ABilly Jones-Hennin co-founded the first national organization for Black lesbians and gays and helped coordinate the first national LGBTQ+ march on Washington.
LGBTQ+ rights advocate ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, seated, with his longtime partner, Cris Hennin, in 2013. The couple married the next year. At his first gay pride festival on the streets of Washington, ABilly S. Jones-Hennin stood fixed to the sidelines, a bystander nervous about joining the party even as he longed to participate. It was the mid-1970s, and Mr.
Mr. Jones-Hennin continued his advocacy efforts for more than four decades, overseeing health programs in D.C. during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and shifting his focus to disability rights after his health declined in the late 1990s, when spinal stenosis began to limit his mobility. He was 81 when he died Jan. 19 at his home in Chetumal, Mexico, where he lived during the winter. He also had a home in Washington.
Mr. Jones-Hennin said he was driven by two goals: confronting homophobia in the Black community and confronting racism in the gay community. He promoted the coalition while also serving as a logistics coordinator for the first national LGBTQ+ march on Washington, a grass-roots political rally that came together after the 1978 assassination of San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who was openly gay.
“When you’re at the front line of organizing — and even on the day of — you’re running around taking care of small details, dealing with the hotel, and dealing with the attendees and you’re trying to smile, and did I remember to zip up my fly? And do I have the right outfit on? Please!” he said in a 2007 interview. “You think I’m going to sit there and listen to a speech? I fell asleep.
“The messages that day were as relevant to me as a gay person as they were to me as a black person,” he told the New York Times
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