David B. Feinberg

David Barish Feinberg (November 25, 1956 - November 2, 1994) was an American writer and AIDS activist. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Feinberg grew up in Syracuse, New York. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in mathematics and studying creative writing with novelist John Hersey. He subsequently worked as a computer programmer for the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and also pursued a Master's degree in lin... more

David Barish Feinberg (November 25, 1956 - November 2, 1994) was an American writer and AIDS activist. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Feinberg grew up in Syracuse, New York. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in mathematics and studying creative writing with novelist John Hersey. He subsequently worked as a computer programmer for the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and also pursued a Master's degree in linguistics at New York University. He completed his first novel, Calculus, in 1979, although it has never been published. Feinberg himself described the novel as "godawful", telling one interviewer that it was a novel that "only an MIT math major could have written". In the early 1980s, he joined a gay men's writing group, eventually creating the character B. J. Rosenthal, a young gay man, much like Feinberg himself, who became the central character in virtually all of Feinberg's later writing. He contributed a humour column to the gay magazine... less