Jack Nichols (activist)

For other people of the same name, see Jack Nichols (disambiguation).

Jack Nichols
Jack Nichols in CBS Reports: The Homosexuals (1967)
Born	John Richard Nichols March 16, 1938(1938-03-16) Washington, D.C., US
Died	May 2, 2005(2005-05-02) (aged 67) Cocoa Beach, Florida, US
Cause of death	Cancer
Nationality	American
Other names	Warren Adkins
Occupation	Journalist LGBT rights activist
Known for	Mattachine Society

John Richard "Jack" Nichols (March 16, 1938 – May 2, 2005) was an American gay rights activist. He co-founded the Washington, D.C. branch of the Mattachine Society in 1961 with Franklin E. Kameny. He appeared in a 1967 documentary under the pseudonym Warren Adkins.

Biography

Nichols was born in Washington, D.C. to parents of Scottish ancestry. He was raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland and came out as gay to his parents as a teenager. He was inspired at age 15 by the poems of Walt Whitman and the works of Edward Carpenter. He recalled to Owen Keehnen that, as early as 1955, he was sharing Donald Webster Cory's The Homosexual in America with his gay friends.

Activism

Nichols co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1961 with Frank Kameny, and the Mattachine Society of Florida in 1965. The Mattachine Society of Washington was independent of the national Mattachine Society, which had formally disbanded a few months earlier.

Beginning in 1963, he chaired the Mattachine Society of Washington's Committee on Religious Concerns, which later developed into the Washington Area Council on Religion and the Homosexual. This organization was pioneering in forging links between the gay rights movement and the National Council of Churches.

Nichols led the first gay rights march on the White House, in April 1965, and participated in the Annual Reminder pickets at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, held each July 4 from 1965 to 1969. He along with other activists successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to rescind its definition of homosexuality as a form of mental illness.

In 1967, Nichols became one of the first Americans to talk openly about his homosexuality on national television when he appeared in CBS Reports: The Homosexuals, a CBS News documentary. Though he allowed himself to be interviewed on camera, Mr. Nichols used the pseudonym "Warren Adkins" in the broadcast at the request of his father, an FBI agent.

Writing career

With his partner Lige Clarke, Nichols began writing the column "The Homosexual Citizen" for Screw magazine in 1968. "The Homosexual Citizen", which borrowed its title from the newspaper published by Mattachine D.C., was the first LGBT-interest column in a non-LGBT publication.

In 1969, after moving to New York City, Nichols and Clarke founded GAY, the first weekly newspaper for gay people in the United States distributed on newsstands. The publication continued until Clarke's murder at a roadblock in Veracruz. From 1977-78, he served as the editor of Sexology. Nichols was hired in 1981 as the news editor of the San Francisco Sentinel.

From February 1997, Nichols was Senior Editor at GayToday.com, an online newsmagazine.

Death

He died on May 2, 2005, of complications from cancer.

Works

• Clarke, Lige; Jack Nichols (1974). Roommates Can't Always be Lovers: An Intimate Guide to Male-male Relationships. St. Martin's Press. 
• by Jack Nichols (1975). Men's Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity. Penguin. ISBN 0140040366. 
• Jack Nichols (1996). The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists. Prometheus. ISBN 1573921033. 
• Jack Nichols, (2004). The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer. Haworth Press. ISBN 1560234881.