Washington, D.C. native Jack Nichols helped found a Mattachine Society chapter in the city in 1961. In 1965, the same year he founded the Society’s Florida chapter and organized the first gay rights protest at the White House, Nichols and his partner Lige Clarke began writing for D.C.’s Homosexual Citizen.
By 1968 the pair was writing the “Homosexual Citizen” column for Screw magazine, the first time gay men wrote about gay life for a straight periodical. A prolific writer and contributor to the publishing landscape, Nichols would go on to be the founding editor of GAY, the first LGBT weekly newspaper in the U.S., serve in the late 1970s as the editor of Sexology, the world’s longest-published sex-therapy periodical, and, from 1997 to 2004, edit the online newsmagazine GayToday.com.
His many published titles include Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (1975), Welcome to Fire Island: Visions of Cherry Grove and The Pines (1976), and The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (1996).
Nichols died on May 2, 2005.