Jack Nichols, the author of several notable books on gay issues and an early and fearless activist for gay rights, has died of cancer at his home in Cocoa Beach, Florida at age 67. As a New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox notes, Nichols “campaigned publicly for gay rights nearly a decade before the Stonewall riots of 1969,” organizing “some of the country’s first civil rights demonstrations on behalf of gay men and lesbians,” including “the first gay rights march on the White House” in 1965. He also “became one of the first Americans to talk openly about his homosexuality on national television” when he appeared in a CBS documentary, “The Homosexuals,” in 1967 (although he used a pseudonym at the request of his father, who was an FBI agent). As a result of a long-term campaign Nichols organized, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from “its list of mental disorders” in 1973. Among his books are Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin, 1975), and The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus, 1996).