Laurence “LARS” EIGHNER Hexamer (born Laurence Vail Eighner, was an American author and memoirist who died on this date (b: 1948). He was the author of Travels with Lizbeth, a memoir of homelessness in the American Southwest during the late 1980s, “a book widely regarded as one of the finest memoirs of recent decades.” This writer heartily endorses that assessment.

Included as a chapter in that book was the essay “On Dumpster Diving,” which is widely anthologized both at full length and in abridged form under the title “My Daily Dives in the Dumpster.“

Eighner also wrote Pawn to Queen Four, a novel; Lavender Blue: How to Write and Sell Gay Men’s Erotica, also published as Elements of Arousal (an early edition includes an introduction by noted erotica author John Preston); Gay Cosmos, a work of gay theory; and numerous short works of gay men’s erotica, collected under various titles.

Eighner began writing for publication in the early 1980s. By that time he was generally known as Lars, the result of having worked in a small office with two Larrys. Because in early writing attempts he had been confused with Black Mountain poet Larry Eigner, Eighner used “Lars” for writing. His first book was a collection of short stories, Bayou Boy and Other Stories (Gay Sunshine Press, 1985). In the late 1980s, he and his dog Lizbeth became homeless, and his experiences as a homeless person in Austin, Texas; Los Angeles, and places in between are the subject of Travels with Lizbeth. You will fall in love with both of them. It is a classic down-and-out story, in a league with Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris, and touching in a way that compares to The Diary of Anne Frank.

Eighner became homeless in 1988 after leaving a job he had held for ten years as an attendant at a state hospital in Austin, Texas.

Eighner was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters in 1994. In July  2015, Eighner was married to the man called Clint in his memoir, with whom he had lived for nearly 28 years. In 2017, he assumed his husband’s surname and his legal name became Laurence Eighner Hexamer. He died aged 73 on December 23, 2021 in Austin.