Obituary
Remembering Rauhofer
Gay music legend noted for remixes, production and innovation
Peter Rauhofer died last week in New York. Gay music lovers say he’ll be remembered for his unyielding work ethic and boundless creativity. (Photos courtesy Angelo Russo)
Angelo Russo knew something was wrong in March when several days went by without hearing back from his friend and client, legendary producer/DJ/remixer Peter Rauhofer.
“We sometimes talked five or six times a day so when I didn’t hear back from him, yeah, it sent up the red flags,” Russo says. “The only time I didn’t hear from him was if we were fighting and of course we fought. The closer you are, the more you fight with someone. But yeah, back in March, we were fine. I was speaking to him one day, then a couple days went by and eventually we had 911 break into his apartment.”
Russo says Rauhofer, whom he’d met at a music conference in 2000 and had managed since 2006, was “barely conscious” having suffered a seizure. Hospitalized at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York, the prognosis was grim. Rauhofer, who was gay, had a malignant brain tumor that had gone undiagnosed long enough to have grown significantly. Russo (also gay) says doctors said its position on the brain made it inoperable. They tried a round of chemotherapy that was unsuccessful. On April 29, Rauhofer turned 48 in the hospital. He died May 7.
Russo says it may have been a bit of a blessing in disguise. Had the Grammy-winning music legend, who remixed hits for Cher (“Believe”), Madonna (“Nothing Fails,” “4 Minutes” et. al.), Janet Jackson (“Throb”), Britney Spears (“Toxic”) and scores of other artists, responded well to chemo, it may have left him with diminished mental faculties.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V4paTlgYLM
“There was a possibility at one point that if it had worked, he may only have had the mental capacity of a 5 year old,” Russo says. “He would have been so unhappy but how can you tell his mom not to try. So they tried but it didn’t work. … When they came back and said there was nothing more they could do, I was hoping he wouldn’t have to lay there and suffer too long. He was not about suffering. He was about being able to be happy and bring joy to people. That’s what his career was all about — parties and music. If he wasn’t able to do that, then I’m happy it didn’t go another route.”
Rauhofer’s mother Helga, who visited from their native Austria for her son’s final days, is executrix of his estate. He will be interred in Austria. A candlelight vigil was held last weekend in Miami. A public memorial is planned for New York Pride next month. Friends in New York are also planning a private memorial service there, where he’d lived since about 1996. Check Rauhofer’s Facebook page for details on public events.
The gay club/music world responded with shock and sadness at Rauhofer’s untimely death.
“I don’t use this term loosely, but he was a musical genius,” says gay DJ/remixer Joe Gauthreaux. “He never got stuck in one sound and stayed there, that’s why his mixes always resonated. He was always doing something different and trying to grow. He never did the same remix twice. He was always trying different sounds. There really was nobody like him.”
Gauthreax also says he “was a huge Peter fan, huge.”
“He was one of the remixers that, from a DJ standpoint, I would always be so excited about. It was usually his mix that was quote-unquote the one. So from that standpoint, this is very hard to take just knowing that there’s not going to ever be another Peter Rauhofer mix to come in and save the day.”
Tori Amos, who had a No. 1 Billboard dance hit in February with Rauhofer’s remix of her song “Flavor,” said in a statement that “he truly captured the spirit of the song” and that she’ll “always hold a very special place in my heart for Peter.”
Local gay nightclub impresario Ed Bailey, who hosted Rauhofer twice at Velvet Nation in the early ‘00s, says Rauhofer’s work epitomized the era.
“His music, his production and his remixes, were kind of not exclusively but almost like the overwhelming soundtrack of the big clubs and circuit parties for the whole decade from about 2000 to 2010,” Bailey says. “He’s widely revered as that amazing one of all the amazing people who helped shape an entire kind of era in club land that for most people, they feel it was one of the best eras ever. We were very proud to be able to have him at Nation and I remember just being mesmerized by his set.”
