Dick Leitsch was born in 1935 in Louisville, Kentucky. While in high school, he came out to his Catholic parents, who took his revelation in stride. Bolstered by their support, Dick was living openly as a gay man by the 1950s. He got rowdy in the local Louisville gay bars, but in 1959, inspired by watching movies and hearing radio shows about New York, he took the plunge and moved to the Big Apple, where he supported himself in subsequent years as a journalist, waiter, bartender, painter, and holiday decorator.

Soon after arriving in New York, Dick met and fell in love with Craig Rodwell, a former ballet student from Chicago by way of Boston. Craig convinced Dick to come to some meetings of a nascent gay rights organization called the Mattachine Society, and by 1964, Dick was the group’s president. Two years later, in a rascally mood, Dick, Craig and a couple of buddies came up with the idea of ‘sip-ins’ (fashioned after the sit-ins of the civil rights era), to focus attention on bars and restaurants that were refusing to serve gay people. Ultimately, their actions led to legal rulings that queer people had the right to peacefully congregate in bars – or wherever they chose.

On the night of June 28, 1969, Dick heard something on the radio about a disturbance at the Stonewall Inn. Hopping a cab, he arrived in time to witness the glorious mayhem that would alter the gay rights movement forever. Dick’s account of the riots was later published in The Advocate.

OUTWORDS had the pleasure of recording Dick’s story in August 2016, on our first East Coast interview trip. In early 2018, Dick received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. He made arrangements to donate his files and photos from a half-century of gay activism to the New York Public Library, then celebrated his 83rd birthday by attending the 50th-anniversary Broadway revival of The Boys in the Band. Commenting on the steady stream of visitors he’d had since his cancer diagnosis, Dick said, “Had I known how much fun this would be, I’d have done it a lot sooner.”