Deceased July 10, 2012
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In Memory
Pete Fisher left Amherst after sophomore year and, after graduating from Columbia in 1969, became a leading figure in the emerging gay rights movement of the 1970s. An important member of New York City’s Gay Activists Alliance, he wrote The Gay Mystique: The Myth and Reality of Male Homosexuality with his late partner, Marc Rubin. Published in 1972, it was one of the first books to look at the subject from the inside rather than from a heterosexual’s viewpoint.
After marching in the first Christopher Street Liberation Parade to celebrate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, he wrote, “There’s no going back after that. You can’t feel those things and take them back to the closet and nurse them. When you know what it really means to be free, you know that freedom is life.”
He led “zaps” against the New York Daily News and Harper’s Magazine for publishing defamatory articles about gay people. He and Rubin collaborated on the book Special Teachers/Special Boys, based on Rubin’s experience teaching troubled youths, and their relationship endured until Rubin’s death from cancer nine years ago.
In recent years, Pete lived with his sister Lynne Fisher in Springfield, Mass. He is also survived by his parents, Andrew and Cornelia Fisher, and his brother Randy.
John Kroll ’66