Joel Dorius, one of three professors who were suspended from Smith College in 1960 for possession of gay pornography, died last week at 87 from bone marrow cancer in his home in San Francisco.

Raymond Joel Dorius, who never used his first name, was born in Salt Lake City on Jan. 4, 1919, and graduated from the University of Utah. He taught English literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Yale before going to Smith. He then spent 20 years at San Francisco State University, where he retired in 1984.

But his career nearly crashed after state troopers and local police in Northampton, Mass., searched his home as part of raids on obscenity in the mail ordered by President Eisenhower’s postmaster general.

He and another untenured professor, Edward Spofford, had been turned in by Newton Arvin, a tenured literature professor whose home was raided first. What they found – pictures of men in their underwear and diaries of the closeted gay life – were mild by today’s standards but considered illegal pornography then.

The three men were charged with possession of pornography. Arvin agreed to testify against the others, but he later suffered a breakdown and committed himself to a mental hospital.

The three professors were suspended from Smith. Arvin was able to retire at half pay, but the school’s contracts with Dorius and Spofford were not renewed.

Dorius and Spofford accepted a guilty verdict so they could appeal under Massachusetts law. In 1963, the state’s Supreme Court overturned all three convictions.

This is the second death caused by cancer I am posting about this week.