Jack completed 67 years of a wonderful and inspiring life at 1:20 AM May 2, 2005. He slipped away quietly.Scott Hall and I were with him it was peaceful and easy, as he listened to Rosemary Clooney's "I Don't Want to Walk Without You " I know that Jack touched everybody with his great heart and his love of the people he met and interacted with, each in a unique and personal way. I will miss him but I will never stop loving him . I am grateful and fortunate to have had a friend like Jack.
Steve Yates
Jack Nichols was a founding father of the gay and lesbian liberation movement and was Editor of GAY, the nation's first gay weekly newspaper. He co-founded the Mattachine Societies of Washington, D.C., and Florida, a warrior who broke ground for gay equality.
---Harrington-Park Press, 2004
In 1963 Jack called on the movement to critique the mental health profession's now-revised stance on same-sex affection. He organized the first White House protest in 1965.
Two of Nichols books have been hailed as "classics" in Library Journal (August, 2004, p. 90).
In the 1960's, prior to editing GAY, Nichols edited well-known men's magazines. In the late 1970's, his editing stints also included Sexology, then the world's longest-lived sex therapy publication.
In 1975, excerpts from Men's Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity, ...Penguin books, Nichols' major philosophic work, were published in textbooks and in Parents Magazine. Between 1997-2004 Nichols edited GayToday.com, a daily news magazine published by Badpuppy Enterprises, Inc. The magazine's archives covering those years can be found at http://www.gaytoday.com/search/archive.asp
Biographical accounts of Nichols' life can be found in a variety of histories, including Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context, edited by Vern Bullough, Ph.D., R.N. And Dr. James T. Sears histories of the South, Lonely Hunters and Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones.
