51 Facts About Jon-Henri Damski

Jon-Henri Damski was an American essayist, weekly columnist, poet and community activist in Chicago's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities from the mid to late 1970s until the late 1990s.

At the time of his death, Damski was the longest-running columnist published in the American gay and lesbian press, having written for publication every week from November 8,1977, until November 12,1997.

Jon-Henri Damski was considered one of the people most instrumental in helping to pass Chicago's Human Rights Ordinance in 1988, which granted protections in jobs and housing to members of the gay and lesbian communities within the city.

In 1990, Jon-Henri Damski worked to pass Chicago's hate crimes ordinance.

In 1991, Jon-Henri Damski was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame for his years of writing and his activism.

Jon-Henri Damski refused an experimental treatment, telling friends and readers he wanted to maintain his quality of life, a clear-head and the ability to write during the last months of his life.

Henry Jon-Henri Damski died at age 59 of a massive heart attack.

Jon-Henri Damski's father moved the family of nine brother to the Washington State, where they were raised in the Northwest.

Jon-Henri Damski wrote often about having a dyslexia so serious that reading books was often next to impossible: his father read aloud to him all of his schoolwork until he was 9.

The divorce drama was broken up by visits to a farm in Cathcart, Washington, where Jon-Henri Damski's grandfather had a cabin.

At eight years old, Jon-Henri Damski was given a choice of which parent to live with, and chose to live with his father.

Jon-Henri Damski later recalled the painful letter he had to submit to the court.

Jon-Henri Damski later summed it up thusly: he was mostly together with his mother for the early years of his life and apart from her for most of the next ten, as he travelled the circuit from her and a stepfather, to his father and a stepmother, and back.

Jon-Henri Damski attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington from 1955 to 1959, and he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1959.

Jon-Henri Damski chose Brandeis University because of Herbert Marcuse and its History of Ideas Program.

In 1967, Jon-Henri Damski began attending the University of Washington for graduate work in the Classics, where he worked on a Ph.

We do know from University of Washington records that Jon-Henri Damski earned the Masters of Arts, and completed the coursework necessary to become a Ph.

From 1970 to 1973, Jon-Henri Damski lectured at Bryn Mawr College in the Classics department.

Jon-Henri Damski led a seminar at the Aspen Summer Institute on Socrates.

Jon-Henri Damski returned to Seattle in 1974, where work continued towards his Ph.

In 1974, Jon-Henri Damski traveled to Chicago for the annual American Philological Society convention, scheduled for that December.

Jon-Henri Damski had hoped to continue lecturing in the Classics and finish his Ph.

In Chicago, then, Jon-Henri Damski wrote daily in his typed journals, using a portable typewriter and the Newberry Library as his base.

Jon-Henri Damski started with impressions of Chicago and continued with epigrams and then poems.

Jon-Henri Damski soul searched as he made it through a few temporary jobs from 1975 to 1977, even as he knocked out several hundred poems and a few thousand more epigrams.

Jon-Henri Damski kept his humor intact by taking his life, daily, to the written page.

Jon-Henri Damski soon found employment with Truman College, one of Chicago's city colleges, where he taught in its Senior Living program.

Jon-Henri Damski maintained his residence in the SRO mid-rise until his death.

Jon-Henri Damski was getting published in the Sun-Times' Line o' type column, which accepted reader submissions, usually epigram-length, humorous musings.

Jon-Henri Damski would write regularly for Gay Chicago Magazine, Gay Milwaukee, Midwest Times, GayLife, Windy City Times, Outlines and Nightlines, as well as for humor magazines "under presumed names," as he puts it on an early resume.

Jon-Henri Damski worked with Ralph Paul Gernhardt and Dan DiLeo on Gay Chicago.

Jon-Henri Damski wrote for Gay Chicago News starting in December, 1977 and continued with Gay Chicago Magazine until 1982.

Jon-Henri Damski participated in its sister publications: Milwaukee Calendar, which became Gay Milwaukee, which became Escape, and then a short-lived monthly, Midwest Times.

Besides reproducing the play-by-play debates among gay men about what to call themselves, and where and how they met in backrooms, bath houses, bars, and park bushes, as well giving voice to the fears of thrills of living in a violence-prone neighborhood, Jon-Henri Damski wrote about how the mainstream press covered gay and lesbian issues, taking to task the Sun-Times, and Time magazine for their reporting.

Jon-Henri Damski wrote back and forth in running battles with nationally syndicated columnists Mike Royko and Bob Greene.

Jon-Henri Damski's growing familiarity with ward politics in Chicago would later make him an indispensable asset in passing the Human Rights Ordinance, in 1988.

Jon-Henri Damski's writing and the reporting at GayLife were marked by their coverage of the murder of a street hustler named Danny Bridges in August, 1984.

Jon-Henri Damski continued his unsparing critique of Chicago's mainstream press accounts of any and all things gay and lesbian.

Jon-Henri Damski began writing for Windy City Times in its first issue, October 3,1985 under the heading JHD.

Jon-Henri Damski remained with the paper after the 1987 death, from AIDS, of his friend Bob Bearden.

Jon-Henri Damski stayed with the publication almost ten years, until being fired abruptly late in May, 1995, by publisher Jeff McCourt.

Michael Miner, author of the Chicago Reader's "Hot Type," notes Jon-Henri Damski had been fired even as he was facing surgeries for malignant melanoma.

Jon-Henri Damski wrote a multi-part series on the trials of Larry Eyler in 1986, and in 1992.

Jon-Henri Damski would maintain for decades that Eyler had been wrongly convicted in Bridges' death as the sole killer.

Meanwhile, Dr Little was tried separately, in Indiana, before the witness Jon-Henri Damski interviews had been found; Dr Little was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Jon-Henri Damski came out as queer in 1989, not long after the passage of the Human Rights Ordinance.

Jon-Henri Damski's writing seemed to take wing, in some ways, at this point, as the weight of political activities with the fabled "Gang of Four" could give way to the funny and insightful, classically trained mind which had kept its eye so intently on the civil rights ball for fifteen years.

Jon-Henri Damski announced his column's re-emergence in Nightlines on June 21,1995.

Jon-Henri Damski's first reading was from his collection of poems about living with cancer, in November, 1996.

Jon-Henri Damski wrote about the "denial of the body", complaining that as gays and lesbians achieved success on the national stage in America, they were de-gaying themselves, and turning into eunuchs.

In 1996, Jon-Henri Damski teamed up with John Michael Vore, then a Chicago-based writer, to begin Firetrap Press.