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Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s brother, Dan (aka Burning Dan for his profession as a fire-spinning and flow arts teacher and performer and frequent appearances at the annual Burning Man Arts Festival), died on October 4th, 2010, of undisclosed causes. This month, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the cover boy for GQ magazine, and has taken the opportunity to lash out at the magazine for the way they portray his brother’s death.

According to Gordon-Levitt, he’s upset with the magazine for printing the following line in the article about his brother:

“…the elder Gordon-Levitt died of an alleged drug overdose in 2010. “It was an accident” is all Joe will say about that.
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He took to Twitter for his scathing rebuke of the magazine:
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“The ‘allegations’ to which [the writer] must be referring were made by a handful of gossip websites. They are factually incorrect according to the coroner’s office and the police department.”
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To be fair, GQ isn’t the only news source that made the claim that overdose caused the death of Dan Gordon-Levitt. The Daily Mail, E! Online, and Radar Online (among others) all reported his death as an possible overdose at the time. These reports were the result of eye-witnesses on the scene, combined with the fact that someone else from the party was admitted to the hospital for drug-related causes. Even the coroner admitted it was possibly drug related, but said that it wouldn’t be official until toxicology reports were returned. Strangely enough, the official cause of death has never been released almost two years later.
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt did request that GQ (and by association, the rest of us) not to dwell on how Burning Dan died, but rather on how he lived …
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“Dan was a brightly positive, genuinely caring, and brilliantly inspiring person, and I liked the idea of such a wide readership learning about him.”
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At the time of is death, Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote the following tribute to his brother on their website hitRECord.org:
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“BURNING dAN brightly embodied that bold beastly bliss sometimes referred to as ‘the creative spirit. He was my chief collaborator on the foundational incarnations of hitRECord.org over the years and continues to inspire us ever the more. He would absolutely positively insist that we not let this bad news deter us on our collective mission.”
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So, with that in mind, feel free to share your thoughts about how Dan Gordon-Levitt (aka Burning Dan) lived how the media has handled his death.