User:Firetrap411/Jon-Henri Damski

Jon-Henri Damski (31 March 1937 - 1 November 1997) was an American essayist and community activist in Chicago's gay, lesbian, transgendered and queer communities from the mid- to late-1970s until the late 1990s. At the time of his death, Damski was the longest-running columnist published in the American gay and lesbian press, having written nearly every week from December, 1977 until October, 1997.

Damski is also considered the first columnist in the American Midwest to publish under his real name and photo, starting in 1978, when no legal protections existed in the city of Chicago to give one recourse if fired from a job, or forced from housing, due to sexual orientation.

Jon-Henri Damski was considered instrumental in helping to pass Chicago's Human Rights Ordinance in 1988, which granted protections in jobs and housing to members of the gay and lesbian communities within the city; and in 1990, he worked to pass Chicago's hate crimes ordinance. In 1991, Damski was inducted into Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame for his years of writiing and his activism Chicago G&L Hall of Fame. In 1997, Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council presented Damski with a Proclamation for his two decades of service to the city of Chicago and its gay, lesbian and transgendered communities (Neal Pollack: "Queer Thinker", Chicago Reader, July 4, 1997 Queer Thinker-1997) .

Damski had been diagnosed with malignant melanoma in 1993. After double-digit surgeries, in late 1996 Damski refused an experimental treatment with interferon, telling friends and readers he wanted to maintain a quality of life, a clear-head and the ability to write during the last years of his life. He wrote weekly until he collapsed in late October, 1997 and died the following week.

Damski's work continues being published in anthologies and collections by Firetrap Press, a publishing cooperative begun with friends in 1996.

Early Life in the American Northwest

Damski was known for his double-thick lenses, Cubs baseball cap and t-shirt & tie combinations as he walked the neighborhoods in Chicago, gathering news for his columns. His vision had been marred from the start of his life--as a premature birth in the 1930s, he was not expected to live. Complicating things, Damski was reputedly a severe dyslexic, who had such trouble with reading as a child, that his father read aloud to him all of his schoolwork until he was 9.

Damski attended Lakeside Academy for Boys in Seattle, Washington where his father, Henry Damski, was a conductor in the symphony orchestra. Damski's parents would split-up in the 1940s, with his mother moving to San Francisco and his father remaining in Seattle.

Damski would spend his Summers in San Francisco until his father's death, when he was 16.

Jon-Henri Damski then took over his father's insurance company, in 1953, becoming the youngest licensed insurance salesman in the state of Washington, even as he continued attending Lakeside Academy. He graduated and attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington from 1955-1959.

During his senior year, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship in 1959, on which he studied at Brandeis University in the History of Ideas Program under Herbert Marcuse. His masters thesis was a collection of 10,000 epigrams.

Damski returned to Seattle in 1962, where he became an account executive with KING-FM. Later he would become a documentary script writer for the KING-TV NBC affiliate's King Productions--and he always remained proud of his documentary on Seattle's street kids.

In 1967, Damski began attending the University of Washington for graduate work in the Classics, where he worked on a Ph.D. from 1967-1974. Damski earned the Masters of Arts, and completed the coursework necessary to become a Ph.C. (Ph.D. candidate), but there is no evidence available showing that he had completed a Ph.D., as was suggested in several of his Chicago obituaries.

From 1970 to 1973, Damski lectured at Bryn Mawr College in the Classics department. He returned to Seattle in 1974, where work continued towards his Ph.D. and taught at Whitman College, his first alma mater.

Damski also led a seminar at the Aspen Summer Institute on Socrates.

Chicago Columnist and Personality

In 1974, Damski travelled to Chicago for the annual American Philological Society's convention, scheduled for that December. He had hoped to continue lecturing in the Classics and finish his Ph.D., but was unable to find work.

In Chicago, then, Damski began a stint of temporary jobs, including working for a translation service, was a Republican poll watcher, almost worked for Encyclopedia Brittanica, and ultimately found employment with Truman College, one of Chicago's city colleges, where he taught senior citizens in nursing homes.

Damski lived north of Wrigley Field, at Cuyler and Broadway from 1974 to 1977. He moved into the Belair Motel, a transient living community, in August 1977, where he stayed until his death.

Jon-Henri Damski Chicago debut resulted from a letter to the the Chicago Daily News about the "Daley machine," short-hand for the political connections of Mayor Richard Daley. Damski also was getting published in the Sun-Time's'" Linotype column, which accepted reader submissions, usually epigram-length, humorous musings.

Damski then found his way to Gay Chicago News and on 2 December, 1977, began his weekly columns which would continue until 29 October, 1997. Damski would write for Gay Chicago Magazine, Gay Milwaukee, Midwest Times, GayLife, Windy City Times, Outlines and Nightlines.

Gay Chicago 1977-1982

Damski worked with Ralph Paul-Gerhhardt (nee, Ralph Paul) and Don DiLeo on Gay Chicago. Paul-Gernhardt had been an original member of GayLife, the first known publication in Chicago to use the word "gay" in its title. DiLeo had worked as a typesetter for the Sun-Times.

Gay Chicago began as Gay Chicago News in 1977, modeled after Gay Community News weekly out of Boston. With its January issue in 1978, Gay Chicago News became Gay Chicago Magazine.

Damski wrote for Gay Chicago News starting in December, 1977 and continued with Gay Chicago Magazine until 1982. He also participated in its sister publications: Gay Milwaukee and a short-lived monthly, Midwest Times. These publications were widely distributed in the American Midwest, to towns in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

Jon-Henri Damski's "Nothing Personal" columns were known for their forthright observations of the Chicago lives who had begun to come together in the 1970s and recognize in themselves a nascent community. In mirroring what he saw, Damski regularly used "street language," to the dismay of some readers--and wrote with a mix of styles reminiscent of New Journalism combined with a dose of Boyd McDonald, the chronicler of same-sex encounters whose columns in the Boston press had been influential on Damski and early Chicago publishers Damski worked with.

