David Mixner, fierce fighter for gay rights, has died at the age of 77
David B. Mixner, a political strategist who played a prominent role in the anti-Vietnam War movement and in the uphill battle for gay rights, and whose decades of influence with Bill Clinton spanned both eras, died Monday at his home in Midtown Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was complications from the prolonged Covid-19 crisis, said Steven Guy, a close friend.
Mr. Mixner, born three days after Mr. Clinton and raised in similar rural hardships, met the future president when they were in their early 20s. He later arranged for Clinton to deliver the first public speech by a major presidential candidate to a gay and lesbian audience in 1992.
His political acumen was such that he convinced California’s leading conservative, Ronald Reagan, to oppose a 1978 state initiative to ban gay teachers. The measure’s defeat was the most important victory for gay rights in the country at the time.
“When I met him when he was young,” Mr. Clinton said of Mr. Mixner in 1999, addressing an LGBTQ group, “I thought I had never met anyone whose heart burned with the fire of social justice that was so strong.”
The son of a farm worker in southern New Jersey, Mr. Mixner dropped out of college to work as a political organizer, and in the late 1960s he seemed to be everywhere, including as part of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign and as presenter. at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year. He was one of four national co-chairs of the Moratorium to End the Vietnam War, a series of major protests in the fall of 1969.
Mr. Clinton met Mr. Mixner that year at a retreat for moratorium supporters on Martha’s Vineyard. The two men bonded over a walk on the beach, in part because of their humble backgrounds, which set them apart from the upper-middle-class Ivy League students who played a dominant role in the anti-war movement.
Mr. Clinton, an Arkansas native and a 23-year-old Rhodes Scholar then studying at Oxford, slept on Mr. Mixner’s couch when he visited the moratorium offices in Washington. He volunteered to help with a satellite protest at the U.S. Embassy in London. Mr. Mixner later visited him in Oxford, where he lay on the floor of a house Mr. Clinton was renting.
A Democratic insider at a time when almost all homosexuals were closeted in politics, the 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Mixner dreamed of a career in the public sector but was convinced that his “terrible secret” of homosexuality wouldn’t allow it. he wrote in a memoir, “Stranger Among Friends” (1996).
So he largely played behind-the-scenes roles. In the 1970s he moved to Los Angeles, where he brought his organizational and strategic expertise to California politics. He worked on campaigns for Harvey Milk, the first openly gay candidate elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and for anti-war activist Tom Hayden. He was the campaign manager for Tom Bradley’s successful bid for re-election as mayor of Los Angeles in 1977.
While still largely closeted, Mr. Mixner in 1976 helped found the Los Angeles Municipal Election Commission, the nation’s first gay and lesbian political action committee. Politicians at the time often returned money from openly gay donors.
Two years later, California Republicans, hoping to exploit a backlash against the rising gay rights movement, placed Proposition 6 on the ballot: a proposal to ban gay men and lesbians from working in public schools.
The measure, also known as the Briggs Initiative (named after its sponsor, Senator John Briggs), received broad support in the polls. Mr. Mixner set out to oppose it. In a letter to friends, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, he announced that he was gay and asked for donations to fight the proposal.
It was Mr. Mixner who crafted an argument to convince Mr. Reagan to oppose Prop 6, according to the book “Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” by reporters Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney from The New York Times.
As a former Republican governor of California, Mr. Reagan prepared to run for president as an anti-government conservative. At a meeting, Mr. Mixner made it clear that the initiative was not about gay rights at all; it was, he said, a matter of government interference and privacy and would open the door for disgruntled students to blackmail their teachers.
Mr. Reagan agreed and publicly expressed his opposition to Proposition 6. Overnight, public opinion turned. The initiative was convincingly defeated.
The 1980s and early 1990s, the height of the AIDS epidemic, claimed many leaders of the gay rights movement, including Mr. Mixner’s romantic and professional partner, Peter Scott, who died in 1989. After years of inaction on AIDS by the White Houses of Mr. Reagan and his successor, George HW Bush, there was cautious hope among LGBTQ activists for the 1992 presidential election. Most gay and lesbian leaders favored Paul Tsongas, a liberal former U.S. senator from Massachusetts. But Mr. Mixner’s old friend, Mr. Clinton, asked him to raise money on his behalf and build support in the gay community.
At first, Mr. Mixner hesitated. “I said, ‘Bill, I’ve lost more than 180 friends to AIDS,’” he told The New York Times in 1992. “Before I can get behind this campaign, I need to know where you stand on this, where you stand on AIDS and our fight for our freedom.’”
A key issue for Mr. Mixner was ending the ban on gay men and lesbians serving in the military. In a interview in 2023, he told Time magazine that he agreed to help Mr. Clinton on the condition that he lift the ban.
In May 1992, Mr. Mixner introduced Mr. Clinton to 500 gay donors at a fundraiser in Los Angeles. To loud applause, Mr. Clinton said: “What I came here today to tell you in simple terms is: I have a vision and you are part of it.” He reiterated that he would end discrimination in the military based on sexual orientation.
But once in power, Clinton faced fierce opposition to that plan. He compromised with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which banned the harassment of closeted gay soldiers while banning openly gay people from serving.
Mr. Mixner felt betrayed and expressed his anger on the ABC News program “Nightline.” In his memoirs he describes how he was ostracized by the Clinton administration because of his criticism.
In July 1993, Mr. Mixner helped lead a protest against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” outside the White House, where his arrest as a known “friend of Bill” received news media coverage.
He and Mr. Clinton eventually healed the rift. During a meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Clinton jokingly said he had considered handing him a pair of handcuffs from his arrest, Mr. Mixner recalled in his book. (Congress lifted the military ban on gay men and women in 2011.)
David Benjamin Mixner was born on August 16, 1946 in Salem County, NJ, the youngest of three children. His father, Ben, worked long hours on a commercial farm growing and packaging frozen vegetables. His mother, Mary (Grove) Mixner, was a bookkeeper for a John Deere tractor dealer.
Mr. Mixner is survived by a brother, Melvin.
In the fall of 1964, Mr. Mixner arrived at Arizona State University as a freshman and became involved in political activism. He organized students to support a strike by local sanitation workers. He transferred to the University of Maryland to be near the center of the anti-war movement in Washington, and volunteered as an organizer of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, where demonstrators chanted, “Hell no, we won.” t go!” to Vietnam to fight.
He dropped out of college soon afterward and became a $320-a-month organizer for Mr. McCarthy’s presidential campaign.
After Clinton’s presidency, Mr. Mixner supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries. In 2009, he helped lead a march on Washington for equal rights, speaking alongside Lady Gaga and Cynthia Nixon.
When he received an award from the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD in 2008, he recalled his life trajectory in an interview with the news website SFGateexpressing pride in his political activism, but also striking a sad tone about the toll of AIDS on his generation of gay men.
“All my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass on stories to the next generation,” he said. “We have lost a whole generation of storytellers.”