Rue Starr; Gay Rights Activist and Musician

Rue Starr, 33, business manager of the Great American Yankee Freedom Band, a gay-oriented performance group. Starr also was coordinator in 1987 of the Southern California delegation to the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. A native of Illinois, Starr came to Los Angeles in 1982 from Houston, where he had played trombone in a suburban symphonic orchestra. Here he joined the Great American Yankee Freedom Band and was its community liaison officer and financial manager for four years. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 and was living in Tucson, Ariz., with friends at the time of his death Thursday.