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Melvin Boozer
(June 21, 1945 - March 6, 1987) U.S.A.

Melvin Boozer

Academic, activist, politician

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Melvin Boozer was born, grew up and spent most of his life in one of Washington's ghettos. The second oldest of three siblings, he was raised by his mother and stepfather. After graduating from Dunbar High School in 1963, he went to Dartmouth College on a scholarship.

His social consciousness was awakened there and he became politically active, especially in the antiwar movement. After graduating with a sociology degree in 1967, Melvin spent several years in Brazil working for the Peace Corps. While there, he began to act on the homosexual desires of which he had been aware since childhood.

When Melvin returned to the United States, he did graduate work at Oberlin College and Yale University. He then served as a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. While at Yale, he began to explore Greenwich Village's queer community, though he still dated women.

President of the Washington D.C. Gay Activists Alliance; he was the first openly gay person to be among the nominees for vice president. He was nominated at the 1980 Democratic Convention, which he addressed in a speech where he spoke of the similarities between the oppression he had experienced as an African-American and as a gay man.

He gave a stirring speech to a nearly-empty Madison Square Garden: "Bigotry is bigotry... Discrimination is discrimination... I believe that there is no power on this earth that can defeat the American people as long as we remain true to the values which have made us great." Melvin received 49 votes before balloting was suspended and then-Vice President Walter Mondale was re-nominated.

Melvin was also active in Black and White Men Together. In September 1981, he opened the Washington office of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. In 1981, Melvin was hired as a district director for the National Gay Task Force; he lost the job in 1983, "leaving the nation's oldest gay organization even whiter." In 1982, he co-founded the Langston Hughes-Eleanor Roosevelt Democratic Club to advocate for Black LGBTQs in D.C.

He died of AIDS related illness; he was forty-one.

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Sources: http://lgbt-history-archive.tumblr.com/ et alii

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