20 Facts About Randy Wicker

Randolfe Hayden "Randy" Wicker was born on February 3,1938 and is an American author, activist, blogger, and archivist.

Notable for his involvement in the early homophile and gay liberation movements, Wicker has documented the early years and many of the key figures of the LGBT activist communities, primarily in New York City.

Randy Wicker's first exposure to the gay movement came while he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1950s, when he discovered a copy of the ONE, Inc magazine One.

Randy Wicker affiliated himself with the New York City chapter of the gay Mattachine Society of New York in 1958, while still a student, spending the summer in the city to work with the organization.

The Mattachine took a comparatively conservative stance in its work for gay rights, while Randy Wicker, who was younger than the leadership and many of the other members, joined with other younger activists like MSNY vice president Craig Rodwell in an effort to make the group more radical.

Randy Wicker adopted the pseudonym "Randolfe Hayden Wicker", retaining his family name as his new middle name to maintain the family connection.

Randy Wicker ran for student body president but during the campaign the dean received notification that Randy Wicker and his roommate Edward Lacey were gay.

Several mainstream media outlets, alerted by Randy Wicker, covered the broadcast, which received favorable treatment in The New York Times, The Realist, Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, and Variety.

Randy Wicker spoke to countless church groups and college classes and, in 1964, became the first openly gay person to appear on East Coast television with a January 31 appearance on The Les Crane Show.

Randy Wicker is credited with organizing the first known gay rights demonstration in the United States.

Randy Wicker lost, but a slate of radicals whose views aligned with his swept the elections, effectively taking control of the organization.

Randy Wicker supported himself by operating, with his lover Peter Ogren, Underground Uplift Unlimited, a slogan-button and head shop.

Randy Wicker was a witness to the Stonewall riots in June, 1969, which are recognized as the start of the modern gay liberation movement.

Randy Wicker later recalled seeing rioters set bonfires and throw garbage barrels through the windows of Greenwich Village businesses.

Randy Wicker temporarily distanced himself from the gay movement, but returned by writing in 1970 for Gay, a tabloid magazine, and again in 1972 to lend his name as co-author The Gay Crusaders, a compilation of profiles of early movement leaders, with Kay Lahusen though Lahusen, who was uncomfortable with public speaking, wrote it all and Wicker simply agreed to do promotion of the book.

Randy Wicker joined the Gay Activists Alliance, a more structured activist group that formed in response to what was seen as the excesses of the Gay Liberation Front.

At times Randy Wicker covered these events for gay media outlets like Gay and The Advocate.

Since 2009, Randy Wicker has been documenting and participating in the Radical Faerie communities in Tennessee and New York.

Randy Wicker formed the activist Cloning Rights United Front, and argued that the right to bear one's "later-born identical twin" was not only an LGBT rights issue, but a human rights issue.

Randy Wicker sought unsuccessfully to convince Stephen Hawking to preserve genetic material for future cloning.