“Jack Nichols, Gay Pioneer: “Have You Heard My Message?””–a founding member of LGBT rights

Campbell III, PhD, J. Louis. “Jack Nichols: Gay Pioneer: Have You Heard My Message?”, The Haworth Press, 2007.

A Founding Member of LGBT Civil Rights

Amos Lassen

We have very few biographies of the founders of the gay rights movement and now with Louis J. Campbell’s “Jack Nichols: Gay Pioneer” we get a look at a man who was a warrior for gay equality. He was a journalist, an activist, co-founder of the Mattachine Society of both Washington, D.C. and Florida and the editor of the first weekly gay newspaper. When he died in 2005 he left a legacy of gay rights and gay pride as well as courage that many of us have not seen. Here is his story—the man, the movement and the memories of all he did before and after Stonewall and while the AIDS epidemic was raging in this country. The book shows us the man and his spirit; a man who refused to be silent at a time when gays had no rights.

I did not know about Jack Nichols before I read this book. I had heard his name regarding the early years of gay lib but never realized how important a man he was. Using unpublished interviews which the author compiled before Nichol’s death, Campbell is able to give us a picture of the man and the early movement for gay rights. Nichols was self-educate and as he matured he was able to “achieve an impressive records of ‘firsts’ as a gay rights activist” from before Stonewall to the age of the internet. He was one of the men that challenged the dogma of psychiatry that homosexuality is a sickness. He wrote a column entitled “Homosexual Citizen” for

SCREW magazine and was the editor of GAY. He managed to get a large following for the things he wrote and his works on liberation and gender identity as valuable to us in order to get a sense of history.

Campbell did his research carefully and presents us with a book full of depth and insight. For a sense of who we are, it is important to understand where we came from and what we have been through. This is a book that helps to provide that information.