Features
Peter Jacobson Named CARES Director
In
Memoriam:
Jack Nichols
In Memoriam
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Jack Nichols 1938-2005
Activist and Author
by Malcolm Lazin
It
is with great sadness that Equality Forum recognizes the passing of Gay
Pioneer Jack Nichols on Monday, May 2 at 1:20 a.m. He was 67 years old.
"Jack Nichols was a seminal leader
of the Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights Movement. He helped launch the movement
in the mid-60s, when the federal government would not hire gays and lesbians,
the American Psychiatric Association considered gays per se mentally ill,
and many states had criminal sanctions precluding gays from congregating
in bars," said Malcolm Lazin, Executive Director of Equality Forum.
"Jack was among the Gay Pioneers who stepped out of a debilitating
closet and helped crack the cocoon of invisibility."
Jack Nichols helped plan the first
organized and annual gay and lesbian civil rights demonstrations in Philadelphia,
Washington, D.C. and New York City from 1965 to 1969, prior to Stonewall.
The first of those demonstrations was held on July 4, 1965 at Independence
Hall in Philadelphia.
The National Celebration of the 40th
Anniversary of the GLBT Civil Rights Demonstration, organized by Equality
Forum, was held in Philadelphia on Sunday, May 1 in front of Independence
Hall. Over 100 nonprofit organizations and 32 national and international
GLBT executive directors participated in Equality Forum 2005 & National
Celebration.
Jack co-founded the Washington, D.C., and Florida Mattachine Societies
in 1961 and 1965, respectively. In August 1963, Jack and 9 other members
of the Washington, D.C. Mattachine Society openly participated in the
Civil Rights Demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial. Nichols helped organize
the first gay and lesbian protest at the White House on April 17, 1965.
Nichols was among the first gay activists
to challenge the American Psychiatric Association's position that homosexuality
was a mental illness. In 1967, he appeared as a self-identified gay male
in an interview with Mike Wallace, the first CBS documentary on homosexuality.
From 1969 to 1973, Nichols and his partner,
the late Lige Clark, were editors of GAY, America's first gay weekly newspaper.
Together, they wrote the first non-fiction memoir by a gay male couple,
I Have More Fun with You than Anybody Nichols authored several
other books, including Men's Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity
and The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists.
Nichols' latest book, The Tomcat Chronicles,
describes his youthful indiscretions. Since 1997, he edited the Internet
news magazine GayToday.com
Forty-five written histories chronicle Nichols' story. His biography
appears in Dr. Vern Bullough's recent book, Before Stonewall: Activists
for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context.
For more information about Jack Nichols, please contact Dan Wagner, Equality
Forum, (215)732-3378 x 10 or dan@equalityforum.com