Randy Wicker was born Charles Hayden, Jr. On a summer vacation from college in 1958, he became active in the Mattachine Society of New York, where he unsuccessfully tried to convince the organization's leaders to use more aggressive civil rights tactics.
In the early 1960s, since he could not use the Mattachine name for his brand of activism, Randy printed business cards proclaiming himself president of the "Homosexual League of New York." He gathered friends to help him stuff envelopes and lobby local media outlets. His early achievements include the country's first all-gay talk show panel about homosexuality, which aired on Pacifica radio stations in 1962 and 1963.
Randy claims that the first queer U.S. picket was in September 1964, in New York, at the Army induction center, several months before the well-known 1965 picket at the White House.
Randy was a frequent guest on radio and TV talk shows in the 1960s and 1970s, and has been interviewed in more recent gay history documentaries. For several decades starting in the 1960s, he contributed articles to gay periodicals in New York City and Washington, D.C.
In 1971, Randy co-founded the GAA-NY Video Committee. First using borrowed equipment, then Randy's own camera and "portable" reel-to-reel machine, they documented GAA's celebrations and protests. Much of the footage was for GAA's public access cable TV show, generally considered the first gay-issues TV series anywhere.
At his father's request, he used a pseudonym in the gay movement. In 1967, he legally changed his name to Randolfe Hayden Wicker, the name he had been using for years. Since the mid 1970s, he has owned a lamp store in New York's Greenwich Village.
In 1991, Randy lent the Library/Archives his original half-inch reel-to-reel tapes. Copying them proved too expensive at that time, so the Library/Archives returned them. Two years later, the Testing The Limits video collective copied some of Randy's tapes for use in a documentary.
Source: http://www.stevecap.com/libdraft/sc0008.htm - et alii
