EGN NEWS DESK
David B. Mixner, a political strategist who performed distinguished roles within the anti-Vietnam War motion and within the arduous battle for homosexual rights, and whose decades-long affect with Bill Clinton spanned each eras, died on Monday at his dwelling in Midtown Manhattan. He was 77.
The trigger was issues of long-term Covid, mentioned Steven Guy, a detailed good friend.
Mr. Mixner, born three days other than Mr. Clinton and raised in related rural privation, met the long run president once they have been of their early 20s. He later organized for Mr. Clinton to make the primary public tackle by a serious presidential candidate to a homosexual and lesbian viewers, in 1992.
His political savvy was such that he was capable of persuade California’s foremost conservative, Ronald Reagan, to oppose a 1978 state initiative to ban homosexual schoolteachers. The defeat of the measure was at that time essentially the most vital win for homosexual rights within the nation.
“When I met him when he was younger,” Mr. Clinton mentioned of Mr. Mixner in 1999, addressing an L.G.B.T.Q. group, “I assumed I’d by no means met an individual whose coronary heart burned with the hearth of social justice so robust.”
Mr. Mixner, the son of a farmworker in South New Jersey, dropped out of faculty to work as a political organizer, and within the late Sixties he gave the impression to be in all places, together with as a part of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential marketing campaign in 1968 and as a presence on the Democratic conference in Chicago that yr. He was certainly one of 4 nationwide co-chairs of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a collection of main protests within the fall of 1969.
Mr. Clinton met Mr. Mixner at a retreat for moratorium supporters on Martha’s Vineyard that yr. The two males bonded throughout a stroll on a seashore, partially over their humble backgrounds, which set them other than the upper-middle-class Ivy League college students who have been prevalent within the antiwar motion.
Mr. Clinton, an Arkansas native and a 23-year-old Rhodes Scholar learning at Oxford on the time, slept on Mr. Mixner’s sofa when he visited the moratorium workplaces in Washington. He volunteered to assist with a satellite tv for pc protest on the American embassy in London. Mr. Mixner later visited him in Oxford, bunking on the ground of a home that Mr. Clinton rented.
As a Democratic insider at a time when nearly all homosexual folks in politics have been closeted, the Sixties and early ’70s, Mr. Mixner dreamed of a public-service profession however was satisfied that his “horrible secret” of homosexuality wouldn’t allow it, he wrote in a memoir, “Stranger Among Friends” (1996).
So he largely took behind-the-scenes roles. In the Seventies, he moved to Los Angeles, bringing his organizing and strategic experience to California politics. He labored on campaigns for Harvey Milk, the primary overtly homosexual candidate to be elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, and for the antiwar activist Tom Hayden. He was the marketing campaign manager for Tom Bradley’s profitable bid for re-election as mayor of Los Angeles in 1977.
While nonetheless largely closeted, Mr. Mixner in 1976 helped discovered the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles, the primary homosexual and lesbian political motion committee within the nation. Politicians on the time usually returned cash from overtly homosexual donors.
Two years later, California Republicans, hoping to take advantage of a backlash towards the nascent homosexual rights motion, positioned Proposition 6 on the poll: a proposal to bar homosexual males and lesbians from working in public faculties.
The measure, also referred to as the Briggs Initiative (named after its sponsor, State Senator John Briggs), had huge help in polls. Mr. Mixner threw himself into opposing it. In a letter to buddies, together with Bill and Hillary Clinton, he disclosed that he was homosexual and requested for donations to battle the proposal.
It was Mr. Mixner who framed an argument for persuading Mr. Reagan to oppose Prop 6, in response to the e-book “Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” by the reporters Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney of The New York Times.
As a former Republican governor of California, Mr. Reagan was getting ready to run for president as an anti-government conservative. In a gathering, Mr. Mixner made the case that the initiative wasn’t about rights for homosexuals in any respect; it was, he mentioned, a query of presidency meddling and privateness and would open the door for disgruntled college students to blackmail their academics.
