Dudley Clendinen, Author, Dies at 67 Dudley Clendinen, a courtly Southern journalist and author who wrote lyrically about civil rights, aging in America, the poignancy of ordinary lives and his own approaching death as a gay alcoholic victim of Lou Gehrig's disease, died on Wednesday in a hospice in Baltimore. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Whitney Clendinen. Mr. Clendinen covered politics, the New South, health care and the great kaleidoscope of topics that fall to a versatile journalist. He was a reporter for The St. Petersburg Times in Florida, a national correspondent and editorial writer for The New York Times and a senior editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Baltimore Sun. In his journalism he explored homelessness, crowded prisons, an abortion doctor's conscience and other tales of conflict and courage. And he wrote of gay life in America - the wretchedness of discrimination and the struggles for acceptance in religion, workplaces and professions. Eventually the story became that of his own troubled life: the risks of publicly acknowledging his own homosexuality, the miseries of alcoholism and divorce, and the loss of friends to AIDS in the 1980s and "90s. "Men - lovers, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, the faces you were accustomed to seeing at parties, bars, in symphony orchestras, in dance companies and behind the counters of familiar stores - would vanish, often with terrifying speed," he wrote in an essay in The New York Times in 2003. You'd have dinner with a friend, or go to bed with someone you'd met, and next you knew, they were dead. More recently his mission became a search for meaning, even joy, in his final years stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the progressive neuromuscular affliction commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease, after the great Yankees hitter. Since November 2010, when he learned of his condition and was told he had 18 to 36 months left, he had discussed the end of his life in writing, lectures and radio and television appearances despite failing muscles, shortness of breath and slurred speech. He called his disease "Lou," like an old friend. With his condition deteriorating, he wrote an essay in The New York Times Sunday Review on July 10, 2011, announcing his intention to commit suicide before becoming a "mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self." His daughter, however, said he had died as a result of the disease and not by his own hand and had been deeply involved in writing a book about his life and illness. In the Times essay, Mr. Clendinen challenged Americans to open a dialogue on dying. "We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate," he wrote. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don't talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren't one of life's greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. James Dudley Clendinen was born on Aug. 17, 1944, one of two children of James and Barbara Harrison Clendinen. His father was chairman of the editorial board of The Tampa Tribune, and his mother was food and society editor there. Dudley, who did not use his first name, graduated from Plant High School in Tampa and from Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1968 with a degree in American history. He soon joined The St. Petersburg Times and remained there for 12 years, covering general and feature assignments. His marriage, to Nancy Barrett in 1970, ended in divorce after he revealed his homosexuality. Whitney was their only child. He is also survived by a sister, Melissa Spring. With The New York Times from 1980 to 1987, he covered metropolitan news briefly, then was chief of the Boston and Atlanta bureaus. In 1987, Mr. Clendinen became The Journal-Constitution's assistant managing editor for features. He was hired by Bill Kovach, a former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, who had been recruited in 1986 to revitalize the Atlanta papers. Both left in 1988 after a confrontation over authority between Mr. Kovach and the publisher, Cox Newspapers. Mr. Clendinen edited "The Prevailing South: Life and Politics in a Changing Culture," a collection of essays by historians, novelists and journalists, and wrote the text for a volume of photographs, "Homeless in America." Both were published in 1988. In 1990 and 1991, Mr. Clendinen was an assistant managing editor of The Baltimore Sun. Over the next seven years, he and Adam Nagourney, a political reporter and national correspondent for The New York Times, researched and wrote "Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America," published in 1999. The book covered the time from the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising in Greenwich Village to the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or Act Up, in 1987. Mr. Clendinen wrote editorials for The New York Times from 1998 to 2000 and afterward wrote freelance articles for The Times, The New Yorker and other publications. His last book, "A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America" (2008), detailed life in a Tampa retirement-nursing home, Canterbury Towers, where his widowed mother spent her last years and where Mr. Clendinen lived for 400 days. In 2009 and 2010, he taught writing at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Baltimore. His 2011 Sunday Review essay spoke of a kind of freedom at death's approach. "This is not about one particular disease or even about Death," he wrote. It's about Life, when you know there's not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It's liberating.