Jon-Henri Damski (March 31, 1937 – November 1, 1997) was an American essayist, weekly columnist, poet and community activist in Chicago's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities from the mid to late 1970s until the late 1990s. At the time of his death, Damski was the longest-running columnist published in the American gay and lesbian press, having written for publication every week from November 8, 1977, until November 12, 1997.
Damski is also considered the first gay columnist in the American Midwest to publish under his real name and photo, starting in January, 1979, when no legal protections existed in the city of Chicago to give one recourse if fired from a job, or forced from housing, due to sexual orientation. Damski's epigrams, columns and poetry have been gathered in several collections and anthologies (see "Damski and Firetrap" section, below).
Damski was considered one of the people most instrumental in helping to pass Chicago's Human Rights Ordinance in 1988, which granted protections in jobs and housing to members of the gay and lesbian communities within the city. In this campaign, Damski worked closely with activists Arthur Johnston (Damski's close friend and benefactor), Rick Garcia, and Laurie Dittman; working under the auspices of the organization Gay and Lesbian Town Meeting, the quartet became widely known as the "Gang of Four." Damski was considered especially influential in securing support for the Human Rights Ordinance from conservative aldermen who had in the past opposed the bill. In 1990, Damski worked to pass Chicago's hate crimes ordinance. In 1991, Damski was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame for his years of writing and his activism. In 1997, Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council presented Damski with a Proclamation for his two decades of service to the city of Chicago and its gay, lesbian and transgender communities.
Damski had been diagnosed with malignant melanoma in 1993. After 7 surgeries, in mid–1997 the melanoma had metastasized to his lungs and liver. Damski refused an experimental treatment, telling friends and readers he wanted to maintain his quality of life, a clear-head and the ability to write during the last months of his life. He wrote weekly until he collapsed in late October, 1997—having unknowingly written his 20th anniversary column and one more for the road, both of which were published posthumously.
Childhood.
Damski was known for his double-thick lenses, Cubs baseball cap and T-shirt &amp; tie combinations as he walked the neighborhoods in Chicago, gathering news for his columns. His vision had been marred from the start of his life—as a premature birth in 1930s Seattle, he was also not even expected to live; yet Damski wrote about this in later years as a positive thing: it freed him up from all the pressures put on his older brother by his parents.
Damski's father, Henry Damski, had spent time in an orphanage in Birmingham, Alabama, before later attending the New England Conservatory of Music. In Seattle, he would become the conductor of the city's Symphony Orchestra; under a stage name, he also led jazz dance bands and hosted his own radio show. Henry Damski died at age 59 of a massive heart attack. Ruth, Damski's mother, hailed from Rockford, Illinois. She was known as Ruthie. Her father moved the family of nine brother to the Washington State, where they were raised in the Northwest. The move would later be followed by a divorce, yet everyone stayed close in bringing up the large family, now extended, so that exes continued to participate even with their new spouses. Damski's mother's side of the family included tavern owners, brothers who worked in the lumber mills, and brothers who enlisted in the armed services.
Damski wrote often about having a dyslexia so serious that reading books was often next to impossible: his father read aloud to him all of his schoolwork until he was 9. Despite problems with his eyesight, he nevertheless had been given regular piano lessons and had some promise, though he suddenly gave it all up when he realized he wanted to be a baseball pitcher—his number one dream from 9 until 17.
Damski attended Lakeside Academy for Boys in Seattle—later simply Lakewood Academy—where he was first tutored in the Classics—the Greek and Latin languages and history. Damski's parents would split-up in the 1940s, with his mother moving to Palm Springs, California (the home of a new lover) and his father remaining in Seattle. His parents would date others and get married; Damski later wrote that he had learned from his maternal grandmother that step-families taught one how to let go of the past and how to get along with additions to the family.
The divorce between Henry and Ruthie was prolonged and public—lasting four years—partly because divorce was still uncommon in the 1940s, and partly because Damski's mother had been a minor actress and his father was a public figure in the jazz and classical music scene. Along with continual press coverage: "There were preliminary divorce proceedings and hearings; private detectives and lawyers on each side; detectives from my mother's new love interest hovering over them from his own messy divorce...a separate custody battle and trial over me, and where I was to go."
The divorce drama was broken up by visits to a farm in Cathcart, Washington, where Damski's grandfather had a cabin. Knowing he had a wild streak, Damski's uncle George had provided a place for his grandfather Bill (Ruthie's father) to relax and live out his life. Jon-Henri and his older brother, Joe, visited him. "He taught us how to trail, fish, walk in the woods and generally enjoy communing with nature ... Woodburning ash from the stove permeated grandpa's clothes. One whiff of that smell today, and I still think of his stove and how we used to heat water on it for our bath."