Gay DJ Hector Fonseca met Rauhofer in 1998, joined Star 69 in 2001 and worked with Rauhofer for eight years releasing about 20 remixes and three albums. Fonseca, traveling this week in Europe, says by e-mail he and Rauhofer developed a strong working relationship and friendship.
“Besides his strong work ethic and extreme attention to detail, what made him stand out was that he was always pushing the sound in the gay scene with elements from the European trance and electro scene,” Fonseca says. “Very few, if any, were doing that and still to this day, it’s quite unique.”
Fonseca says Rauhofer will be “remembered as a visionary from a great era in New York City.”
“We were really the epicenter of house,” he says. “Now most cutting edge stuff is coming from Amsterdam, but if you take a closer look into that music, you can hear the influence from DJs of that time here in New York and Peter was a big part of that. The Twilo and Roxy days when you really had to push the sound to stand out. He will be missed by many but remembered through his music.”
During a lengthy phone interview this week, Russo, who started as an intern at Rauhofer’s Star 69 label in 2001, shares several memories of their years working together.
Russo says Rauhofer:
- had been in apparently good health prior to the March seizure. He says he doesn’t know of Rauhofer ignoring any warning signs earlier though he admits Rauhofer was usually “not one to go to the doctor.” “He hadn’t complained of headaches or anything,” Russo says. “This kind of blindsided me.”
- was in and out of consciousness in his final days. He was able to squeeze hands of those by his bedside at times. “We don’t know how much he heard, but we gave him an earful.” And although sad, Russo says it was a joy to share with Rauhofer’s mother details of his life in New York, of which she’d previously known little.
- was a workaholic who “would obsess over his mixes” and would often stay up working all night to finish them.
- loved to collect toy metal robots and Gucci jewelry.
- kept his Grammy for Cher’s “Believe” in his Star 69 office until it closed in the summer of 2010 after which he kept it on a shelf in the living room of his 42nd Street apartment in Manhattan.
- dated at various times and had some semi-long term boyfriends, but made it clear work came first for him. “A lot of people just don’t have the patience for that,” Russo says. Rauhofer had not been dating in recent months, Russo says.
- Had met many of the artists whose hits he remixed. Although most of the remixing work was done without the artist, Russo remembers Rauhofer meeting Madonna, for instance, on multiple occasions. He says Rauhofer wasn’t especially star struck in general though he had an obsession with Grace Jones and “always wanted to work with her but never got the chance.” “If she had walked in the room, he might have gasped,” Russo says.
Rumors that Rauhofer could be tough — Bailey says, “I don’t think it’s a secret in the industry that he had a reputation for being difficult to work with” — were mostly a matter of Rauhofer’s being, “never a diva, but a perfectionist,” as Russo puts it.
“There were tiny spats about things,” Russo says. “He hated it when some A&R (artist and repertoire) person would be bugging for a mix, say they just wanted to sample it to see where he was going with it, then they’d start promoting his unfinished mixes, he hated that. But most of the time, believe it or not, he was pretty easygoing. When you pushed him, yeah, he would let you have it. … He would scream when he felt like he’d been wronged, but he’d worked really hard for what he achieved and he expected to be respected for that.”
Bailey says although Rauhofer excelled at mixing, spinning and producing, it’s his DJ sets for which he’ll most be remembered among the general public.
“It’s inevitable that the mixes will sound dated over time but the memories people experienced of him spinning live will live on,” Bailey says. “They’ll never be tarnished because they’re not something you can listen to over and over.”
Russo says Rauhofer’s ability to transcend genres is an important part of understanding his legacy.
“His whole idea about music, whether it was one remix or a whole DJ set, was that it should be a journey,” he says. “Toward the end of the ‘90s, I think it started to be very segregated in a way. You had this mix for the straight crowd, and this mix for the circuit crowd but there was no style he couldn’t do. He could remix for any audience. I like to reference this latest thing he just did for Tori. There were three different mixes and another that wasn’t released and you could really listen to them all back to back because they were so different. He was able to do it all.”
