Throwback Thursday Remembers Some Community Members We Lost This Week

December 18, 2025
HANK ORSO

Y'all, this week was a rough one. Not only for our community, but globally. From the anti-Semitic attack in Australia to the Brown University shooting to the death of Rob Reiner, it's like 2025 is trying to outdo itself as it comes to a close. For this week's Throwback Thursday, we're going to remember Reiner, as well as two members of our community who died recently.

Anthony Geary

Anthony Geary (pictured above, on the right), born in 1947, died this past Sunday due to complications from a scheduled surgery he had undergone three days prior. He was 78. Geary leaves behind his husband, Claudio Gama, pictured with him above.

He was most famous in the role of Luke Spencer on the daytime soap opera General Hospital, which he played from 1978 to 2015. You could joke that Luke, who started off as a real cad, was America's favorite bad guy, having committed a heinous act against the character of Laura, played by Genie Francis. Luke and Laura, in true soap opera fashion, would later date and wed, and the Luke and Laura saga was cemented in soap history. The 1981 wedding episode was the most-watched episode ever, with over 30 million viewers. Geary would be honored with a record eight Daytime Emmy wins for Best Lead Actor and was nominated sixteen times.

Geary appeared in numerous TV and movie projects, but it was General Hospital that made him a global star. After General Hospital, he retired and moved to Amsterdam. His husband said of him, "For more than 30 years, Tony has been my friend, my companion, my husband."

Wenne Alton Davis

Davis, who used they/them pronouns on their IG account, was killed this past Monday when they were struck by an SUV while crossing the street in midtown Manhattan. They were an actor recognised on an episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, as well as having a small role in the 2104 film adaptation of Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart. Besides a slew of parts in TV and movies, Davis, when not busy acting, was a member of the customs security team at JFK Airport in NYC, for whom they played on the force's hockey team. Their agent, Jamie Harris, told The Advocate, "I can only describe Wenne Davis as a bright light. She had a huge love for New York, for acting, and, most of all, for her family and her circle of friends (which was also huge). She was someone for whom friendliness and kindness were not what she did but more who she was as a person."

Rob Reiner

Reiner died alongside his wife, Michelle, on Sunday, the victims of a knife attack. His son Nick Reiner has been arrested and charged.

The reason Reiner is included here isn't that he was gay; he wasn't, but because he was a fierce and true ally of the LGBTQ+ community, both in real life and as embodied by his most famous fictional character, that of Michael "Meathead" Stivic on the groundbreaking 70s sitcom All In the Family.

Reiner, the son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, was an actor and the director of a host of films that spanned decades and genres, some of which defined their generations: The Sure Thing, Defending My Life, When Harry Met Sally, This Is Spinal Tap, which basically invented the mockumentary film (!), A Few Good Men, Misery (which won Kathy Bates her Best Actress Oscar), and The Prncess Bride. The list goes on and on.

Reiner cofounded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which successfully fought against California's Prop 8, the ballot measure that sought to dismantle marriage equality in the state. As The Advocate states, the organisation's "efforts restored marriage equality in California and contributed to the momentum for nationwide equality a couple of years later."

But Reiner's advocacy goes back long before that. Playing the character of Michael Stivic on All In the Family, he wasn't far from his fictional character as an über lefty, unafraid to raise a dissenting counter-culture voice against his bigoted but well-meaning father-in-law, played by Carroll O'Connor. Whether it be gay rights, racial and gender equality, or economic equality, the two humorously butted heads over social politics in almost every episode. Mike is described by John Casey as the moral center of the show, and as "an inclusive conscience and arbiter of what was right and fair." He was, as Casey points out, one of the community's earliest and most outspoken public allies. And the character wouldn't have had as much fire behind his words if the actor, Reiner, didn't work with the same convictions.

And the show's creator, Norman Lear, worked with the identical convictions. It was only the third ever episode of the series, in Feb, 1971, that Lear flipped gay stereotypes on their heads. And coincidentally, the episode featured a young Anthony Geary. In "Judging Books By Their Covers," Geary played "Roger the Fairy," an effeminate straight friend of Mike, whom Archie Bunker immediately deems "queer as a four-dollar bill," and with repeated use of the other F-word. Later, Archie finds out his butch drinking buddy Stan is actually the gay guy! What's remarkable is how Mike Stivik comes to Roger's defense, and further says, "So what if he is?" Here we have a straight male character advocating for his friendship with a perceived gay man and thinking nothing of it, displaying allyship long before such a notion to do so in a public realm was ever considered. That these two men, Reiner and Geary, died on the same day decades later is a little shattering.

Geary would later tell The Advocate about the episode, "It handled important issues around prejudice and homophobia with truth and heart. Most importantly, the script was funny. In those days, we didn’t routinely see gay characters on TV. When we did, they tended to serve as the butt of a joke or the subject of violence. This story highlighted the truth that all gay people are not alike and proved again that images and preconceptions about gays are often incorrect, deceptive, and offensive.”

Reiner would remain a lifelong social advocate and liberal Democrat, vociferously opposed to the likes of who spawned the current president and administration. This would explain Trump's reprehensible response to Reiner's death.

Rob Reiner, thank you for being a friend.

Blake Mitchell

As we reported yesterday, porn personality Blake Mitchell, who ended up using his legal name Lane Rogers in his later career, died tragically in a motorcycle accident earlier this week. He was only 31. There has been a huge outpouring from the adult industry with fond memories of his personality and LGBTQ activism. During his career, he was an advocate for bisexual representation and also shared stories of being bullied to raise awareness about anti-LGBTQ sentiment. His porn career spanned over a decade, focusing on his equestrian endeavors and social media most recently. He will be missed.