Advocate was pioneer for the gay community
Family, friends and various communities are mourning the death of peace laureate and gay rights activist Nickie Valdez, co-founder and president of Dignity San Antonio, a group that has long sought to fully include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics within the church.
Valdez, 80, died at her San Antonio home on Christmas Day after an eight-year battle with multiple myeloma. Her memorial service is still being planned.
Valdez was widely regarded as a pioneer and hero in the gay community and a tireless advocate for justice and social equality. She didn’t do it for public recognition. But in January 2019, the interfaith peaceCENTER honored her as a peace laureate for her achievements.
“Her whole call was to help people recognize that they were created in the image and likeness of God, and God loved them just as they are created,” said Deb Myers, Valdez’s wife and partner of 35 years. “She believed that to the core. She was very tenacious in that work and lived it.”
Valdez was born in San Antonio on Sept. 10, 1940. She was young when her mother abandoned the family, and Valdez was raised by an aunt near downtown, Myers said.
She went on to graduate from Fox Tech High School in 1961. She attended college for a short while but could not afford higher education, Myers said. Valdez later became a picture framer, working for Art Inc. for many years, then started her own small framing business.
Valdez came out to her family as gay in the early 1960s — a time when hardly anyone did so for fear of rejection and public scorn.
“She was one of the first people to be out and open in San
Antonio,” Myers said.
A lifelong Catholic, Valdez helped establish Dignity’s San Antonio chapter in 1976. That group continues to celebrate weekly liturgies today and welcomes all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex Catholics, as well as anyone else wishing to attend.
Valdez and Myers met through Dignity in 1985. The women were joined in a holy union in 1989 and legally married in 2015.
Over the years, Valdez was involved with the National Organization for Women and the Forward Foundation, and she worked as a volunteer for the Switchboard, a peer hotline launched for the gay community by the San Antonio Free Clinic. She helped organize “A Sense of Belonging,” the first conference ever held in San Antonio for the gay community, in 1976.
She also was active with Pax Christi San Antonio, the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, the San Antonio Equal Rights Political Caucus and other social justice groups.
In 2010, the Archdiocese of San Antonio stopped letting Dignity members gather for Mass at St. Ann’s Catholic Church, saying this conflicted with the Catholic Church’s official teachings. Dignity now holds its weekly services at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
Valdez never wavered in her Catholic faith, said her longtime friend, Patricia S. Castillo, co-founder and executive director of the P.E.A.C.E. Initiative, an advocacy group that works to end domestic violence.
Castillo became disillusioned with the Catholic Church because of the way it handled some issues and said she left in the early 1990s to join the Episcopal Church. But Valdez, she recalled, remained steadfast.
“I just got mad and said ‘I’m out of here,’” Castillo said of the Catholic Church. “And Nickie didn’t. Nickie said, ‘You will respect who I am, and I will remain in your faith as long as I live. And I will be acknowledged one way or another.’
“You talk about ‘speak truth to power’ — that just floors me about her, that little, tiny woman,” Castillo said of Valdez. “You could not make her stop, no matter what. She found all these little niches all over the community where her faith could be practiced. … And she was not going to let that go, no matter what. To her, that was her church — and she was going to passionately defend her faith and her spirituality in that way until the day she died.”
Valdez reached out to gay Catholics about God’s Word as early as the mid-1960s, a few years before the national DignityUSA organization formed in 1969, said executive director Marianne Duddy-Burke, who lives in Boston.
“One of the things I found so remarkable about Nickie was she was doing the work of making a home for LGBTQI Catholics in our church,” Duddy-Burke said. “She was out there in the mid ’60s, sitting on church steps, waiting for people who felt rejected by the church. She was there to talk to them, to assure them of God’s love, to talk about Scripture and sacraments with them.
“She was so aware of the impact that faith leaders’ rejection had on people and on the good that inclusion could do.”
Despite her tiny frame, Valdez was a giant — and was very unassuming about the influence she wielded, Duddy-Burke added.
“She and Deb together took so many people into their homes, under their wings, just mentoring them, nurturing them one by one, giving housing to people who didn’t have housing because their families had rejected them,” she said. “She saved lives. She definitely saved lives.”
She described Valdez’s death as “a stunning and devastating loss.”
Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez, who presides over Bexar County Courtat-Law No. 13, said Valdez has left an indelible mark.
“When she entered a room or joined us at a function, people knew exactly who she was,” the judge said. “People knew that she had a lifetime of work behind her, being an advocate and being a voice. It’s not that she demanded respect or expected it. But we knew she had earned a certain level of deference.”
Valdez was preceded in death by her 16-year-old son, Robert Nicklaus Valdez Minor, a Central Catholic High School student who was killed by a drunken driver in 1988.