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NYC Dwarf Gay Activist Killed in Taxi Accident
 Harry Wieder, 57, who walked with crutches, was leaving a community board meeting last night when he crossed in the middle of the block and was hit by a yellow cab reports The New York Post. Mr Wieder was rushed to Bellevue Hospital where he was pronounced dead. He was a fixture at community board meetings, rallies and other political events, where he became well known to New York City’s political players.
"We had all just left the (board) meeting and his car was parked across the street. It was laborious for him to walk. For him to walk to the corner and cross the street would have been extremely difficult. He was crossing the street in the middle of the block," said district manager Susan Stetzer. "The cab driver was very distraught."
Harry started as an activist in the early 1980s when he came out as gay and got involved in the rights group Act-Up. "He came out of the closet like a cannonball," said author Betty Adelsen, who profiled Mr Wieder in her 2005 book, The Lives of Dwarves: Their Journey From Public Curiosity Toward Social Liberation.
Mr Wieder, the child of Holocaust survivors, was born in 1953 with achondraplasia - a form of dwarfism - and was raised in Queens. In the early 1980s he underwent surgery on his spine that left him walking with crutches and using a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He also suffered significant hearing loss and lived in a home for the deaf on the Lower East Side.
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