Posted on 05/02/2005 2:54:14 PM PDT by Borges
COCOA BEACH, Fla. - Jack Nichols, a writer and editor who was a pioneering member of the gay rights movement in the United States, died Monday. He was 67.
Nichols died at Cape Canaveral Hospital of complications from cancer, according to his friend, Steve Yates, who said Nichols had battled cancer for 20 years.
"Jack was among the gay pioneers who stepped out of a debilitating closet and helped crack the cocoon of invisibility," said Malcolm Lazin, executive director of Equality Forum, a Philadelphia-based gay rights group.
Nichols helped found chapters of the Mattachine Society, an early support group for gays, in Florida and Washington in the early and mid-1960s. He also helped plan some of the nation's first organized, annual gay and lesbian civil rights demonstrations, including a protest outside Philadelphia's Independence Hall on July 4, 1965.
In addition, 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 a groundbreaking CBS documentary on homosexuality, Lazin said.
From 1969 to 1973, Nichols and his partner, the late Lige Clark, were editors of GAY, America's first gay weekly newspaper. The two also wrote a nonfiction memoir called "I Have More Fun with You than Anybody."
Nichols wrote several other books, including "Men's Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity" and "The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists." His most recent book, published last year, was "The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer."
From 1997 to 2004 he edited the Internet news magazine GayToday.com.
"Everyone who met him felt like he was there for just them," said Yates, his friend since 1962, when the two met in Miami. "Beyond gay rights, he was a human rights advocate. That was his true goal."
Nichols is survived by his mother, Mary F. Lund, 90, and several cousins, according to Yates, who is planning the funeral.
once upon a time, cancer meant aids when a homosexual died young.
Probable connection to AIDS.
Sounds like a Monty Python skit: "...I'm a pioneer and I'm okay..."
Ironic how he died before his mother - I don't know anything about his illness, I just know that the gay lifestyle is unhealthy, more unhealthy than smoking...
Gay sex is more dangerous than secondhand smoke.
Where's the warning labels?
Nichols helped found chapters of the Mattachine Society, an early support group for gays, in Florida and Washington in the early and mid-1960s. He also helped plan some of the nation's first organized, annual gay and lesbian civil rights demonstrations, including a protest outside Philadelphia's Independence Hall on July 4, 1965.
In addition, Nichols was among the first gay activists to challenge the American Psychiatric Association's position that homosexuality was a mental illness.
Related information posted here.
once upon a time, cancer meant aids when a homosexual died young.
It still does, and depends on the type of cancer.
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