David Mixner, gay rights advocate, 77
David Mixner, a political strategist who helped move gay rights to the center of American politics and put his long friendship with Bill Clinton on the line over the president’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring gay people from serving openly in the military, died March 11 at his home in Manhattan. He was 77.
He had complications from long-term COVID, according to his friend and executor, Steven Guy.
Mixner, a farmer’s son from rural New Jersey, lived until he was 30 as a closeted gay person who considered his sexuality a “terrible secret.”
While keeping his personal life intensely private, he built a successful career in Democratic politics. He was working in Los Angeles on the 1977 reelection campaign of Tom Bradley, the city’s first Black mayor, when he decided — with anguishing trepidation — to come out.
Clinton, an old friend who had once let him sleep on his floor in England when the future president was studying as a Rhodes Scholar, was one of the first people Mixner called on for moral support. They had gotten to know each other in their early 20s at a gathering of opponents to the Vietnam War.
“When I met him when he was young,” Clinton later said, “I thought I had never met a person whose heart burned with the fire of social justice so strongly.”
Mixner “was an important role model for a lot of gay activists … because he was one of the first who was willing to come out,” said Charles Kaiser, the author of the book “The Gay Metropolis,” a history of gay life in the United States. “It was in a period when whatever your profession was … you mostly assumed that if you came out of the closet it would have a terrible destructive effect on your career.”
A skilled strategist and prolific fundraiser, Mixner emerged as a leading advocate in the burgeoning movement for gay rights. In 1978, he met with former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who would soon run for president, and persuaded him to oppose Proposition 6, a state ballot initiative that would have banned openly gay people from teaching in public schools.
Mixner appealed to Reagan, a standard-bearer of the conservative cause, on the grounds that the measure would set a dangerous precedent for government intrusion in private life. Reagan later said that while he did not “approve of teaching a so-called gay life style in our schools,” there was “already adequate legal machinery to deal with such problems if and when they arise.” The measure failed.
As the spread of HIV/AIDS became a crisis in the gay community in the 1980s, Mixner helped spearhead a movement of activists outraged by what they regarded as the scandalously inadequate response by government officials and medical professionals who dismissed the disease as a “gay plague.”
Mixner was credited with raising $3.4 million for the 1992 Clinton campaign. Clinton kept his pledge in part with his support for HIV/AIDS funding and measures barring anti-gay discrimination in employment, as well as with an executive order that prohibited the federal government from refusing security clearances to gays because of their sexual orientation.
Sean Patrick Maloney, who worked as White House staff secretary in the Clinton administration and later became the first openly gay congressman from New York and the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview that “people like me would never have been able to enjoy the careers we have without his sacrifice,” describing Mixner as a “moral voice who took real risks to win our equality, and very often at a high personal cost.”