An IPR contributing editor reflects on his years of friendship with Reason senior editor Brian Doherty, their shared ties to the Libertarian Party and Burning Man, and the many communities mourning his immense loss.
In 2021, during the Denver 50th Anniversary Celebration of the founding of the Libertarian Party, Brian interrupted my dance with Elizabeth Nolan, calling to ask: “JOBI (my playa name) are you going to the Rogue Burn?”
Black Rock City 2020 had been cancelled due to COVID, and 2021 after an initial attempt was likewise cancelled. Two years without income from ticket sales had both threatened and transformed the Burning Man organization and split its devotees, like much of the rest of the USA, into pro-protective and pro-risk taking factions. About 15,000 burners and others gathered on the Black Rock playa for a “Plan B”, Burning-Man organization free event.
“No Brian, I’m not planning on going, are you?
“JOBI – I’ll go if you go.”
“Okay, Brian, I’ll go if you go, so are you going?”
“I don’t know, will you go?”
“I want to pitch my tent between your Roadtrek and my car, so I don’t get run over.”
Unlike the ORG event, this would be a wild gathering of burners, more like the 1990s gatherings than those of the 2010s – driving, no city street grid, no state of Nevada field hospital, no prohibition on guns or dogs.
“Okay, Brian, I’ll go if it helps you go.”
And there we were. Two burners with an intersecting interest in the Libertarian Party, talking about David Nolan, the future and past of the party with radical self-reliance and radical self-expression surrounding us in the dust just north of Gerlach, Nevada. Brian was a far longer tenured member of the Burning Man community (cult) than me, having authored THIS IS BURNING MAN: THE RISE OF A NEW AMERICAN UNDERGROUND in 2006 (two years later, in 2008 he would publish RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM: A FREEWHEELING HISTORY OF THE MODERN AMERICAN LIBERTARIAN MOVEMENT.)
“Is this like it was in the old days? No tickets, no perimeter fence, no addresses?”
The biggest difference that delighted Brian – LED lights.
There was no wooden man effigy present on playa that year – instead a drone artist from The Netherlands created a massive (better) version in the sky. Breathtaking wonder art. Brian had heard a rumor that it might happen late that night and we stumbled across the camp just as the drones lifted off.
He was like a kid at Christmas. Infectious giddy delight.
A year later at a hotel in Reno I was texting vote totals to him from the floor as the (so-called) Mises Caucus took over the party, while he was online from his room updating a Reason website and doing what he did best – writing.
As an invitation to his Life Celebration stated: Brian had diverse friend pockets “that don’t overlap”. I only overlapped two: the Libertarian Party and Black Rock City. Others included music and comic subcultures. There are more, I’m sure, that I’ll never know.
Brian was having a hard time walking around the playa (the name for the dry lakebed where burners, like dreamers creating the world’s largest art project –a city of 75,000 plus, only to see it disappear like Shambala a few weeks later), so I borrowed a glorified golf cart from the Census Team and offered to play chauffeur for Brian for a long night. We wandered into deep playa, and back to the DPW saloon observation deck to watch a 4am drone show, this one with whales dancing over the ancient lakebed.
He spoke of former girlfriends, and failed relationships, of typos that he regretted in his books (Michael Michael instead of the correct Michael Mikel), and we dined on Trader Joe’s Indian food packets heated on the dashboard of his car.
We almost met up again at Love Burn in Miami, but I decided not to go, even though I was in Miami at the time, not knowing he was there until after it was over. I wish I had.
We had discussed the fragility of life and his profound grief over the death of his comic-artist friend. Brian wrote in a tribute at https://www.tcj.com/remembering-joe-matt
“I have been thinking and writing and talking about Joe a lot in the past few days, of course. And it’s delightful thinking and writing and talking and remembering Joe, because he was such a uniquely bright, thoughtful, funny, troubled, peculiar man, who despite a strong streak of self-centeredness really wanted to put on an entertaining show for his friends and companions, or even any stranger he might interact with. I have been suppressing the reason I’m thinking about Joe so much now, but next time I’m in Los Feliz and I’m not taking a multi-mile walk with Joe Matt, not driving him to Iliad and Amoeba, not accompanying him to buy some weird bargain thing at Albertsons or Rite Aid, it’s going to hit me, and it’s going to hurt very much for a very long time.”
I feel much the same. The life celebration in LA last weekend was mostly the friend-pocket of Burners (plus one somewhat out of place senior Reason administrator and his wife). Brian could write like a poet for Reason but, “also filled out his expense reports like they were (incomprehensible) poetry.”
Neighbors and friends shared about cleaning out his library of possessions which are now being curated by Chicken John and Brian’s brother Jim. Rubber Boy was there, sharing about his cameo in This is Burning Man as the guy who crashed the gate by hiding in a box. Or wandering around the Mohave Space Port pretending to be a rocket scientist’s assistant.
Others shared about future planned celebrations in Florida and the San Francisco Bay area. I was delighted to see the photos of his memorialization at the LP Convention and wondered where else folks like us were grieving? Perhaps among those like Joe Matt who he knew in the art world Brian documented in his DIRTY PICTURES: HOW AN UNDERGROUND NETWORK OF NERDS, FEMINISTS, MISFITS, GENIUSES, BIKERS, POTHEADS, PRINTERS, INTELLECTUALS, AND ART SCHOOL REBELS REVOLUTIONIZED ART AND INVENTED COMIX.
Other obituaries for Brian can be found at:
- https://reason.com/2026/03/16/remembering-brian-doherty-chronicler-of-and-participant-in-wild-and-wonderful-subcultures/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/us/politics/brian-doherty-dead.html
- https://www.cato.org/blog/brian-doherty-memoriam
- https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-17/brian-doherty-dead-libertarian-author-fatal-fall-california-bay-area
>I have a copy of his book, Radicals for Capitalism, on my bookshelf.
As do I, a signed copy. Most libertarians should read it.
I have a copy of his book, Radicals for Capitalism, on my bookshelf. Let us remember his efforts and accomplishments.