John Gerassi

John Gerassi (July 12, 1931 – July 26, 2012), also known as Tito Gerassi or mononymously Tito, was a French-American leftist professor, journalist, author, scholar, political activist, and revolutionary. At birth, Tito's parents, artist Fernando Gerassi and Ukrainian feminist Stépha Gerassi, were members of the Montparnasse circle of artists and intellectuals that included Pablo Picasso and his godfather Jean-Paul Sartre. Initially working as a journalist for Time magazine and later a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, he grew close to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution and analyzed the American policy against Latin America in his 1965 book The Great Fear in Latin America. In 1966, Tito would investigate the Boise homosexuality scandal in The Boys of Boise, exposing the persecution of homosexuals in the city that was carried out under the guise of a moral panic. Tito also utilized his close ties to figures to construct biographies, creating the only authorized biography of Sartre, Hated Conscience of His Century in 1989.

Tito also spent his life as an educator, teaching at institutions including San Francisco State University, The University of Paris (XII, Vincennes), the JFK Institute of the Free University of Berlin, UC Irvine, and Bard College. At the time of his death, he was the senior professor of Political Science at Queens College, City University of New York, where he had been teaching since 1978.