By Matt Simonette

Staff writer

Community members and activists gathered at Gerber-Hart Library Sunday to commemorate the 12th anniversary of the passing of writer Jon-Henri Damski and give out the award to the persons who best exemplified his spirit.

Over the course of two decades, in the pages of Chicago GayLife and Windy City Times, Damski chronicled in Chicago’s GLBT community. He died on Nov. 1, 1997.

Sunday’s event also marked the recent publication of “Nothing Personal: Chronicles of Chicago’s LGBTQ Community, 1977-1997,” a compilation of many of Damski’s columns.

Longtime community activist Arthur Johnston, who co-owns Sidetrack and co-founded Illinois Federation for Human Rights (now Equality Illinois), described his friendship with Damski.

“I was pleased to call Jon-Henri my best friend from the day I met him to the day he passed,” Johnston said.

He added, laughing, “Most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about … then I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘That’s what he meant.’”

Damski surprised Johnston with his political acumen. “When I had the odd opportunity to work on a gay rights ordinance in Chicago, I had the chance to bring Jon-Henri to meetings on that ordinance,” Johnston said. “...None of us had any notion that he was a superior political thinker.”

Albert Williams, a Chicago Reader staff writer who was Damski’s editor at Chicago GayLife and Windy City Times, said that the writer was not afraid to cover the sides of the community perceived as being less seemly.

“He gave voice to hustlers, and other people who weren’t really ‘acceptable’ in the gay community,” Williams said, adding that Damski widely wrote of community activism as well, at a time when “people thought of activists just as people who couldn’t get a date.”

According to Williams, Damski was one of the first must-reads in the gay publications referred to as “bar rags.” Damski’s column was “food for the mind to go along with drinks for the body,” Williams said.

Damski’s friend and fellow activist Lori Cannon then presented the Jon-Henri award to Johnston and Williams, who until that point were unaware that they’d won.

Johnston used the occasion to remind the audience of the insights to be garnered from revisiting Damski’s columns, written at a time when “every person who was out and gay in Chicago could fit in this room.”

“There’s so much to be gained by all of us in looking at Jon-Henri’s works again,” Johnston said.

Cannon summed up Damski’s mystique for both his readers and his friends. “He was our shaman. He was our scribe. People were his beat. Weren’t we lucky that he brought us together?” she asked.