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Jack Nichols, Gay Pioneer “Have You Heard My Message?” Jack Nichols, Gay Pioneer “Have You Heard My Message?” J. Louis Campbell III New York London First published by Harrington Park Press® the trade divsion of The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580. This edition published 2012 by Routledge Routledge Routledge Taylor & Farncis Group Taylor & Farncis Group 711 Third Avenue 2 Park Square, Milton Park New York, NY 10017 Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. PUBLISHER’S NOTE The development, preparation, and publication of this work has been undertaken with great care. However, the Publisher, employees, editors, and agents of The Haworth Press are not responsible for any errors contained herein or for consequences that may ensue from use of materials or information contained in this work. The Haworth Press is committed to the dissemination of ideas and information according to the highest standards of intellectual freedom and the free exchange of ideas. Statements made and opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the Publisher, Directors, management, or staff of The Haworth Press, Inc., or an endorsement by them. Cover design by Marylouise E. Doyle. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Campbell, J. Louis, PhD Jack Nichols, gay pioneer : have you heard my message? / J. Louis Campbell III. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-56023-652-8 (hard : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-56023-653-5 (soft : alk. paper) 1. Nichols, Jack, 1938-2005. 2. Gay activists—United States—Biography. 3. Gay liberation movement—United States—History. I. Title. HQ75.8.N53A3 2007 306.76'6092—dc22 [B] 2007011208 This book is dedicated to the Mattachine societies, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Gay Activists Alliance, and all individuals and groups, gay or straight, who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, in words and deeds, to freedom and equality for homosexuals. ABOUT THE AUTHOR J. Louis Campbell III, PhD, is Associate Professor of Communica- tion Arts and Sciences at Penn State Altoona. The author or co-author of numerous articles, essays, and book chapters, Dr. Campbell is a former co-chair of the Penn State President’s Commission on Les- bian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Equity. This text is his first re- search entry into the conversation. CONTENTS Foreword ix Dr. George Weinberg Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv Chapter 1. Reflections in the Bubble Room 1 Chapter 2. Dining Room Memories 21 Chapter 3. Burgeonings 35 Chapter 4. Bertie’s Deal 53 Chapter 5. Shrinking the Shrinks 69 Chapter 6. Lige Signs On 89 Chapter 7. Quiet in the Holler 121 Chapter 8. Free the Willies 147 Chapter 9. Amerika, America 169 Chapter 10. Last Will and Testament 187 Notes 215 Bibliography 247 Index 295 Jack Nichols and the Earliest Sign of Activism, 1940 (Source: The Jack Nichols Collection, The Pennsylvania State University.) Foreword To understand Jack Nichols, or anyone, you have to understand his or her impress on the world. What were the circumstances, local or widespread, when the person came into it? And how did he or she leave it? Some people drain the world’s resources, leaving existence for others drier and more constricted. Others add resources. And what better resources can one add for people than more freedom, justice, and mercy? Shakespeare wrote that mercy is an “attribute to God himself,” suggesting that the value is larger than any person. To Jack, the value and the person were the same. His life was an uninterrupted endeavor to give us a better world than he found. I met Jack in 1965, a time when thirty states had the right to put two consenting adults in jail for ten years for a homosexual act. It was a time when if you were a known gay, you couldn’t be bonded or get a government job; you could be legally thrown off a bus and denied an apartment, denied all public services. Years earlier, Kinsey had tried an experiment with a friend of Jack’s and mine, C. A. Tripp, who later wrote several important books. Kinsey had told Tripp, who was gay, that he had found the per- fect lawyer to defend his research center against certain charges, but he wasn’t sure how the lawyer felt about homosexuals. He suspected that the man had harsh feelings toward gays, though the man had never met a professed homosexual. In those days, most heteros were in that category concerning homosexual men. It was too dangerous to come out when you didn’t have to. Kinsey had invited Tripp to his home in Bloomington, Indiana, to spend a weekend with him and the lawyer. He asked Tripp not to say anything about his sexual prefer- ence until the two men had bonded. The plan worked. When Tripp told the man he was gay, the man accepted him completely and went on to work with Kinsey. Jack had suggested that I try the same experiment with some of my psychologist friends, and I did, bringing Tripp, who was very good- Jack Nichols, Gay Pioneer © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1300/5842_a ix x JACK NICHOLS, GAY PIONEER looking and very hetero-appearing, to some gatherings with psycho- analysts. They liked Tripp, but the instant they found out that he was gay, they kept him away from their children and subsequently ush- ered him out of their lives. That experiment led to my identification of homophobia as a sickness and to my coining the word. That was the world that Jack grew up in. It was easy for me to like myself—the luck of the draw had made me acceptable. But how did Jack have such incredible self-esteem and good cheer? From his early childhood, when he realized that he liked boys and not girls, the fact seemed utterly friendly. It was a period in history when gay suicide was not uncommon, and those whose families could afford treatment were regularly rushed off by their parents to some specialist. On the self-hate scale, Jack was a zero. Why? I have spent innumerable hours and days with him over a period of forty years, and I have no idea why. One thing I can say, though, is that those who hate them- selves hate others. Jack emanated love of others, I think, because he loved himself. In the early 1960s when I met Jack, there were hardly any gay ac- tivists anywhere: a few so-called homophile societies, a magazine or two, and a few scattered hopefuls for a better world. Everyone else gay, male and female, was under cover. As for reading material, The Well of Loneliness and The Homosexual in America were essentially it, and they were usually missing from libraries. There were, of course, plenty of trysting places for gays; there always were. (Even in eighteenth century London, when the penalty used to be death, there were gay bars). But in Jack’s early world even gay thoughts were a crime of the soul. You didn’t step up and say publicly that you were a homosexual unless you were a very rare human being. Jack was such a person. In 1965, when I first met Jack, at a homophile gathering in New York City, almost none of my favorite writers who were gay had come out, or rather been yanked out by biographers. Within the next decade, bi- ographers would remove the masks of Byron, Melville, Hawthorne, Houseman, and Tennyson. Coming out proved easy for them. They were dead. And even they had staunch defenders against the accusa- tion. With no role models, how did Jack do it? However he did it, he was an inspiration to dozens of people, incipient homophiles, and he was to prove inspirational to millions in the decades to come. Foreword xi In the sixties, when Jack, Frank Kameny, Lilli Vincenz, and a dozen others formed the first homophile society in Washington, DC, it took great courage. Movies of that little group, including Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin, walking with placards still exist. The true greatness of that little knot of people cannot be seen, though. It re- sides in the unseen context: the world as they knew it, as they found it. I gave a speech at the Barbizon Hotel in New York City in 1965. I assaulted those in my profession who used pretended knowledge to make the lives of millions of people as bad as they could. I had met the homophile crowd about a week earlier, and I am still friends with many of them, those dreamers who made their dream come true. I met Jack there that week, a stunningly handsome man (you didn’t have to be gay to recognize that): articulate, poetic, and forceful. By then, he was beginning to generate momentum in the fight for gay rights. Nothing could stop him or his allies from making a continued case for gay rights and human rights, except murder (the fate that his lover, Lige Clark, suffered some years later). I admired Jack his abil- ity to live in the past, present, and future. He was working for the fu- ture but could quote vast passages from Burns, Whitman, and others. Great writers and thinkers, voices from the past, were whispering in his ear, even when he wasn’t quoting them.

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