David Fair

David Fair (born April 27, 1952) is an American activist who has been a leader in the labor, LGBT, AIDS, homeless and child advocacy movements in Philadelphia, PA since the 1970s.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, where he was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement as well as the local reform Democratic Party movement and later the LGBT rights movement.

At Penn he formed and chaired the Penn Voters Rights Council, and won a successful federal lawsuit (Fair v. Osser, 1971), which won Pennsylvania students the right to register to vote from their campus addresses.

Also in 1971, he led an effort to organize Penn students to vote against then-Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo in the Philadelphia mayoral race, which was unsuccessful.

He also led Penn People for George McGovern in the 1972 Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania.

Fair attended Stockholm University in 1974–75 at its Institute for English-Speaking Students in a Penn junior year abroad program.

While there, with the help of his then-wife Sonia, he published a newsletter called Rosten (The Voice) for English-speaking students at the university, advocating for a stronger education program and a student voice in curriculum development in the program.

He graduated from Penn with a degree in political science in 1975.

Fair formally “came out" in 1976 at a meeting of a group of gay and bisexual married men held at the nascent Gay Community Center of Philadelphia. He soon became active in several local gay organizations, including Gays at Penn (GAP). In 1977, GAP led a successful effort to force the university to adopt a sexual orientation nondiscrimination policy. Fair, then an administrator at a local Episcopal Church based on campus, along with others, leveraged that activism to organize a group to form a progressive lesbian and gay rights organization, the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force (PLGTF), which became the leading LGBT civil rights organization in the region until its dissolution in the mid-2000s. In 1978, Fair also led the effort to put on the first gay and lesbian cultural festival outside of New York and California, called the Philadelphia Gay Cultural Festival, which held over 20 events in 1978 and 1979 including films, theatrical performances, comedy performances, lectures and social events.

He has founded or co-founded several advocacy and service organizations, including the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force (1977), the Philadelphia Gay Cultural Festival (1978), Lavender Health (1979) (now Mazzoni Center), the Philadelphia/Delaware Valley Union of the Homeless (1985), Philly Homes 4 Youth (2017), and the Philadelphia Coalition on Opioids and Children (2018), and led the creation of numerous local government health and human service initiatives, including the AIDS Activities Coordinating Office for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (1987) and the Division of Community-Based Prevention Services (2001), the Parenting Collaborative (2003), and the Quality Parenting Initiative (2014) for the Philadelphia Department of Human Services.

Fair has received over 50 community service awards from various Philadelphia agencies and organizations, among them the Philadelphia Inquirer's Citizen Award, the City of Philadelphia Human Rights Award, and the Philadelphia Gay News Legacy Award.

He was also named among the top 101 Connectors in Philadelphia by Leadership Philadelphia, and has served on over 80 local boards and committees since 1977.

Fair was born in Southwest Philadelphia and attended Catholic grade and high schools.

In the summer of 1979, Fair helped form an LGBT Health Committee of the PLGTF, later organized as the nonprofit Lavender Health.

The organization is now named the Mazzoni Center, in honor of physician Peter Mazzoni.

Along with fellow LGBT Democratic Party activist Scott Wilds and others, Fair formed a 1979 mayoral campaign committee to support pro-LGBT City Councilman Lucien Blackwell, but the campaign was unsuccessful.

However, the effort drew the attention of the politically powerful local labor leader Henry Nicholas, president of the local affiliate of 1199: The National Health Care Workers Union, who hired Fair as his executive assistant in 1980.

During his tenure at the Union from 1980 to 1988, Fair was the media spokesperson for the union and was involved in numerous strikes and protests, being arrested by Philadelphia police 13 times.

While at 1199C, Fair also became a leading advocate against homelessness in Philadelphia.

He was active in the Committee for Dignity and Fairness to the Homeless, Dignity Housing, and other ad hoc groups, and helped to form the Philadelphia/Delaware Valley Union of the Homeless and its chapters in New York and Baltimore.

At its height, the National Union of the Homeless had over 15,000 members.

The city's largest social services union at the time, 1199C also became a base for Fair to build bridges between the union's largely black membership and LGBT and AIDS activism.

In 1980–82, he and Wilds formed Gay Campaign 80 and the Philadelphia Equal Rights Coalition, successful efforts to elect LGBT people to various neighborhood party posts in the city.

The organizing efforts garnered the attention of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which published an article on the growing influence of LGBT political activism in the city featuring Wilds and Fair.

The union hall became a major meeting place for LGBT and progressive organizations, and Fair took advantage of his new connections in the black political networks in which 1199C was prominent to influence black elected officials on LGBT issues.

These connections and other organizing efforts by Fair, Wilds, Lisa Bacon, Rita Addessa (head of PLGTF), Doug Bowman and many others were instrumental in the passage of a 1982 amendment to the Philadelphia Fair Practices Act prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The Union, which itself had a large black LGBT membership, also became the base of Gay and Lesbian Friends of Wilson Goode, chaired by Fair.

Goode was elected Philadelphia's first black mayor in 1983

In 1984, Goode appointed Fair to form the city's first Mayor's Commission on Sexual Minorities.

Also that year, Fair began years of anti-racist activism within the LGBT community with a speech to the annual dinner of Black and White Men Together Philadelphia, a local multiracial LGBT group which was honoring Fair with a community service award.

In that speech, Fair decried the dominance of racist attitudes in the local white gay community, using as a prime example the closing of the only LGBT mental health agency in the city once it began to serve a predominately people of color clientele.

In 1985, Fair was elected the Union's first openly-gay officer, Secretary-Treasurer, and as a Vice President of the Union's national organization.

In 1985, as the AIDS epidemic grew in both the LGBT and racial minority communities, Fair encouraged Goode to create the Mayor's Commission on Health Emergencies, the first effort in the city government to create a local response to the AIDS epidemic.

That same year, Fair gave the fledgling AIDS prevention organization, Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI) its first office space.

In 1986, Fair authored AIDS and Minorities in Philadelphia: A Crisis Ignored for BEBASHI and began participating in the organizing of African American and Latino LGBT people to combat the epidemic in their own communities.

At the 1986 national convention of the National Association of Black and White Men Together, Fair gave the keynote speech on white gay racism, which was later published in Speaking for Our Lives: Historic Speeches and Rhetoric for Gay and Lesbian Rights 1892-2000.

These efforts were typified by a speech Fair gave to a town meeting sponsored by the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Community Council in 1989 focusing on the need to embrace intersectionality within the community to make progress.

The controversies surrounding the organizing by Fair and other activists, both black and white, among Philadelphia communities of color are detailed in To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS a book by Dan Royles at the University of North Carolina.

Fair's efforts resulted in numerous awards, including, in 1989–90, from the AIDS in the Barrio Conference, the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, the Philadelphia Fellowship Commission, Unity/Philadelphia, Dignity/Philadelphia, the Philadelphia City Council, and the Mayor's Office.

From that point until the mid-1990s, Fair became a leading organizer of anti-racism efforts in the LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities in Philadelphia.