Gregory Dawson's "Self Portrait," 2000, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 in.

Greg Dawson hailed from Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago, and graduated from Yale University in 1955. After serving in the military, he came to New York City where his first job was as a talent coordinator for the "Tex and Jinx" show, a "breakfast" radio program on WOR that starred Tex McCrary and his wife Jinx Falkenburg.

Dawson next worked as a special events director at the 1964 World's Fair under Robert Moses, New York's legendary master builder and urban planner.

In the early 1970s, Dawson became a co-owner of the Ballroom, a cabaret/restaurant on West Broadway in Soho. The club introduced such talents as Jane Oliver and Baby Jane Dexter, and later moved to West 28th Street in Chelsea. In that location it played host to some of cabaret's leading lights, including Barbara Cook, Peggy Lee, Eartha Kitt, Rosemary Clooney, Mary Cleere Haran, Johnnie Ray, and Van Johnson.

Dawson was a co-founder of MAC, the Manhattan Association of Cabarets.

In recent years, Dawson was a painter, working primarily in watercolor and acrylic, and a sculptor, completing constructions in wood and bronze. He won commissions for both outdoor sculptures and large murals and maintained a studio in downtown Brooklyn.

An early gay activist, Dawson was involved at the old Soho Firehouse where the Gay Activist Alliance was born. It was from that group that the Task Force initially evolved. At the Task Force, Dawson helped organize the first board of directors and establish the gay rights movement's first paid staff.

Gregory Dawson was 73 and is survived by his sister, Hillary Schlesinger.

- David Rothenberg.

SOURCE: reprinted from GayCityNews, October 25, 2007