Harold Fairbanks was born George McKay Spence in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1935. He attended the State University of Iowa (approx. 1954-1958) where he was involved in film programming on campus. He moved to Los Angeles in 1959 where he began a career in film, working as a projectionist, film programmer for schools, booker in a film exchange, film editor, technician, and publicist. In addition, he helped produce two low-budget features. He assumed the name Harold Fairbanks for his career in journalism. He worked as a movie reviewer for the Advocate, where he often reviewed gay erotic films; and then became the Entertainment Editor for Newswest (1975-1977). In the 1980s, Fairbanks began writing obituaries while a staff writer for Update, bringing a more journalistic approach by interviewing friends and survivors rather than relying on biological family who would often exclude details of homosexuality and AIDS from the obituary ("AIDS Obituaries: The Newspaper Quilt [draft]," by Karen Ocamb, LA Times Sunday Magazine). Fairbanks died in 2014.