At eight years old, Damski was given a choice of which parent to live with, and chose to live with his father. He later recalled the painful letter he had to submit to the court (and which reporters would write about). His father's lawyers had coached him on what to write and later say in court apparently without success. The result was an odd joint custody, with the young Damski "bounced on my own every six months from Seattle to California and back." While in California, Damski spent two Summers in the Desert Inn, and others in San Francisco. His parents would eventually reconcile and become lovers, again—but not marry again; for Ruthie was off to an engagement in Japan for 2 years. While gone, Damski's father died, and when she eventually returned, it was with sole custody.
Damski later summed it up thusly: he was mostly together with his mother for the early years of his life and apart from her for most of the next ten, as he travelled the circuit from her and a stepfather, to his father and a stepmother, and back. He then lived with her and took care of her during the last years of her life, when, he writes, they "became quite close friends."
Education and early work.
Damski attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington from 1955 to 1959, and he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1959. He chose Brandeis University because of Herbert Marcuse and its History of Ideas Program. Damski's masters thesis was a collection of 10,000 epigrams. "Marcuse warned me that writing epigrams was dangerous to my thought and health," wrote Damski in the late 1980s; Damski would continue to write them until his 1997 death. (No final tally has yet been ascertained.)
Damski writes, though, that he left Brandeis with a "broken wing." Elsewhere, he comments: "When I was 23, I had this wild idea that I could 'straighten' out, or up, or something. I went with [Whitman College friend] George [Pettibone] in his car as he drove back to law school at the University of Michigan." Damski spent ten days living the life of a law student with George and his friends. "I thought if I could enter law school, and take up a legitimate craft, people would not think I was so odd and queer. Momentarily I was the philosopher who was trying to come in from the cold. It's fun to get stoned; but it's not fun to get stoned by your fellow creatures when you don't think like they think." Damski credits Pettibone with getting him back on his own journey: "No other guy in our class could be me," Pettibone told him. Some called him "Socrates" in college, Damski writes. Others labeled him "the great pretender."
"George sent me back on my erratic, wandering path," Damski wrote in 1993.
That path, then, returned him to Seattle in 1962, where he became an account executive with KING-FM. He would soon begin writing documentary scripts for the KING-TV NBC affiliate's King Screen Productions. While doing research on Seattle street kids, Damski first heard rock and roll from the Beatles, Janis Joplin and "my neighbor, Jimi Hendrix." Damski became swept up in the new music: he used his TV money from documentary writing to travel up and down the West Coast following other rockers: The Rolling Stones, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix; he saw "the Stones more than 15 times in 10 different cities."
The documentary work also provided some crucial lessons on understanding and writing about others' lives. In a 1981 interview with Albert Williams for Chicago's "GayLife" newspaper, Damski says: "When I started interviewing people, I wrote about a 19-year-old boy who was beaten up. I realized as I phrased it accurately as I knew it, that he had been forced out of home by his father, and that was why he was living with other people at 19. Of course, his father insisted, 'I "never" forced my son out.'"' And Williams follows-up: "This gave Damski a greater awareness of the subjective nature of truth, which has a lot to do with his writing. He deals with 'fictional facts'—the dreams and illusions we all live with."
In 1967, Damski began attending the University of Washington for graduate work in the Classics, where he worked on a Ph.D. from 1967 to 1974. While some sources show Damski completing the Ph.D.—even he writes that he had problems getting to the finish, with, again, no sources available which definitively say why. We do know from University of Washington records that Damski earned the Masters of Arts, and completed the coursework necessary to become a Ph.C. (Ph.D. candidate).
From 1970 to 1973, Damski lectured at Bryn Mawr College in the Classics department. Damski also led a seminar at the Aspen Summer Institute on Socrates. He returned to Seattle in 1974, where work continued towards his Ph.D. and he lectured at Whitman College.
Life in Chicago.
In 1974, Damski traveled to Chicago for the annual American Philological Society convention, scheduled for that December. He had hoped to continue lecturing in the Classics and finish his Ph.D., but was unable to find work in the small, crowded Classics field. This would make finishing the Ph.D. thesis difficult, though notes show him working on it through 1975.
In Chicago, then, Damski wrote daily in his typed journals, using a portable typewriter and the Newberry Library as his base. He started with impressions of Chicago and continued with epigrams and then poems. The output of poems between 1976 and 1978 and the discovery of two complete, yet unpublished manuscripts—along with a fistful of rejection letters—suggest Damski had begun to put the Ph.D. behind him and began to focus on becoming a published poet.
During these first Chicago years, Damski lived at 917 Cuyler Avenue in Chicago, not far from Irving Park Road and Broadway. In a letter from December, 1974, he describes it this way: "I live in a first class Spanish-speaking area not far from Wrigley Field, which is also located a few blocks from the water and French markets. I live in the upper, but not necessarily better half, of an old mansion: very warm and comfortable, nine rooms, frescoes on the walls (not the ice box), and one grand piano, but of course: no television. In the old days, judges and sea captains occupied it...and a "cave canem" protects the remaining ground which looks out over a new McDonald's golden arch parking lot. Thus I have the best of two worlds: 19th