Thomas Kraemer

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Gay Today articles by Thomas Kraemer

Jack Nichols edited GayToday.com until shortly before his death in 2005. (See obituaries below) I contributed several articles over two years. (See links below)

NOTE: To reduce server storage space, the local copy links do not contain any text or pictures. The links provided to GayToday.com were working as of May 3, 2005.

Jack Nichols
March 16, 1938 - May 2, 2005

Frank Kameny, Jack Nichols and George Weinberg riding on Heritage of Pride float
Left to right: Dr. Frank Kameny, Jack Nichols, and Dr. George Weinberg being honored as Grand Marshalls of New York City's 2004 Heritage of Pride Parade

Although Jack Nichols was not from Oregon, he touched all gay Oregonians with his five decades of gay activism. Jack Nichols died in Florida on May 2, 2005 at the age of 67.

I was first touched by Nichols' 1972 book "I Have More Fun With You Than Anybody" that he coauthored with his lover Lige Clarke. For many years prior to the publication of this book, Jack and Lige had touched many other gay people with "The Homosexual Citizen" column published in Al Goldstein's very heterosexual "SCREW" newspaper. This column was one of the only sources of gay news available to Oregonians. "SCREW" was only sold in adult book stores.

Jack and Lige's column led them to become the editors of "GAY," the first weekly gay newspaper. ("The Advocate" was a biweekly newspaper.) It was often sold in hippie-style bookstores and cigar store newsstands alongside the other radical political publications of the period.

Jack Nichols' activism started years before the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. In 1961 Nichols and Dr. Frank Kameny started the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Mattachine homophile rights organization. Inspired by Martin Luther King's famous 1963 march on Washington for black civil rights, Jack and Frank led a protest at Independence Hall on July 4, 1965 calling for homosexual civil rights. Bayard Rustin, the man who was the driving force behind Martin Luther King's march, was also gay.

Nichols was the first activist to challenge the medical dogma that homosexuality is a sickness. Nichols worked with Dr. George Weinberg and other activists to get homosexuality removed from the official list of mental disorders. Weinberg coined the term homophobia in the 1960s and initiated psychological research on homophobia.

On March 7, 1967 Nichols was interviewed by Mike Wallace of CBS News for the first nationally televised documentary on homosexuality. Jack Nichols was one of the first homosexual Americans to come out publicly.

Jack Nichols never retired. His gay activism continued into the Internet Age. He edited a daily web publication GayToday.com from 1997 until 2004 that was read by more than 50,000 people worldwide.

In 2002 I sent Jack an email thanking him for his 1972 book. As he seemed to do with everyone who came close, we became friends. Even though he lived on a beach in Florida, the Internet enabled our frequent long distance communications.

Professor J. Louis Campbell of Penn State University has spent the last several years working on a biography of Jack Nichols. A contract with a distinguished book publisher is under negotiation. An early draft of the book promises to preserve this important part of gay history.

More on Jack can be found on his personal website jack-nichols.com and gaytoday.com. Also, until his death he wrote a column in 365Gay.com.

Photo of Jack Nichols' New York Times obituary, May 4, 2005, p. C16 Photo of story 'TV: CBS Reports on Homosexuals' in New York Times, March 8, 1967, p. 91
Jack Nichols obituary, New York Times, May 4, 2005, p. C16 Jack Nichols was interviewed by Mike Wallace of CBS News in 1967. (George Gent, "TV: CBS Reports on Homosexuals," New York Times, March 8, 1967, p. 91)

Complete text of Jack Nichols "The New York Times" obituary published Wed. May 4, 2005, p. C16 as transcribed by Thomas Kraemer:

HEADLINE: Jack Nichols, Gay Rights Pioneer, Dies at 67

BYLINE: By Margalit Fox

SUBHEAD: Making a mark as founder of the nation's first gay weekly newspaper and leader of early protests.

PHOTO CAPTION: Jack Nichols in 2004

Jack Nichols, a writer and early gay activist who campaigned publicly for gay rights nearly a decade before the Stonewall riots of 1969, died on Monday in Cocoa Beach, Fla., where he lived. He was 67.

The cause was complications of cancer, from which Mr. Nichols had suffered intermittently for more than 20 years, said Steve Yates, a longtime friend.

With Dr. Frank Kameny, Mr. Nichols founded the Mattachine Society, an early gay advocacy gorup, in Washington in 1961. (They adopted the name of an older gay organization, founded in 1950 by Harry Hay in Los Angeles, that had officially disbanded several months earlier.)

Mr. Nichols, who helped organize some of the country's first civil rights demonstrations on behalf of gay men and lesbians, was a founder of Gay, the first gay weekly newspaper in the United States.

He also successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to rescind its definition of homosexuality as a form of mental illness. Until shortly before his death, Mr. Nichols edited the online publication GayToday.com.

"At one point, I would really say that he was just about the most visible gay person in the country, if we go back to the mid-1960's," said Rodger Streitmatter, a professor of journalism at American University and the author of "Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America" (Faber & Faber, 1995). "He was always willing to be identified as a gay person, and that was still an era when many people were not."

When Mr. Nichols and Mr. Kameny started the Washington Mattachine Society in 1961, identifying oneself in public as gay posed serious risks. Homosexual acts were against the law in every state, and gay men and lesbians who came out risked being jailed or institutionalized.

"In those days," Mr. Kameny said yesterday in a telephone interview, "the entire approach to everything connected with us was negative, whether we were sinners, according to the clergy and the theologians; or criminals, according to the lawyers and the legislatures, or sick according to the psychiatrists. We had all of these forces coming at us from every direction, which we proceeded to fight."

John Richard Nichols was born in Washington on March 16, 1938. He came out as gay to his parents as a teenager.

In 1967, Mr. Nicholsl became one of the first Americans to talk openly about his homosexuality on national television when he appeared in "The Homosexuals," a CBS documentary. (Though he allowed himself to be interviewed on camera, Mr. Nichols used a pseudonym in the broadcast at the request of his father, an F.B.I. agent.)

Mr. Nichols, who also helped establish a chapter of the Mattachine Society in Florida, led the first gay rights march on the White House, in April 1965. The same year, he helped organize a July 4 demonstration at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

In 1969, after moving to New York, Mr. Nichols founded Gay with his companion, Lige Clarke. Mr. Nichols and his colleagues campaigned for years to have the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders; the association did so in 1973.

Among Mr. Nichols's books are "Men's Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity" (Penguin, 1975); "The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists" (Prometheus, 1996); and "The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer" (Harrington Park Press, 2004).

Mr. Nichols is survived by his mother, Mary F. Lund, of Cocoa Beach. Mr. Clarke died in 1975.

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