Irving Rosenthal wasn’t famous like the Beat figures he associated with — Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and others — but he was an integral part of their scene. He died on April 22 at the commune he founded in San Francisco in 1967. He was 91.

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago and the editor of a journal there, he and his poetry editor were fond of the Beat writers on the West Coast and began publishing them. The writing did not impress university officials. Mr. Rosenthal and others on the staff resigned to form their own journal. Big Table. He battled censorship issues throughout his publishing life that focused on gay liberation, free love and other counter-culture issues of the time.

“Sheeper,” Mr. Rosenthal’s major literary output, was published in 1967. Donald Stanley, writing in The San Francisco Examiner, described it as having no plot except “the recurrence over and over and over again of the details of Sheeper’s homosexuality. But leaving the question of morality to better moralists than I,” he added, “one is stuck with the conviction that this approach, this startling frankness, this violation of old taboos will become commoner before it becomes rarer.”