Name Peter Fisher | Role Author | |
Peter Fisher (May 19, 1944 – July 10, 2012) was an American author and gay rights activist. An alumnus of Amherst College and Columbia University, he served in the US Air Force prior to becoming an early member of the Gay Activists Alliance, a protest group that split off from the Gay Liberation Front after the Stonewall riots with the goal of "writing the revolution into law." Fisher led a number of the "zaps", or protests targeted at public figures, organized by the GAA, as well as serving as an unofficial historian for the group.
Fisher received the Stonewall Book Award in 1972 for The Gay Mystique: The Myth and Reality of Male Homosexuality, later described as "one of the first books to look at the subject from the inside rather than from a heterosexual’s viewpoint." His manuscripts and papers are archived at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York, together with those of his partner and fellow activist Marc Rubin. Never recovering from the death of his long-time companion Marc Rubin in 2007, Fisher committed suicide in 2012 and their migled ashes were scattered in the back yard of the sister in Springfield, Massachusetts.