American writer Herman Carroll, better known by his pseudonym H. G. Carrillo, was BOTD in 1960. Born in Detroit, Michigan to a middle-class African-American family, he was a brilliant student, openly queer from his early teens and prone to embellishing details about his life. After graduating high school, he moved to Chicago, immersing himself in the city’s queer scene. In 1988, his partner David Herzfeldt died from an AIDS-related illness. He studied English and Spanish at DePaul University in 1995, calling himself Hermán (Hache) Carrillo and telling friends he was a Cuban-born immigrant. He began publishing fiction, using the name H. G. Carrillo and winning a number of literary prizes and fellowships. In 2004, he published Loosing My Espanish, a novel about a gay Afro-Cuban man whose family emigrated from Santiago, to glowing reviews. After completing an MFA at Cornell University, he became an assistant professor at George Washington University, teaching Latin-American literature and creative writing. A dynamic and popular teacher, he entertained his students with stories of his parents fleeing Cuba, along with tall tales about studying at Dartmouth College and eloping to Morocco with his female teaching assistant until she left him for a woman. After failing to secure tenure due to his poor publication record, he resigned and went to work for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, eventually becoming chairman. In 2015, he married his long-time boyfriend Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a Dutch entomologist 10 years his junior. Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2019, he was admitted to hospital in April 2020, where he contracted COVID-19, dying aged 59. A month after his death, the Washington Post published a lengthy obituary. Carroll’s niece contacted the Post, who published a revised obituary with an editor’s note, clarifying Carroll’s original name and background. VanEngelsdorp later admitted to the New Yorker that “the only true things [Carroll] ever told me about his life was his birthday and the fact that he was Catholic.”