Born 8/9/1936
Cleveland, Ohio
Died 3/8/2023
Brattleboro, Vermont
Dolores Klaich, 86, died peacefully on March 8, 2023, International Women’s Day, in her Brattleboro, Vermont home, where she had lived since 2004 after a long residency in East Hampton, New York.
Dolores was a retired journalist, editor, and educator who worked as a reporter for Life Magazine in the 1960s. Later, she developed and implemented an HIV-AIDS curriculum that was used for much of the 1980s by health care professionals and communities alike during the first decades of that epidemic. Thereafter, she did freelance work, publishing books and articles, with an emphasis on gay, lesbian, and feminist issues. Her book Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism (1974) was widely used in some of the first Women’s Studies programs.
Throughout her life, Dolores participated in citizen activism for various social, environmental, and anti-war efforts. This was a natural pathway for a “pink diaper baby” inspired by her Socialist parents. In her last years, she supported the Death with Dignity movement, choosing for herself, after a long period of declining health, Medical Aid in Dying under Vermont’s legislative Act 39 permitting this kind of care.
Dolores devoted her professional and personal life to the Jewish principle of TIKKUN OLAM: work done to repair the world.