Obituary
Beloved D.C. ‘Old Catholic’ Bishop Charles Braun dies at 86
Gay church leader offered spiritual support to LGBTQ community
The Rt. Rev. Charles “Charlie” Braun, who served since 2001 as Bishop of the D.C.-based Inclusive Catholic Diocese of the Chesapeake Bay and as founding minister at the affiliated LGBTQ supportive St. John’s Inclusive Catholic Community of D.C., passed away Aug. 3 at the age of 86.
Write-ups about Braun’s life and legacy as a progressive religious leader report that the Inclusive Catholic Diocese of the Chesapeake Bay and St. John’s Inclusive Catholic Community are part of the “Old Catholic” movement, which is a partial break-away church from the Roman Catholic Church.
“St. John’s parish was founded with and continues with the special calling to reach those who had been hurt by other church denominations,” a statement on the St. John’s website says.
“St. John’s welcomes all without exception, with particular care for members of the LGBTQIA+ community who have suffered abuse and rejection elsewhere, offering them contemporary scriptural and theological guidance grounded in an ancient faith tradition made to work in the 21st century,” the website statement says.
It notes that until the time of his passing, Braun, among other things, performed the St. John’s Inclusive Catholic Community’s weekly Sunday mass at its headquarters location at 3417 14th St., N.W. in the city’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. The location is in a converted townhouse owned and operated by the LGBTQ supportive Dandelion Collective, which provides support for the local LGBTQ community.
Rev. Stephen F. Scott, the current pastor at the D.C. St. John’s Catholic Community, said Braun is a native of Bucks County, Pa., and studied to become a priest at D.C.’s Catholic University’s Marist House seminary, where he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in the 1960s.
Scott told the Washington Blade that Braun was then assigned as a parish priest at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Wheeling, W.Va. The St. John’s Catholic Community website write-up says Braun directed that church’s choir “and formed friendships that lasted lifetimes.”
The website write-up continues, “Bishop Charlie left the Roman Catholic priesthood but never left ministry. He found a new spiritual home in the Old Catholic movement, where he was consecrated a bishop and became a beloved unapologetic voice for its theology and tradition.”
It says he began his service as Bishop of the D.C.-based Inclusive Catholic Diocese of the Chesapeake Bay in October 2001 and later founded the St. John’s Inclusive Catholic Community, both of which he led until the time of his passing.
“In Washington, D.C. Bishop Charlie became especially well known and cherished within the LGBTQ+ community, offering compassionate pastoral presence, ordaining and mentoring candidates for ministry, and reminding all who knew him that ministry does not end when circumstances change – it simply takes new forms,” the website statement says.
Rev. Scott confirmed reports by people in the LGBTQ community who knew Braun and who told the Blade the man they knew as Bishop Charlie visited LGBTQ supportive bars and restaurants in D.C., including the Dupont Circle area, to perform religious services and offer spiritual support for LGBTQ people.
“Charlie spoke so much about the importance of loving and welcoming, especially gays, lesbians, transgender Catholics and Christians and meeting them where they were,” Scott said. “So not expecting people to come to a full-on church building, he would go in his evenings and enjoy a drink or have a meal, whether it was Dupont Italian Kitchen, Floriana, or any of the neighborhood gathering places in the queer community,” Scott told the Blade.
“If there was a couple that would come to talk to him and wanted to get married, he would arrange with the couple to have the ceremony at their venue of choice,” according to Scott. “He would have weddings, confirmations, baptisms at those locations because that’s where the community felt comfortable.”
A Mass of Christian Burial was held for Bishop Charles ‘Charlie’ Braun on Saturday, Aug. 22, at the LGBTQ supportive Lutheran Church of the Reformation located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Scott said the church was selected because it offered a larger space for the service than the St. John’s Inclusive Catholic Community location in Columbia Heights.
Actor Tim Curry died at his home in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
Curry has a career spanning decades that included roles on the stage and screen. With an unmistakable voice, he also leaves behind a large body of voice work in animated features and video games. Curry is perhaps best remembered by LGBTQ fans for his performances in camp classics, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Clue.”
