The Amazing Randi, The Gay Magician Who Defeated Houdini, Dies At The Age Of 92

The Amazing Randi (twitter @Jugbo)

JAKARTA - The Amazing Randi, a bearded gay magician who lived his career for decades, died at the age of 92.

Randi died Tuesday, October 20 "of age-related causes," according to a post on the James Randi Educational Foundation website.

Randi's magic stunts are simple - to charm and amaze, but never lie.

Throughout his career he has been able to break free from his jacket while hanging over the Niagra Falls, he has also been able to escape hanging from six floors above Broadway; block of ice; closed coffins and prison cells. Most of what he did when he was in his 50s.

In surviving 104 minutes in a closed coffin submerged in a pool during a live broadcast on the Today show in 1956, he beat the record held by Harry Houdini.

Throughout it all he's been quite transparent about his tricks, ending the show by telling the audience: “Everything you see here is a trick. There is nothing supernatural involved. "

Randi is best known for his denial of pseudoscience (pseudo-science), and is often at odds with a number of illusionists including the spoon-bending Uri Gellar.

In a famous segment on The Tonight Show in 1973, Randi watched Geller struggle to turn metal keys and spoons. Randi advised the show producers to make sure Geller did not have access to the props provided. The incident sparked a decades-long dispute between the two.

Randi admitted to being a same-sex enthusiast in 2010, at the age of 81. He said he was inspired to confess after watching the movie Milk.

"From about seventy years of personal experience, I can tell you that there is not much 'gay' when it comes to being homosexual," he wrote in a blog post.

"For the first twenty years of my life, I had to live in the shadows, in a culture that was - outwardly at least - utterly hostile to the hints of lifestyle variation."

Randi married a man named José Alvarez in 2013 when she was 85 years old. Alvarez, an artist who fled Venezuela to escape homophobic death threats, met Randi at the Fort Lauderdale public library in 1986.