David B. Feinberg

David B. Feinberg (1956-1994) was an American writer and AIDS activist best known for his novels Eighty-Sixed (1989), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Fiction, the Stonewall Award for Literature, and the American Library Association Gay/Lesbian Award for Fiction, its sequel Spontaneous Combustion (1991), and the essay collection Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (1994). Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, to Jewish parents and raised in Syracuse, New York, he graduated from MIT in 1977 with a degree in mathematics and later earned a master's in linguistics from NYU, while working as a computer programmer and actively participating in ACT UP demonstrations. His works humorously yet poignantly chronicled gay life in New York City before and during the AIDS crisis.