All about Jack.

Fifty years a go Jack Nichols joined a handful of visionaries who used their lives to transform the way America felt about gay men and women. No other group of activists has ever changed our country so dramatically or so quickly. Nichols performed his first revolutionary act at the age of 15 by coming out to his FBI agent father in Chevy Chase, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C. In 1953 that required an unimaginable kind of courage. "Jack was a very unusual person, especially in his time," said author Ed Alwood (Straight News), "especially in the '50s, because he was a person who could rise above the social culture that surrounded him."

President Dwight Eisenhower had just barred homosexuals from all federal employment, and the only times gay people were written about were when they were fired from the State Department or arrested in police sweeps designed to "clean up" Times Square.

And yet even in these dark ages there was already a gay bible, a book that had given Nichols the courage to be different at 15. Written by Edward Sagarin--under the name Donald Webster Cory--it was called The Homosexual in America, and it was a sensation to everyone who had read it. When Nichols overhead Frank Kameny talking about the book at an after-hours party one Saturday night, they struck up a conversation that sparked one of the most important friendships in the history of the gay rights movement.

A year later, in November 1961, Kameny, Nichols, and a handful of others founded the Mattachine Society of Washington. In 1965 the Mattachine Society adopted what was then a deeply radical position: "In the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, homosexuality is not a sickness ... in any sense...."

In 1967, Nichols appeared on camera in The Homosexuals, a CBS documentary narrated by Mike Wallace. The day after the show aired, Nichols was fired from his job at the Washington Plaza Hotel, and he soon moved to New York City.

Two years later, Nichols and his lover, Lige Clarke, both participated in the Stonewall riots. Together the couple did more than anyone else to infuse the gay movement with the spirit of the '60s. They published this ringing call to arms the week after the riots: "The revolution in Sheridan Square must step beyond its present boundaries.... We hope that 'Gay Power' will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration, and that the young activists will ... carry the sexual revolt triumphantly into the councils of the U.S. government, into the anti-homosexual churches, into the offices of anti-homosexual psychiatrists, into the city government, and into the state legislatures which make our manner of love-making a crime.... We must crush tyranny wherever it exists and join forces with those who would assist in the utter destruction of the puritanical, repressive, anti-sexual Establishment."

Within 30 years, almost all of Jack Nichols's dreams had come true.