Activist for gay rights dies at 83

Dick Leitsch, who became a leading gay rights activist in 1960s New York, where he helped end police entrapment of gays and organized the first major act of civil disobedience by a gay rights group — a boozy sit- in known as the Sip-In — died June 22 at a hospice center in Manhattan. He was 83.

The cause was liver cancer, said a niece, Cheryl Williams.

A bartender, freelance journalist and onetime Tiffany sales representative, Leitsch was a self-described “hick from Kentucky who didn’t known anything about gay rights” when he followed a boyfriend to New York in 1959. He soon became a member and young leader of the Mattachine Society, an early gay advocacy group named after a group of medieval jesters who, disguised by masks, protested the oppression of peasants.

Leitsch rarely donned a mask himself. After being named president of the organization’s New York chapter in 1965, he took the group in a more aggressive direction, taking on the city’s police chief and newly elected liberal mayor, John Lindsay, in campaigns that drew on the tactics of the African-American civil rights movement and became a model for other gay rights groups across the country.

In that pre-Stonewall era, a few years before an uprising at a Greenwich Village gay bar galvanized a broader protest movement for equality and acceptance, few gays used their name or showed their face on television. Leitsch was a notable exception, appearing on “The David Susskind Show,” in local news and radio broadcasts and at town-hall-style meetings.

While Mattachine’s Washington leader, Frank Kameny, focused on ending discriminatory practices at the level of the federal government, Leitsch’s work centered on a more quotidian, if nonetheless important, aspect of gay life: ending discrimination and police entrapment at bars, one of the few places available for gay men and women to meet, mingle and organize.

In New York, the State Liquor Authority often revoked the licenses of bars that served gays, whom it targeted under a Prohibition-era provision barring “disorderly” customers. (Sodomy laws aimed at gays remained on the books in New York until 1980.) Plainclothes police officers flirted with gay men and lesbians who were then arrested on charges of “homosexual solicitation.”

Leitsch, collaborating with poet Allen Ginsberg and meeting with city leaders, led a 1966 campaign to end the practice of gay entrapment in New York, according to George Chauncey, a Columbia University history professor and author of “Gay New York.”

“This had a profound impact on gay life in New York,” Chauncey said. “It really meant that for the first time in a generation, a gay man going into a bar didn’t have to worry that the cute guy coming onto him might’ve been a plainclothesman who was trying to reach his arrest quota.”

“His actions,” Chauncey added, “helped make it easier for a generation of gay people to come out and be openly gay.”

Building on the success of his entrapment campaign, Leitsch organized an effort to spotlight the refusal of bars to serve gay customers, which Chauncey described as “the first organized act of civil disobedience by gay people.”