Jim Wickliff, a long-time community volunteer and activist, whose military picture appeared on an early version of the video box for the film Before Stonewall, has died. He was born Dec. 6, 1927.
Wickliff was found dead in his home Sept. 11 and the cause of death has not yet been determined. He did have a history of heart problems.
When he served in the U.S. Army in the early 1950s, he was stationed in Japan and Korea. He was a humanities/art history teacher at Roosevelt University, and was described by friends as "brilliant."
Wickliff was also a co-founder of Integrity, the gay Episcopal group, and active in Mattachine Midwest.
"His lover, Tom, and my lover died 11 years ago, that's when Jim moved back to Chicago," said Floyd Thompson, executor of Wickliff's estate. "My lover died at the same time, so we really helped each other out."
Wickliff had retired early from his career in Florida to take care of his partner, who had Parkinson's disease.
Thompson said Wickliff left a note at his home stating: "The only real regrets about moving on now is that I'll miss you and all of my other friends more than I can say."
The Veteran's Administration is handling the funeral arrangements. They provide the funeral home, headstone, flag and burial. He is expected to be buried at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery outside of Joliet, with no special ceremony. However, friends expect to hold a memorial service soon.
"He always left a positive impression," Thompson said. "He's the kind of person to give money to street people even though he did not have his own. He had a disciplined mind, was comfortable with himself and others. He was into opera, the humanities, art ... he loved to read, all kinds of things. He was a brilliant man, a real scholar."
Wickliff was also a founding member with Greg Sprague of the Gay & Lesbian History Project, and the Gerber/Hart Library.
Former Chicagoan Grant Gallup, in an e-mail, also had many fond memories.
"I have lost my very best friend, and am at a loss as to where to go to find him," Gallup said. "We wrote e-mails to each other several times a day, and I told him all about my life here in Managua ... . I am both sad and glad to say that all we have now are wonderful memories of the best of friends. ... His going home to the Creator is a better remembrance now for us of Sept. 11, the day we found he had gone."
Gallup added: "For myself, I do not expect ever to have again a friend like Jim. Louie Crew rightly said that he was one of the most compassionate persons he had ever met. He was also the most modest. It was our dear modest Jim who moved Integrity from being a newsletter into being a movement, a liberating membership organization. It was a phone call from him that startled me into meeting with him and others in Chicago to begin our meetings at St. James Cathedral, after Louie Crew had enlisted us all with his newsletter in 1974. It was Jim who did most of the planning for our first Convention, and it was Jim who compiled, edited, and published In Celebration, the little book that recorded forever our first National Convention in 1975 after we met at St. James Cathedral. ... Jim also was one of the founders of the Chicago branch of the Gay Academic Union, and he had a finger in anything courageously and honestly gay. ... He used to paint wonderful canvases and play his own grand piano."
Other friends, including Bill Kelley, Jim Edminster and Marie Kuda, were also deeply saddened upon learning of Wickliff's death, and they are preparing a more complete look back at Wickliff's contributions. His one surviving relative is a sister from Indianapolis.
Excerpts from a June 2, 1999 interview with Jim Wickliff by Sukie de la Croix for his WCT Whispers column, about his early life in Chicago:
"I used to come up to Chicago when I was in the Army, with a lover named Dick Smith, and he knew a lot of people in Chicago. I'd come up here with him, and sometimes I'd come up here without him and stay at the Lawson Y. When I moved here, after I got discharged, which was in '52, I moved to Hyde Park to study the organ with a real fine organist that was there. It was just over the golden age of the gay period out there, the landlords were very leery of renting to two guys. ... They all turned us right down flat, in no uncertain terms ... they did not rent to bachelors. We finally found a place and we stayed there for about a year and then we moved up on the North Side."
