William Armstrong Percy III

American historian and activist (1933–2022)

William Armstrong Percy III (December 10, 1933 – October 30, 2022) was an American professor, historian, encyclopedist, and gay activist. He taught from 1968 at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and started publishing in gay studies in 1985.

Bill was born to Anne Minor Dent and William Armstrong Percy, II, of the Mississippi Percy family. His mother was raised by her widowed uncle, the distinguished Memphis lawyer Dent Minor. He was a descendant of 17th century Dent settlers in Maryland and the Minors in Virginia. Dent's great uncle John B. Minor taught law at the University of Virginia from 1845 to 1895 and served for decades there as dean of the Law School. In 1968 he moved to the University of Massachusetts at Boston. After gaining tenure and promotion to full professor there, in 1975 Percy "came out" to colleagues. He joined the fight for equal rights for gays in 1982 after meeting gay activist Charley Shively. Dover's work, influenced by pseudo Freudianism, was very homophobic. Cartledge noted there were finer works in German that were translated into English before Dover wrote. Percy published The Age of Marriage in Ancient Rome (2003), arguing that Roman males married at younger ages than concluded by historians, and to younger women. The earlier average dates were found by Percy among his personal trove of ancient Roman wedding licenses and divorce papyri. Of all ancient people studied by Percy, only Greek males waited until about 30 to marry. In Sparta, they normally married females of 18, but in other free cities, they married females aged from 14 to 16, soon after the passage to puberty. William Armstrong Percy III died on October 30, 2022, at the age of 88.

The Age of Recovery: The Fifteenth Century (Vol. X, The Development of Western Civilization series), with Jerah Johnson. New York: Cornell University Press, 1970. Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, Ed. Wayne R. Dynes. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1990. Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence, with Warren Johansson. New York: Haworth Press, 1994. Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. Champaigne/Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. The Age of Marriage in Ancient Rome, with Arnold Lelis and Beert Verstraete. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.