David Mixner

David Benjamin Mixner (August 16, 1946 – March 11, 2024) was an American political activist and author.

He was best known for his work in anti-war and gay rights advocacy.

Mixner was born on August 16, 1946, and grew up in the small town of Elmer, New Jersey.

His father Ben worked on a corporate farm, and his mother Mary worked shifts at a local glass factory and later took a job as a bookkeeper for the local John Deere dealership.

Mixner had two older siblings, Patsy Mixner Annison and Melvin Mixner.

Mixner attended Daretown Elementary School, then Woodstown High School, where he got involved in the Civil Rights Movement, by participating in picketing and sending his own money to Martin Luther King Jr. In his memoir, Stranger Among Friends, Mixner explains that his parents were "livid" over his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, claiming his activism embarrassed them.

When Mixner told them he wanted to go south during the summer of 1963 after following the events in Birmingham, Alabama, his parents forbade him.

In the fall of 1964, Mixner enrolled at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, where he soon became involved in civil rights and anti-war activism, including helping to organize protests against a speech by General William Westmoreland.

Prompted by an article he read in The Arizona Republic about city garbage workers who were seeking the right to unionize, in the fall of 1966, Mixner organized the first of many protests he would organize over the next thirty years.

Mixner rallied hundreds of workers, students, and professors and led a march on City Hall.

Although the city successfully broke the strike, the workers eventually earned the right to unionize.

Mixner found himself much more interested in activism, including LGBT rights, than in pursuing a college degree.

While at Maryland, Mixner was a grassroots organizer for the 1967 March on the Pentagon, which was later captured in Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night.

Later that year, Mixner dropped out of college and began working for the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy.

One of Mixner's first assignments was organizing the Minnesota operation, helping McCarthy win the Minnesota caucus, defeating incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Later, Mixner and other members of McCarthy's campaign team went to Georgia to help select an alternative delegation to send to the national convention in Chicago, challenging Governor Lester Maddox's hand-picked delegation, which included only seven African-Americans in the 117 person delegation.

The Georgia Democratic Party Forum, which sought to challenge Maddox's delegation, held its own convention in Macon, where Congressman John Conyers (D–MI) keynoted their convention before turning over the floor to Julian Bond, the first African-American elected to the Georgia legislature, who would later become Chairman of the NAACP.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mixner was allegedly beaten by police during the protests held outside the convention center.

After Vice President Hubert Humphrey claimed the nomination, Mixner began seeking out new outlets for his activism.

He soon befriended Doris Kearns Goodwin, who introduced Mixner to Senator Ted Kennedy, who he claimed would become a lifelong friend.

In early 1969, Mixner was invited to join the Delegate Selection Committee, where he served as his generation's voice, and he intended to use the platform to raise the issue of the violence at the previous year's convention.

Mixner served as an organizer of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam.

The idea was prompted by Jerome Grossman, a Massachusetts businessman active in the peace movement.

Grossman proposed to Sam Brown, a close friend of Mixner, that they set aside a day in 1969 where "business as usual" would come to a halt, essentially engaging in a strike against everything.

Brown decided that the word "moratorium" would be less threatening than "strike" to middle-class Americans, and set to work, setting aside October 15, 1969 as the day of the moratorium.

Brown soon enlisted the help of Mixner, David Hawk, another young activist, and Marge Sklencar, whom they knew from the McCarthy campaign.

Bill Clinton, at the time a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, visited the headquarters of the moratorium and suggested to Mixner that he organize a parallel protest at Oxford.

In 1976, Mixner began the process of coming out of the closet, and soon thereafter was a founding member of the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), the nation's first gay and lesbian Political Action Committee.

At the time, very few candidates were willing to accept donations from openly gay individuals or gay-affiliated organizations.

At the time, Mixner was also serving as the campaign manager for Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles who was seeking reelection; so while he worked to raise funds for MECLA, his involvement was kept secret because of the potential for his sexuality to become an issue in Bradley's campaign.

Soon after Bradley won reelection easily, Mixner turned his focus to fighting Proposition 6, an initiative placed on the California ballot by Orange County State Senator John Briggs that would make it illegal for gays and lesbians to be schoolteachers.

Similar initiatives had recently passed throughout the country when Mixner turned his focus to fighting Proposition 6, creating the "NO on 6" organization to fight it; through the process, he would publicly come out of the closet.

Mixner and his lover Peter Scott secured a meeting with then Governor of California Ronald Reagan, whom they convinced to oppose the initiative publicly.

As a result, and through the work of Mixner, Scott, legendary gay rights activist and San Francisco City Councilman Harvey Milk, and others, Proposition 6 was defeated by over a million votes, the first ballot initiative of its sort to be shot down.

As a result of this huge success, Mixner and Scott experienced a huge upturn in business for their fledgling political consulting firm, Mixner/Scott, and were asked by Bill Clinton, then running for governor of Arkansas, to host a reception for Clinton at their Los Angeles home.

In late 1984, after years of devastation in his personal life resulting from the AIDS crisis, Mixner decided to focus his energy on combating nuclear proliferation, creating an organization named PRO Peace.

This protest of about a thousand people gathered in front of the American embassy in London would later be a significant issue in Clinton's presidential campaign, with President George H. W. Bush telling Larry King on CNN in October 1992, "Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but to go to a foreign country and demonstrate against your own country when your sons and daughters are dying halfway around the world, I am sorry but I think that is wrong."

The Moratorium drew millions of people throughout the country, who gathered in public places and read the names of the soldiers killed in Vietnam aloud.

The day was capped off by a march at the Washington Monument, where Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about her late husband's passion for ending the war.

David Mixner's commentary on the Moratorium is featured in the documentary, The Movement and the "Madman," which debuted on the PBS series American Experience in 2023.