Longtime Dallas LGBT activist Campbell Burgess Read died Wednesday, April 25, 2018, at the age of 87.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland to Selwyn and Mary Read (nee MacMillan), Read was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Corpus Christi Cambridge. He was a respected mathematician and statistician and was a statistics professor at SMU for 40 years.

Read helped form the school’s first gay and lesbian student association, Gay and Lesbian Student Support Organization, in 1983. Read told Dallas Voice in 1988 that the organization placed an ad in the Daily Campus, and within a month, 60 students responded. The school newspaper wanted to send a reporter to the meetings, but Read refused because meetings were held at his home, and he wanted to give the students who attended privacy. He said it was the first time the administration had to look at the LGBT community, but regular attendance at the GLSSO meetings was low, and the group folded by 1985.

By 1988, when he spoke to Dallas Voice, Read said the Texas sodomy law had a chilling effect on gays and lesbians on campus and that — at least for the then-near future, he didn’t expect any formal campus group to form.

When the Reagan administration wanted to do a community survey on the prevalence of HIV in the general population by taking a blood sample from people in randomly selected households, Dallas was to be the test city for the national project. Dallas County Commissioners Court, then Republican controlled, had qualms and appointed a 29-member advisory panel. Seven of those members were gay, including Read who opposed the survey. The Dallas survey failed and by 1989, the newly-elected Bush administration pulled its support from the project.
Read was also an environmentalist, and in the 1980’s, he became a member of the Trinity River Corridor Citizen’s Committee. He was an early activist against building a toll road in the Trinity flood plain, long before there were signature bridges or bond money set aside for parks in the flood plain.

He was a keen birdwatcher and environmentalist as well as a member of the local church community helping organize and teach others about birdlife. He was never happier than when walking the mountain trails around Santa Fe.

Read is survived by his sister, Diana, one niece and one nephew.

A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, June 13, in the sanctuary of First Unitarian Church, 4015 Normandy Ave. in the Sanctuary followed by a reception in Channing Hall. Park on either side of the building or in a back lot accessible from St. Andrews Drive.