“Rocky Horror” (1975) became an underground cultural phenomenon of gender-bending joy.
To this day, fans meet at late night movie theaters dressed in costumes of their favorite characters, including as Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Such gatherings gave permission for fans to play with gender expression, which could be particularly important for LGBTQ fans in more repressive times and places.
“… It became a gathering point for LGBTQ+ people. For punks, for goths, for anyone who felt marginalized or othered by society,” screenwriter, producer, and filmmaker Michael Varrati told the Washington Blade in September 2025 interview on “Rocky Horror”‘s lasting legacy. “When you walked through those theater doors, you belonged, and everybody accepted you, and the thing that made you feel like a freak was celebrated.”
Curry was also known for roles under heavy prosthetics, such as Pennywise the murderous clown in Stephen King’s “It,” or as the demon-horned Darkness in “Legend.” Always shining through any mask was Curry’s signature mischievous voice.
With the passing of Dolly Parton, a fellow LGBTQ icon, one can expect many tributes to Curry and Parton at drag shows and music events at LGBTQ venues in the coming nights.
Pitchers DC (2317 18th St., N.W.) will have a “Dolly + Tim Tribute” with show tunes on Sunday from 2-8 p.m. JR.’s Bar (1519 17th St., N.W.) has announced it will have a show tunes night “honoring Dolly & Tim” on Monday starting at 9 p.m.
Obituary
Music icon and dear LGBTQ friend Dolly Parton remembered
‘Queen of Country’ died on Tuesday in Nashville
I don’t want to say goodbye.
To be honest, my first impression of music icon Dolly Parton was similar to the scathing look the demur Jane Fonda gave the boss’s secretary in one of my favorite funny feminist films ever, “9 to 5.”
Fonda’s aghast up-and-down scrutiny was pure unspoken tsk tsk condescension toward this bubbly dumb-blond wigged white trash colleague — until she looked down at her own flat chest. For a moment, Fonda suggested a hint of envy, at which we laughed. I felt a sigh of relief at not having to carry around all the weight Dolly Parton’s boobs implied.
Those boobs, those big blond country-western wigs, and her seemingly irrepressible humor were as much a part of Dolly Parton’s brand as was her incomparable voice and the songs she wrote that moved generations. In 1974, I longed to love someone as much as Dolly loved the person for whom she wrote her goodbye, “I Will Always Love You.”
Surely, someone with that big a heart was bigger than the tight bodice society forced innovative go-getters like Dolly Parton to squeeze into.
In fact, Parton’s difficult backstory of childhood poverty in Sevierville, Tenn., living in a cabin with no running water and 11 siblings — and an ambition infused with a love-your-neighbor Christian upbringing — created a depth of character that used smarts, ingenuity and humor to thwart her stereotype-blinded detractors.
“Well, I graduated [high school] on a Friday night and headed out on a Saturday morning,” Parton told ABC News’s Robin Roberts in an extensive interview in advance of the 2019 CMA Awards. “As I make jokes about it with my matching luggage, those four paper bags from the same grocery store. I thought, well, I can’t be any poorer than I already am, and I’m a girl. I’ll find some boy that’ll take me to Shoney’s … I thought I’m not going to go hungry.”
Like Billie Jean King and other female professionals, Dolly Parton fought hard to get paid what she was worth.
“It’s not all about money,” she said. “I count my blessings more than I count my money, but I need to count my money, too.”
Tough times taught her how to be tough and funny. “Well, I don’t think people can live in this world without going through times like that,” Parton told Roberts. “People always look at me; they always say, ‘Oh, you just always seem to be so happy.’ I said, ‘That’s the Botox.’ No, but seriously, I’m a very sensitive person. I feel everything to the core.”
That’s what makes her famous 1977 interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters so compelling. Walters had become infamous for making her interview subjects cry after asking tough, prying, sometimes rude questions that she said her audience wanted answered.
