited and contributed to such magazines as Christopher Street, New York Native, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He read everywhere and with almost everyone involved in the downtown scene. Whether writing about pop culture, New York, being gay, alcoholism, or AIDS, content always came secondary to style in Dlugos' poetry. Sometime after being diagnosed HIV positive, Dlugos decided to abandon his career as a fundraiser to become a priest in the Episcopalian church where he could utilize and express his experiences as a gay man. While studying at the Yale School of Divinity, Dlugos died of AIDS related complications on December 3, 1990.