David B. Mixner, a political strategist who played a prominent role in the anti-Vietnam War movement and the tough fight for gay rights and whose decades-long influence on Bill Clinton spanned both eras, died Monday at his home in midtown Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was complications of a long-term Covid infection, said Steven Guy, a close friend.
Mr. Mixner, who was born three days apart from Mr. Clinton and grew up in similarly deprived rural areas, met the future president when the two were in their early 20s. He later arranged for Clinton to give the first public address by a major presidential candidate to a gay and lesbian audience in 1992.
His political savvy was such that he persuaded California’s leading conservative, Ronald Reagan, to oppose a 1978 state initiative to ban gay school teachers. The measure’s defeat was the most significant victory for gay rights in the country at the time.
“When I met him when he was young,” Clinton said of Mr. Mixner in 1999, addressing an LGBTQ group, “I thought I had never met anyone in whose heart the fire of social justice burned so strongly. “
Mr. Mixner, the son of a farmworker in southern New Jersey, 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 a presence on the Democratic convention in Chicago this year. He was one of four national co-chairs of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a series of large protests in the fall of 1969.
Mr. Clinton met Mr. Mixner this year at a retreat for moratorium advocates on Martha’s Vineyard. The two men became friends during a walk on the beach, in part because of their humble origins, which distinguished them from the upper-middle-class Ivy League students prevalent in the antiwar movement.
Mr. Clinton, an Arkansas native and 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 outside the American Embassy in London. Mr. Mixner later visited him in Oxford, where he stayed on the floor of a house that Mr. Clinton had rented.
A Democratic insider at a time when almost all gays in politics were kept closet, in the 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Mixner dreamed of a career in public service but was convinced that his “terrible secret” of homosexuality did not would allow. he wrote in his memoir Stranger Among Friends (1996).
Therefore, he largely took on behind-the-scenes roles. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and 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 re-election as mayor of Los Angeles in 1977.
Although he remained largely hidden, Mr. Mixner helped found the Los Angeles Municipal Election Committee in 1976, the first gay and lesbian political action committee in the country. Back then, politicians often gave back money from openly gay donors.
Two years later, hoping to capitalize on a backlash against the emerging gay rights movement, California Republicans put Proposition 6 on the ballot: a proposal to ban gays and lesbians from working in public schools.
The measure, also known as the Briggs Initiative (named after its sponsor, State Senator John Briggs), received widespread support in polls. Mr. Mixner threw himself into the resistance. In a letter to friends, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, he announced that he was gay and asked for donations to fight the proposal.
According to the book “Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” by reporters Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney of The New, it was Mr. Mixner who made an argument for persuading Mr. Reagan to embrace Prop 6 oppose York Times.
A former Republican governor of California, Mr. Reagan was preparing to run for president as an anti-government conservative. At one meeting, Mr. Mixner argued 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 changed. The initiative was clearly rejected.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, many leaders of the gay rights movement died, including Mr. Mixner’s romantic and professional partner, Peter Scott, who died in 1989. After years of White House inaction on AIDS, there was cautious hope among LGBTQ activists during the 1992 presidential election and the presidential elections of Mr. Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush. Most gay and lesbian leaders favored Paul Tsongas, a liberal former U.S. senator from Massachusetts. But Mr. Mixner’s old friend 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 over 180 friends to AIDS,'” he told the New York Times in 1992. “‘Before I can support this campaign, I need to know where you stand on AIDS and our fight for our freedom.'”
An important issue for Mr. Mixner was the lifting of the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military. In an interview with Time magazine in 2023, he said he was willing 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 thunderous applause, Mr. Clinton said, “I came here today to tell you in simple terms: 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 when Mr. Clinton was in office, he faced fierce opposition to the plan. He compromised with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which banned harassment of closeted gay soldiers and banned openly gay people from serving in the military.
Mr. Mixner felt betrayed and expressed his anger on the ABC news program “Nightline.” In his memoirs, he detailed how he was expelled from the Clinton administration for his criticism.
In July 1993, Mr. Mixner helped lead a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” protest in front of the White House, where his arrest was reported in the news media as a known “friend of Bill.”
He and Mr. Clinton eventually healed the rift. At a meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Clinton jokingly said he had thought about handing him a pair of handcuffs after 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, New Jersey, the youngest of three children. His father, Ben, worked long hours on a commercial farm growing and packing frozen vegetables. His mother, Mary (Grove) Mixner, was an accountant 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 enthusiastic about political activism. He organized students to support a strike by local sanitation workers. He transferred to the University of Maryland to be near the Washington center of the antiwar movement and volunteered as an organizer of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, where demonstrators chanted “Hell no, we’re not going!” to Vietnam to fight.
Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of college and organized McCarthy’s presidential campaign with a monthly income of $320.
After the Clinton presidency, Mr. Mixner supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. In 2009, he led a March for Equality in Washington, where he spoke alongside Lady Gaga and Cynthia Nixon.
When he received an award from the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD in 2008, he recalled his journey as a gay man in an interview with the news website SFGate.
“All of my peers have died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey or help me pass stories on to the next generation,” he said. “We’ve lost a whole generation of storytellers.”
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2024-03-12 17:36:51
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