“You don’t have to look like this; you’re very beautiful. You don’t have to wear the blonde wigs; you don’t have to wear the extreme clothes, right?” Walters asked the brightly dressed Parton.
Parton delivered a master class in grace and class.
“It’s certainly a choice,” Parton replied. “I don’t like to be like everybody else. I’ve often made the statement that I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do.”
Chuckling yet? Parton wanted attention, then she could dazzle them with talent. “Once they got past the shock of the ridiculous way I looked, then they would see there’s parts of me to be appreciated. I’m very real where it counts … and that’s inside,” Dolly Parton told Barbara Walters. “Show business is a money-making joke, and I just always like telling jokes.”
Walters then asked Parton — the beloved star with 19 studio albums and a slew of awards won over a decade in the male-dominated music business: “Do you ever feel like you’re a joke, that people make fun of you?”
Parton was the personification of composure.
“I know they make fun of me. But actually, all these years people have thought the joke was on me, but it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing, and I can change it at any time. I make more jokes about myself than anybody,” Parton said.
“I am sure of myself as a person. I am sure of my talent. I’m sure of my love for life,” Parton said. “And I’m very content. I like the kind of person that I am. So I can afford to piddle around and do-diddle around with make-up and clothes and stuff. Because I am secure with myself.”
Game, set, match to Parton.
In another ABC interview in 2012, Parton expanded on that over-the-top signature style which she adopted after seeing the town tramp.
“There was this woman, we won’t call her names, but she was beautiful,” she told ABC News Nightline. “I had never seen anybody, you know, with the yellow hair all piled up and the red lipstick and the rouge and the high-heeled shoes, and I thought, ‘This is what I want to look like.’”
As the image implies, there were constant rumors that she was secretly involved with any male within inches — as well as a secret lesbian life with her oldest childhood pal, Judy Ogle. She denied the rumor — she was married to Carl Dean for 58 years. He died in March 2025.
Dolly Parton died peacefully on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, at the age of 80 in Nashville after a “brief battle with cancer,” her team wrote in a statement to People.
“Our beloved Dolly Parton spent her life and career bringing joy, laughter, hope, and integrity into everything she touched. Her unmatched generosity reached the lives of countless people whom she would never meet, yet she was always there to offer a helping hand,” they wrote.
“Whether it be the hundreds of millions of books donated through her invaluable Imagination Library or funding research that helped create a lifesaving vaccine used around the world, Dolly’s unconditional love for all people was the guiding force for her lasting impact. After bravely facing a brief battle with cancer, Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, surrounded by loved ones,” the statement concluded.
The music world is in mourning. And news outlets are overflowing with tributes. Few of them mention us. In fact, one note of criticism for some is a precise example of that “unconditional love for all people” her team talked about.
“The ’80s — a decade she kicked off in grand fashion with the working woman’s anthem ‘9 to 5’ — brought Parton some of her greatest mainstream success, but the climate of the times also conspired to reduce her to a punchline and a caricature: The self-made country-pop queen who had pulled herself up by her bra straps. She played along, as an act of self-preservation, but it is a consolation to know that she lived long enough for her reputation as a songwriter to rise considerably in the 21st century,” Lindsay Zoladz wrote in her “appraisal” of Dolly Parton, who “had the voice, and concerns, of an Earth Angel” for the New York Times.
Damn, bitch! Have you never even seen a Dolly Parton drag queen? There’s almost a cottage industry devoted to Dolly. And Dolly knew — and loved it! She even participated in a Dolly Parton drag contest at a gay LA bar — which she lost!
“They had a bunch of Chers and Dollys that year, so I just over-exaggerated — made my beauty mark bigger, the eyes bigger, the hair bigger, everything,” Parton laughingly told ABC News Nightline. “All these beautiful drag queens had worked for weeks and months getting their clothes. So I just got in the line, and I just walked across, and they just thought I was some little short gay guy … but I got the least applause.”
