David Mixner, 77, fierce fighter for gay rights and Bill Clinton adviser
At the outset of the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, David B. Mixner was grateful for how much LGBTQ+ activists had accomplished and mindful of what and who had been lost along the way to that August week when more than 200 openly gay and lesbian delegates participated in choosing Al Gore as the party’s presidential nominee.
“The thrill of being able to sit at the table after all these years is beyond description,” Mr. Mixner, a founder of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, told the Globe then. “We can bring a passion against injustice along with a determination to be free. And it doesn’t just apply to us, it applies to the entire nation; it is the gift we bring, and we have so much to offer.”
Amid the celebrating, however, he and others recalled past political gatherings when LGBTQ+ activists were excluded, and they remembered those who had died during the AIDS epidemic. “A lot of the people I love don’t have birthdays to celebrate anymore,” he said.
Mr. Mixner, a political strategist who also had played a prominent role in the anti-Vietnam War movement and whose decadeslong influence with Bill Clinton spanned both eras, died Monday at his home in midtown Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was complications of long-term COVID, said Steven Guy, a close friend.
Mr. Mixner, born three days apart from Clinton and raised in similar rural privation, met the future president when they were in their early 20s. He later arranged for Clinton to make the first public address by a major presidential candidate to a gay and lesbian audience, in 1992.
His political savvy was such that he was able to persuade California’s foremost conservative, Ronald Reagan, to oppose a 1978 state initiative to ban gay schoolteachers. The defeat of the measure was at that point the most significant win for gay rights in the country.
“When I met him when he was young,” Clinton said of Mr. Mixner in 1999, addressing an LGBTQ+ group, “I thought I’d never met a person whose heart burned with the fire of social justice so strong.”
Mr. Mixner, who had 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 presidential campaign in 1968 and at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year. He was one of four national cochairs of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a series of major protests in the fall of 1969 that was originally conceived by Boston businessman and activist Jerome Grossman.
Clinton met Mr. Mixner at a retreat for moratorium supporters on Martha’s Vineyard that year. The two men bonded during a walk on a beach, in part over their humble backgrounds, which set them apart from the upper-middle-class Ivy League students who were prevalent in the antiwar movement.
Clinton, an Arkansas native and a 23-year-old Rhodes scholar studying at Oxford at the time, slept on Mr. Mixner’s couch when he visited the moratorium offices in Washington. He volunteered to help with a satellite protest at the US Embassy in London. Mr. Mixner later visited him in Oxford, bunking on the floor of a house that Clinton rented.
As a Democratic insider at a time when almost all gay people in politics were closeted, the 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Mixner dreamed of a public-service career but was convinced that his “terrible secret” of homosexuality would not permit it, he wrote in a memoir, “Stranger Among Friends” (1996).
So, he largely took behindthe-scenes roles. In the 1970s, he moved to Los Angeles, bringing his organizing and strategic expertise to California politics. He worked on campaigns for Harvey Milk, the first openly gay candidate to be elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, and for antiwar activist Tom Hayden. He was the campaign manager for Tom Bradley’s successful bid for reelection as mayor of Los Angeles in 1977.
While still largely closeted, Mr. Mixner, in 1976, helped found the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles, the first gay and lesbian political action committee in the country. Politicians at the time often returned money from openly gay donors.
Two years later, California Republicans, hoping to exploit a backlash against the nascent gay rights movement, placed Proposition 6 on the ballot: a proposal to bar gay men and lesbians from working in public schools.
The measure had wide support in polls. Mr. Mixner threw himself into opposing it. In a letter to friends, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, he disclosed that he was gay and asked for donations to fight the proposal.
It was Mr. Mixner who framed an argument for persuading Reagan to oppose Prop 6, 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 York Times.
Reagan agreed and publicly voiced his opposition to Proposition 6. Overnight, public opinion turned. The initiative was soundly defeated.
The 1980s and early ’90s, the height of the AIDS epidemic, claimed many leaders of the gay rights movement, including Mr. Mixner’s romantic and professional partner, Peter Scott, who died in 1989. By the early 1990s, he kept in a desk at work what he called the “AIDS Book, Friends of David Mixner Who Have Died of HIV.” Listed in order of the dates they died were, at that point, 192 names, all in blue or black ink, except for “Peter Scott, 5/13/89,” written in red.
After years of inaction on AIDS by the White Houses of Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, there were cautious hopes among LGBTQ+ activists for the 1992 presidential election. Most gay and lesbian leaders favored Paul Tsongas, a liberal former senator from Massachusetts. But Mr. Mixner’s old friend Clinton asked him to raise money and build support in the gay community on his behalf.
An important issue for Mr. Mixner was ending the ban on gay men and lesbians serving in the military. In an interview in 2023 with Time magazine, he said he agreed to help Clinton on the condition that he would lift the prohibition.
In May 1992, Mr. Mixner introduced Clinton to 500 gay donors at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles. To raucous applause, Clinton said, “What I came here today to tell you in simple terms is, 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 once in office, Clinton faced intense opposition to that plan. He compromised with a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which banned harassment of closeted gay soldiers while forbidding openly gay people 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 tell” outside the White House, where his arrest as a well-known “friend of Bill” received coverage in the news media. “I guess when you get arrested in front of the White House it does create tension in the friendship,” he told the Globe afterward.
He and Clinton eventually healed the rift. In a meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton jokingly said he had considered presenting him with a pair of handcuffs from his arrest, Mr. Mixner recalled in his book. (Congress lifted the military’s ban on gay men and women in 2011.)
“David was a trailblazer in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said as she ended her briefing Tuesday. “His moral clarity never wavered, which is why he became such an invaluable confidant for so many.
“Perhaps most importantly, he was deeply dedicated to mentoring the next generation of LGBTQ+ leaders fighting to create a better world. Those of us doing this work today, including myself, owe him a debt of gratitude.”
David Benjamin Mixner was born Aug. 16, 1946, in Salem County, N.J., the youngest of three children. His father, Ben, managed a small farm and started a volunteer ambulance service. His mother, Mary (Grove) Mixner, was a bookkeeper for a John Deere tractor dealer.
The family lived in a white farmhouse, but Mr. Mixner knew he didn’t fit in by his 10th birthday when his father, a deer hunter, gave him a gun. “I wasn’t keen on killing Bambi,” he told the Globe in 1993.
Mr. Mixner leaves a brother, Melvin.
In the fall of 1964, Mr. Mixner arrived as a freshman at Arizona State University and became swept up in political activism. He organized students to support a strike by local sanitation workers. Transferring to the University of Maryland, to be near the Washington hub of the antiwar movement, he volunteered as an organizer of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, where protesters chanted “hell no, we won’t go!” to Vietnam to fight.
He dropped out of college and became a $320-a-month organizer for McCarthy’s presidential campaign.
Following the Clinton presidency, Mr. Mixner endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. In 2009, he helped lead a march on Washington for equal rights, where he spoke along with Lady Gaga and Cynthia Nixon.
In 2008, when he received an award from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD, he recalled his life’s trajectory in an interview with the news website SFGate, expressing pride in his political activism but also striking a mournful tone about the toll of AIDS on his generation of gay men.
“All of my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass down stories to the next generation,” he said. “We lost an entire generation of storytellers.”