The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer
By Jack Nichols
Harrington Park Press, 238 pages.

Here’s an entertaining and occasionally sexually-titillating account of life in the early days of gay liberation. It’s instructive, in part, because it shows an innocence and ease with sex and sexiness that is refreshingly at odds with stereotypes of the repressed and repressive 1950s and early 60s. Nichols’ narrative of his life as a young gay man demonstrates in a way how something has been lost in our self-conscious and deliberate and politically active and aggressive sexuality at the turn of the 3rd Millennium.

Based on memoirs and contemporaneous writing exercises, the sweetly told narrative begins in 1960 when then twenty-three year old Nichols made a break from a four-year relationship with a philandering lover in Washington, D.C. to vacation in Florida. He falls in love with a fellow vacationer, a cute, self-proclaimed "hillbilly" named Warren. The Tomcat Chronicles is mostly the story of how Nichols pursues and loses and gets and loses Warren. Along the way, he befriends Warren’s lesbian twin sister and her lover and three of them travel from Florida to D.C. to Appalachia looking for Warren and having sexual adventures along the way. Great fun at a time when homosexuality was a secret underground society and tall, attractive young men like 6 ft. 3 Nichols got all the attention they could want.

Of course, we know it wasn’t all fun for homosexuals. There were also in those days many repressed and suffering homosexuals and victims of society’s persecution. One of these was Franklin Kameny, the Harvard-educated astronomer who’d been fired from a job with the federal government because of his sexual orientation and who took his dismissal to court—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, along the way establishing the D.C. chapter of the fledgling Mattachine Society and almost single-handedly creating one of the threads of the homosexual rights movement: reform of persecutory laws and change in psychiatric definitions. "Almost single-handedly" I say because also in 1960, Jack Nichols met Kameny at a party and over the next four years—with occasional breaks as Nichols quested after Warren—became Kameny’s trusted lieutenant, legal and psychiatric researcher, and fellow community organizer.

The phase of Nichols’ life recounted in The Tomcat Chronicles ends in 1964 with his meeting Lige Clarke, the handsome Kentucky-born Pentagon employee, with whom he forged a classic and society-changing relationship. Clarke and Nichols would go on to establish GAY, the first gay weekly newspaper, write a regular column on gay issues in Screw Magazine, and author a couple of early gay genre books together, including I Have More Fun With You Than Anybody, the first nonfiction memoir of a loving gay relationship. (That decade long partnership was tragically sundered in 1975 when Clarke was killed in a gay-bashing in New Mexico.)

I read I Have More Fun With You back in the early 70s when I was just discovering for myself what gay life was; I’d attribute that book with helping me form a positive perception of gayness and a realistic expectation of true love and happiness from my own homosexual adventuring. (And it proved true!)

Today Jack Nichols is senior editor at GayToday.com and author of a variety of books on gay politics, gay relationships, and even a book about gay adventures on Fire Island. He is truly one of the pioneers and elders of the movement.

There’s not much specifically "spiritual" in Nichols’ recounting of his sexual escapades during those four years hitchhiking and traveling up and down the eastern seaboard, but there’s an innocence and romantic naïveté and earnestness in his life that is surely exemplary of true spiritual values.