Dolly Parton lost the Dolly Parton look-alike contest in an LA gay bar! But she hasn’t lost the ineffable connection to her fans — whom she understood, felt, and fought for — including protecting “Gay Day” at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.
“When it first started, there were people giving us threats; I still get threats,” Parton told ABC News. “But like I said, I’m in business. I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself. I love everybody.”
That’s what I saw when Dolly Parton arrived and smiled through an onslaught of paparazzi and gay fanboys at an APLA Commitment to Life event.
Oddly though, as a reporter, my fixation was on Parton’s “date,” her gay manager Sandy Gallin, who seemed to rarely show up publicly with his supposed posse, controversially dubbed the “Velvet Gay Mafia.”
The late gay AIDS advocate Dana Miller, who was on the APLA board, wrote a piece for In Los Angeles Magazine about the Four Warriors of AIDS fundraising: David Geffen, Barry Diller, Sandy Gallin, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
“It was the early ’90s, and we were in the second decade of AIDS with absolutely no hope in sight,” Miller wrote. “It was then I discovered the warriors, and it was amazing. Gay and straight, they were the ones who for almost a decade came together in living rooms and storefronts to provide what our government didn’t. My list of warriors is long, yet this is the tale of four particular individuals who, for years, I closely watched working behind the scenes to make a difference in the quality of life of men, women, and children they would never know.”
After Gallin died in 2017 at age 76, columnist Billy Masters wrote a tribute in the Los Angeles Blade that expanded on that theme – and included a section on Dolly Parton, with whom he formed Sandollar Productions in 1985. Sandollar Productions, with Howard Rosenman, produced the 1990 Oscar winning documentary “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt” that raised global awareness about AIDS.
“While Gallin’s client list was vast and varied, he especially loved his divas. A special place in his heart was reserved solely for Dolly Parton. The two met after Dolly asked singer Mac Davis who should help with her career. Davis said, ‘You should talk to Sandy Gallin — he’s my manager.’ Sandy had one goal — to make Dolly a mainstream star. The first thing he did was set up a recording session for the song ‘Here You Come Again,’”Masters wrote.
“Dolly was hesitant. She said, ‘A monkey could sing this song and have a hit with it.’ She was very nervous that it would turn off the country market, which she was very loyal to.’ Gallin made a deal with her — if the song wasn’t No. 1 on the pop charts AND the country charts, he’d never get involved in her musical decisions again. Dolly took the deal — and lost,” Masters wrote. “From then on, she and Sandy were inseparable. They considered each other beyond best friends and almost soul mates. ‘My husband didn’t love to travel, and Sandy was gay, and he did,’ said Dolly.”
Dolly Parton also talked about Gallin in an interview with Apple Music Country’s Proud Radio: “Sandy and I just clicked like nobody’s business,” Parton told host Hunter Kelly. “He was like my best gay bud. … We [went to] Studio 54. We’d sit on the couch and watch all the craziness. But we were all involved in the fun of it, and it was great.”
“I really owe him so much,” Parton added.
But, contrary to what Dolly Parton sings in “9 to 5,” it’s not all taking and no giving. Dolly Parton told the KKK that she welcomes gay people to Dollywood. And in 1991, when gay men were dying of AIDS by the thousands, and some Southern Christian leaders said AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality, Dolly Parton wrote and sang one of the first country songs to include “gay” and Christianity: “Some are preachers, some are gay … But not a one is turned away when it’s family.”
She later got an Oscar nod for “Travelin’ Thru,” a song for the transgender film “Transamerica.”
In 2023, after her home state of Tennessee passed anti-trans and anti-drag laws, Parton said she knew how deeply it hurt LGBTQ people, including in her own family and life, to be attacked for who they are.
“I know and love them all, and I do not judge,” she said. “They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton.”
By the end of “9 to 5,” I realized that I had been the judgmental one with stereotype-blinders. I enjoyed learning how to get bold things done while expressing yourself with authentic joy. But unfortunately the theme and song are still applicable today.
Thank you, Dolly Parton.
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