Matthew Gaylor, RIP

[Matt Gaylor was an LFS member for more than half a decade in the late 1990s and early 2000s and for several years a Prometheus Awards finalist judge.]

Matthew Gaylor died Thursday 28 June in Columbus, Ohio. He was best known for his mailing list, Freematt's Alerts. He distributed that list from 1996 to 2002. Matt was 47.

I first encountered Matt on the old Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP). That was early 1996, and he announced that he was starting his own mailing list. I was one of Matt's first subscribers, and his list Freematt's Alerts was one of my first e-mail lists.

As a side note, the MDOP was my first e-mail list. A guy named Jimmy Wales had started it back in 1991. Today, Jimmy is known as the founder of Wikipedia.

Matt had long understood the power of this new media. He told me that he had been using e-mail since 1992 (very early for anyone outside of academia). It was also on Matt's list where I first learned about the attempts of governments to spy on the Net through programs like Echelon.

Matt never worked as a techie, but it was easy to have an intelligent conversation with him about technical subjects. He was also a dedicated Mac user and would quickly defend Macs against their detractors.

I finally met him 1998, when I moved to Columbus. Matt and I forged another bond as we had both been born in Wheeling, West Virginia. But he was 11 years older and had left the area at a much younger age.

Matt was the first person to tell me about all the problems within the Libertarian Party. He felt like it was truly a waste of time, although I felt (and still do) like I had nowhere else to go. He had a lot of stories of various problems and had reported problems with other groups as well. He suggested to me that the LP had even been infiltrated by various agent provocateurs for the sole purpose of sabotaging it.

It is a real tragedy that Matt never wrote his political memoirs or kept some type of journal. He stuck by the movement, even though he had effectively been thrown out of the Ohio LP.

Matt actually made political activism fun. He simply didn't care whom he annoyed or angered. His criticisms weren't always fair, but he always called something a spade if he believed it was a spade.

He told me a great story about finding a negative article about John Kasich and distributing copies of it out at a Red Team fundraiser. I just laughed, as he was one of the few people who had the guts to try something like that. Matt loved being a troublemaker, just like the heroes who threw the tea into the Boston Harbor.

I especially enjoyed spending one Saturday night with him in the Ohio State University area in the fall of 2002. This was during a march against rape. Matt had distributed flyers around campus advising women to buy guns and “take aim against rape.” OSU administration and the student newspaper were not happy.

Freematt's Alerts was a great tool for activism, and it was a great fit for Matt's personality. All Matt did was send out various articles (news and opinion) on subjects important to those who were sympathetic to the cause of freedom. Thus, he formed loose alliances with people in groups like Gun Owners of America, the Independent Institute, and the ACLU. Matt became friends with people like Jim Bovard, L Neil Smith, JJ Johnson, and Declan McCollough. Matt told me that he would even receive books from publishers, hoping that he would review them. I seem to remember Matt telling me that he had something like 700 subscribers.

It was the only e-mail list where I read just about everything that was sent out. It was my primary source of news on the World Trade Center. It was my source when I learned of the death of Robert Nozick and Poul Anderson. It was also on 14 September 2001 that I first read questions about whether United Flight 93 had crashed or had been shot down.

Matt's health steadily declined over the last few years of his life, and his interest in activism declined as well. He was severely overweight, and this naturally lead to other problems.

Like RW Bradford, Matt never got any monetary compensation for his work. He took pleasure in just doing it. He was interested in revolution for the sake of revolution, or borrowing words from Abbie Hoffman—“revolution for the hell of it.”

Chris Baker interned at Liberty magazine (1996-7) and currently lives in Austin, Texas. He has also been published in The Freeman, Austin Chronicle, and Columbus Alive.