Robert Earl Carter (July 27, 1927 – February 22, 2010) was an American Roman Catholic priest and LGBT rights activist.
Carter grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, and later Park Ridge, Illinois.
[1] Carter graduated from the University of Chicago in June 1946 and the next day was received into the Catholic Church as a convert.
He entered the Society of Jesus in 1954 and was subsequently ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1963.
[1] Carter was gay, and became one of the first Roman Catholic priests in the United States to acknowledge this publicly after he became one of the founders of the National Gay Task Force in 1973 (later the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force).