Michael Seltzer, whose bedside vigil for a friend who was dying of AIDS transformed him into a prodigious fund-raiser who rallied individuals, foundations and corporations to support the prevention and treatment of the disease in the 1980s, when it was largely neglected at all levels of government, died on July 31 at his summer home on Governor Island, near Branford, Conn. He was 78.
His husband, Ralph Tachuk, said the cause was cardiac arrest. His death was not widely reported at the time.
“Michael’s pursuit of a world without AIDS was personal,” Kevin Jennings, the chief executive of the civil rights advocacy group Lambda Legal, said in an interview. “After witnessing a friend’s battle with AIDS in the 1980s, he felt a profound responsibility to act. ”
Mysterious at first, and with no proven treatment, AIDS was met largely with fear, neglect and a blame-the-victim response. Research into prevention, treatment and palliative care was not a popular cause.
In 1985, Mr. Seltzer spent two weeks in Paris with Bob White, a California man he had befriended in Philadelphia after college, who was being treated at the Pasteur Institute.
“Bob eventually went back to San Francisco and died,” Mr. Tachuk said. “Michael continued working in the fight against AIDS.”
Mr. Seltzer collaborated with Joyce Bove, Katherine Acey and others to found Funders Concerned About AIDS in 1987 and served as its executive director until 1997. He was a founder of Funders for L.G.B.T.Q. Issues and a chairman of Lambda Legal and the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan. From 2003 to 2006, he was president of Philanthropy New York, an umbrella group.
Arantxa Bonifaz Rosas, a researcher for Funders Concerned, estimated that during Mr. Seltzer’s tenure with the organization, private philanthropy for H.I.V.-related programs soared to $59 million in 1996 from $18 million in 1987, and that a total of nearly $700 million has been raised from those sources since then.
“When Michael Seltzer first got involved in progressive and then gay activism in the 1970s, it was mostly funded through passing the hat at meetings and through low-dollar fund-raisers,” Andy Humm, a former spokesman for the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights and a member of the New York City Human Rights Commission in the early 1990s, wrote in Gay City News after Mr. Seltzer’s death.
“More than any other individual,” Mr. Humm added, “Seltzer turned that around over the course of decades of work, from serving on boards of major gay organizations from 1980 onward to creating and running organizations that exponentially increased philanthropy to gay and AIDS causes.”
Michael Stephen Seltzer was born on Jan. 17, 1947, in Manhattan to Max Seltzer, a lawyer, and Dorothy (Reisman) Seltzer, who ran the household.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, he earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations and African studies from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 1968. He served in West Virginia and Hawaii with the national service organization VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), whose goal is to reduce poverty.
In the 1970s he lived in Philadelphia, where he worked for the American Freedom From Hunger Foundation. He collaborated in running the People’s Fund (later the Bread & Roses Community Fund), which raised money for groups like the Black Panthers that many other philanthropic groups shunned as too radical. (The fund’s motto was “Change, not charity.”)
After returning to New York in 1979, he worked as a program officer for the Ford Foundation and continued his activism. As a professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York for 12 years, he was instrumental in establishing the New York Community Trust Leadership Fellows, with support from the New York Community Trust. He remained active until recently, marching in the “No Kings” and “Hands Off” protests against the Trump administration this year.
In addition to Mr. Tachuk, whom he marred in 2013, Mr. Seltzer is survived by a half brother, Richard Seltzer.
As a former volunteer for Crossroads Africa who helped build a school in Cameroon while he was in college, and the author of the reference book “Securing Your Organization’s Future: A Complete Guide to Fund-Raising Strategies” (published in 1987 and revised in 2002), Mr. Seltzer was both persistent and pragmatic.
“It’s not enough to only want to do good,” he told The New York Times in 1999, when he was chair of the master’s program in nonprofit management at the New School in Manhattan. “You have to do good well.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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