Besides writing about the debate between gay men about backrooms, bath houses and bars, as well as violence in the community, Damski wrote about how the mainstream press covered gay and lesbian issues, taking the Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago magazine, to task for their reporting. Damski also wrote back and forth in running battles with nationally syndicated columnists Mike Royko and Bob Greene. And he wrote about the arrest and conviction of John Wayne Gacy, the first of several serial killers who would prey on the Chicago's gay community.

GayLife 1982-1985

In 1982, Jon-Henri moved his columns to GayLife, where it appeared on the front page and he got a "substantial pay raise." Under the editorship of Albert "Bill" Williams, Damski expanded his columns to coverage of Chicago politics: Mayor Jane Byrne, Mayor Harold Washington, the City Council and aldermanic districts which filled its ranks.

Damski's growing familiarity with ward politics in Chicago would later make him an indispensable asset in passing the Human Rights Ordinance, in 1988. Damski's writing--and the reporting at GayLife--were marked by their coverage of the murder of a street hustler named Danny Bridges in August, 1984. GayLife and Damski then covered the trial of the man who would be convicted of Bridges' murder, Larry Eyler.

Damski would maintain for decades that Eyler had been wrongly convicted in Bridges' death as the sole killer. Damski and others believed an Indiana State University professor had been at least an accomplice--and he would publish multiple columns about the topic over the next ten years.

GRID--what was later to be renamed AIDS--was also first written about by Damski while at GayLife.

During 1985, funding for GayLife became short--and Damski was dropped by the paper in March. The weekly folded not long after, when its remaining staff left en masse to begin Windy City Times.

Windy City Times 1985-1995

Damski began writing for Windy City Times in its first issue, October 3, 1985 under the heading "JHD." He would stay with the publication almost ten years, until being fired by publisher Jeff McCourt in May, 1995--and after a rancor-filled airing of dirty laundry by Damki's supporters at both the Tribune's "Hot Type" column and Gab, a newer weekly in the gay and lesbian press.

In the nearly ten years Damski under the Windy City Times masthead, he wrote about the exponential toll of AIDS on the community; the battle for the Human Rights Ordinance, and its 1988 passage; the battle over funding for AIDS in the city of Chicago; the trials of Larry Eyler for the murder and dismemberment of Danny Bridges; the lives and deaths of colleagues and close friends, and ultimately, the cancer diagnosis he received in October, 1993.

After that diagnosis, an unfamiliar theme began to show up more often in Damski's weekly writings: he began to speak more about his own life both before and during what would be his 23 years in Chicago.

Damski also came out a "queer" in 1989--not long after the passage of the Human Rights Ordinance. In so doing, he was returning to a self-describing label he had tried on along with others in his earliest columns--when he explored the dynamics of being called "faggot," "queer," "gay" and "homosexual." Damski is arguably the first columnist queer columnist in America.

Outlines & Nightlines 1995-1997

Jon-Henri Damski began writing for the gay and lesbian monthly Outlines with its July, 1995 issue and for its sister-publication, the weekly Nightlines, in its July 5, 1995 issue. Eventually, Windy City Times would be added to the publications edited and published by their founder, Tracy Baim.

It was also during this last period of Damski's weekly career that he announced the formation of a publishing cooperative with John Michael Vore and friends, Firetrap Press. He wrote about his first reading and the collection of poems about living with cancer, in October, 1996. Thus, Damski added a new sense of identity to the list he had been writing about for 20 years: cancer survivor.

Damski's last column for Nightlines was published October 29, 1997.

Damski & Firetrap 1996-2002

Damski teamed up with John Michael Vore, a Chicago-based writer, in 1996 to begin Firetrap Press. Before his death, three collections of his works were published by Firetrap. These were considered "keep-sake" editions--limited-run, hand-made non-books, put together by friends of Damski's, including Lori Cannon, James Tennant and Vore. Each collection sold out:

Poems for the Fo(u)rth Quarter: Virtually Incurable But Not Yet Terminal: poems begun in 1996 and reflecting his take on a "medical diagnosis"; the poems were collected in an actual medical file with the ominous words X-RAY REPORTS on the cover. The more than hundred poems were illustrated with work by Michael "Omega" Orsetti, Damski's muse.

Damski-to-Go: a "deck" of 48 humorous Damski one-liners, or epigrams, illustrated by Vore and collected in a cubicle, take-out food container. Some of these dated to Damski's original work in the History of Ideas in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Angels Into Dust: The New Town Anthology, Volume 1: a collection of columns spanning Damski's Chicago career and covering the life and birth of New Town, Damski's name for the g/l/b/t/q communities. This edition was the most "book like," using, as it did, the prototypes for what would soon become Print On-Demand technologies.

Firetrap publisher/editor Vore updated the books and created three new "facsimile" digital editions in 2002, making the limited-run works available as Adobe Acrobat books on-line.

Also in 2002, a fourth anthology of columns came out under the title: dead/queer/proud.

dead/queer/proud explores the trajectory of Damski's writing which made him a "queer thinker"; it advances a number of philosophical critiques of Western life found in Damski's weekly columns, with grounding in the works of French authors Gilles Deleuze and Guattari. The selections mark a revamping of Damski's understanding of Western thought, which he first formed while studying the Classics at the University of Washington. From Damski's earliest columns, he had both promoted positive ideas about same-sex attraction, while at the same time cautioning readers from becoming too attached to any fixed notions about one's identity.