Mr. Reagan agreed and publicly voiced his opposition to Proposition 6. Overnight, public opinion turned. The initiative was soundly defeated.
The Nineteen Eighties and early ’90s, the peak of the AIDS epidemic, claimed many leaders of the homosexual rights motion, together with Mr. Mixner’s romantic {and professional} accomplice, Peter Scott, who died in 1989. After years of inaction on AIDS by the White Houses of Mr. Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, there have been cautious hopes amongst L.G.B.T.Q. activists for the 1992 presidential election. Most homosexual and lesbian leaders favored Paul Tsongas, a liberal former U.S. senator from Massachusetts. But Mr. Mixner’s outdated good friend Mr. Clinton requested him to boost cash and construct help within the homosexual neighborhood on his behalf.
At first, Mr. Mixner hesitated. “I mentioned, ‘Bill, I’ve misplaced over 180 buddies to AIDS,’” he advised The New York Times in 1992. “‘Before I can get behind this marketing campaign, I’ve to know the place you stand on this, the place you stand on AIDS and our battle for our freedom.’”
An necessary challenge for Mr. Mixner was ending the ban on homosexual males and lesbians serving within the navy. In an interview in 2023 with Time journal, he mentioned he agreed to assist Mr. Clinton on the situation that he would elevate the prohibition.
In May 1992, Mr. Mixner launched Mr. Clinton to 500 homosexual donors at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles. To raucous applause, Mr. Clinton mentioned, “What I got here right here at the moment to inform you in easy phrases is, I’ve a imaginative and prescient and you might be a part of it.” He reiterated that he would finish discrimination within the navy based mostly on sexual orientation.
But as soon as in workplace, Mr. Clinton confronted intense opposition to that plan. He compromised with a coverage of “don’t ask, don’t inform,” which banned harassment of closeted homosexual troopers whereas forbidding overtly homosexual folks to serve.
Mr. Mixner felt betrayed, and voiced his anger on the ABC News program “Nightline.” In his memoir, he detailed how he was frozen out by the Clinton administration for his criticism.
In July 1993, Mr. Mixner helped lead a protest over “don’t ask, don’t inform” exterior the White House, the place his arrest as a widely known “good friend of Bill’s” acquired protection within the information media.
He and Mr. Clinton ultimately healed the rift. In a gathering within the Oval Office, Mr. Clinton jokingly mentioned he had thought of presenting him with a pair of handcuffs from his arrest, Mr. Mixner recalled in his e-book. (Congress lifted the navy’s ban on homosexual women and men in 2011.)
David Benjamin Mixner was born on Aug. 16, 1946, in Salem County, N.J., the youngest of three kids. His father, Ben, labored lengthy hours on a business farm that grew and packed frozen greens. His mom, Mary (Grove) Mixner, was a bookkeeper for a John Deere tractor vendor.
Mr. Mixner is survived by a brother, Melvin.
In the autumn of 1964, Mr. Mixner arrived as a freshman at Arizona State University and have become swept up in political activism. He organized college students to help a strike by native sanitation employees. Transferring to the University of Maryland, to be close to the Washington hub of the antiwar motion, he volunteered as an organizer of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, the place protesters chanted “hell no, we gained’t go!” to Vietnam to battle.
He dropped out of faculty quickly after and have become a $320-a-month organizer for Mr. McCarthy’s presidential marketing campaign.
Following the Clinton presidency, Mr. Mixner endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton within the 2008 Democratic major. In 2009, he helped lead a march on Washington for equal rights, the place he spoke together with Lady Gaga and Cynthia Nixon.
In 2008, when he acquired an award from the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group GLAAD, he recalled his life’s trajectory in an interview with the information web site SFGate, expressing satisfaction in his political activism but additionally hanging a mournful tone concerning the toll of AIDS on his technology of homosexual males.
“All of my friends died of AIDS, and I’ve nobody to have a good time my previous or my journey, or to assist me move down tales to the following technology,” he mentioned. “We misplaced a complete technology of storytellers.”
