American writer Hubert Selby Jr. was BOTD in 1928. Born in Brooklyn, New York to a working class family, he left school at 15 to work on in the city docks, and became a merchant seaman in 1947. He contracted tuberculosis and was invalided back to the United States, spending three years in hospital, eventually having nine ribs and one lung removed. He spent most of the next decade as an invalid, developing an addiction to painkillers following his various surgeries. Encouraged by his childhood friend Gilbert Sorrentino, he began writing fiction, using a raw stripped-down style to describe the violent working-class world of his youth. His 1961 story Tralala, a harrowing account of a gang-rape of a young prostitute was published in The Provincetown Review. Its editor was subsequently arrested for selling pornography. He combined Tralala and other stories into his debut novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. Published in 1964, it caused a sensation for its graphic descriptions of drug abuse, violence and sexual assault. Praised by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who predicted that it would “explode. like a rusty hellish bombshell over America”, it was banned in several countries, and unsuccessfully prosecuted for obscenity in Great Britain. The book’s success propelled Selby to literary celebrity, exacerbated by his arrest and imprisonment in 1967 for heroin possession. After his release, he moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to escape his drug addiction. He continued to write and publish, notably his 1978 novel Requiem for a Dream, a harrowing portrait of four Brooklynites trapped in varying cycles of addiction. In the 1980s, he befriended punk rock singer Henry Rollins, who became a champion of his work. The renewed interest in his work helped him secure a position as a creative writing teacher at the University of Southern California, where he worked for the rest of his life. His star rose again with a controversial but critically celebrated 1989 film adaptation of Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the Oscar-nominated 2000 film of Requiem for a Dream. Married twice and with two children, Selby died in 2004 aged 75. While avowedly heterosexual, he earns Honorary SuperGay status for his honest and empathetic descriptions of gay and trans characters in American literature.