on the TV series The Critic. 2001 saw the publication of McKuen's A Safe Place to Land, which contains 160 pages of new poetry. For 10 years he gave an annual birthday concert at Carnegie Hall or the Lincoln Center. He released the double CD The Platinum Collection and was remastering all of his RCA and Warner Bros. recordings for release as CD boxed sets. In addition to his artistic pursuits he was the Executive President of the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), a post he held longer than any other man or woman elected to the position. McKuen lived in Beverly Hills, California with his partner Edward, whom he called his "brother", and four cats in a large rambling Spanish house built in 1928, which housed one of the world's largest private record collections. He died of respiratory arrest, a result of pneumonia, at a hospital in Beverly Hills, California, on January 29, 2015. LGBT activism McKuen never publicly identified with a particular sexual orientation, though he did describe his sexuality by saying, "I can't imagine choosing one sex over the other, that's just too limiting. I can't even honestly say I have a preference." He was active in the LGBT rights movement, and as early as the 1950s, was a key member of the San Francisco chapter of the Mattachine Society, one of the nation's earliest LGBT advocacy organizations. The cover of McKuen's 1977 album Slide... Easy In featured a photo of a man's arm gripping a handful of vegetable shortening; the can was a pastiche of Crisco – then widely used by gay men as a sexual lubricant – with the label instead reading "Disco". That same year, McKuen spoke out against singer Anita Bryant and her "Save Our Children" campaign to repeal an anti-discrimination ordinance in Miami, tagging Bryant with the nickname "Ginny Orangeseed", and also including a song on Slide... Easy In titled "Don't Drink the Orange Juice", referencing Bryant's fame as commercial pitchwoman for the Florida Citrus Commission. He often gave benefit performances to aid LGBT rights organizations and to fund AIDS research. Criticism Despite his popular appeal, McKuen's work was never taken seriously by critics or academics. Michael Baers observed in Gale Research's St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture that "through the years his books have drawn uniformly unkind reviews. In fact, criticism of his poetry is uniformly vituperative ..." In a