Mel Heifetz (born November 4, 1935) is a Philadelphia-based real estate developer, philanthropist, and LGBT activist. He is a nationwide supporter of gay rights causes in America. [1] and in 2018, he was awarded the Philadelphia Award. [2]
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Mel Heifetz (born November 4, 1935) is a Philadelphia-based real estate developer, philanthropist, and LGBT activist. He is a nationwide supporter of gay rights causes in America. [1] and in 2018, he was awarded the Philadelphia Award. [2]
Heifetz grew up poor [3] in South Philadelphia and had working class Jewish parents. Heifetz's parents were hairdressers and from the age of eight, he began working by cleaning his parents' salon and selling door-to-door with his father. [4] Heifetz enrolled at Temple University to study real estate but left after one year. [4] [5]
Heifetz is a distant relative of violinist Jascha Heifetz. [4]
Heifetz maintains a relationship with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose attorneys successfully defended him in the 1950s when his first business, the Humoresque coffeehouse, was raided by police for welcoming interracial and gay couples. [6] [7] [8] Heifetz's experience with Humoresque and the ACLU marked the beginning of his activism against injustice and abuse. [8]
Heifetz built himself as a businessman and developed real estate, gay bars, and hotels, including the Alexander Inn, Philadelphia’s first gay hotel. [8] [9] From 1996 until 2013, Heifetz owned and operated Sisters, Philadelphia's only lesbian bar. [10] [11]
Heifetz made a major donation in 2005, which paid off the mortgage of Philadelphia’s William Way LGBT Community Center. [12] In 2015, the William Way LGBT Community Center honored Heifetz with their Humanitarian of the Year Award. [13]
In October 2017, Heifetz donated $16 million to The Philadelphia Foundation’s GLBT Fund of America, with the fund’s income annually supporting LGBT groups. [14] [12] The GLBT Fund of America was initially established in 2007 and its money supports civil rights causes, social justice, and health needs through LGBT groups such as The Trevor Project, Attic Youth Center, and GALAEI. [4] [15] Also in 2017, Heifetz became a founding benefactor to the Gloria Casarez Residence, Pennsylvania’s first young adult LGBT-friendly permanent supporting housing project. [16] [17]
Through donating $1 million to President Barack Obama's 2012 Presidential reelection campaign [18] and $1 million to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, [1] Heifetz officially became the biggest political donor in Pennsylvania. [19] In his February 2016 Huffington Post piece, Heifetz cites Barack Obama's track record on LGBT rights as a motivating factor for supporting him. [3]
In addition to the 2018 Philadelphia Award and the 2015 William Way LGBT Community Center Humanitarian of the Year award, Heifetz was the 2014 recipient of the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund Lifetime Legacy Award [20] and the 2008 Human Rights Campaign Equality Award. [21] The Philadelphia Award was established by Edward William Bok and past winners of the award include businesswoman and philanthropist Leonore Annenberg and architect Louis Kahn. [22]
In September 2019, the Equality Forum and LGBT History Month awarded Heifetz with their Frank Kameny award, named in honor of LGBT civil rights movement leader Frank Kameny. [23] Past recipients of Equality Forum’s Frank Kameny award include activist Peter Staley [24] and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell.[ citation needed ]
The homophile movement is a collective term for the main organisations and publications supporting and representing sexual minorities in the 1950s to 1960s around the world. The name comes from the term homophile, which was commonly used by these organisations. At least some of these organisations are considered to have been more cautious than both earlier and later LGBT organisations; in the U.S., the nationwide coalition of homophile groups disbanded after older members clashed with younger members who had become more radical after the Stonewall riots of 1969.
Franklin Edward Kameny was an American gay rights activist. He has been referred to as "one of the most significant figures" in the American gay rights movement.
Harold FitzGerald "Gerry" Lenfest was an American lawyer, media executive, and philanthropist. Lenfest, along with his wife Marguerite, were among the most prominent Philadelphia-based philanthropists in his last two decades, donating more than $1.3 billion to 1,100 groups, supporting various educational, artistic, journalistic, and healthcare causes.
Barbara Gittings was a prominent American activist for LGBT equality. She organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) from 1958 to 1963, edited the national DOB magazine The Ladder from 1963 to 1966, and worked closely with Frank Kameny in the 1960s on the first picket lines that brought attention to the ban on employment of gay people by the largest employer in the US at that time: the United States government. Her early experiences with trying to learn more about lesbianism fueled her lifetime work with libraries. In the 1970s, Gittings was most involved in the American Library Association, especially its gay caucus, the first such in a professional organization, in order to promote positive literature about homosexuality in libraries. She was a part of the movement to get the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in 1972. Her self-described life mission was to tear away the "shroud of invisibility" related to homosexuality, which had theretofore been associated with crime and mental illness.
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John Richard "Jack" Nichols Jr. was an American gay rights activist. He co-founded the Washington, D.C., branch of the Mattachine Society in 1961 with Franklin E. Kameny. He appeared in the 1967 CBS documentary, CBS Reports: The Homosexuals, under the pseudonym Warren Adkins.
Katherine Lahusen was an American photographer, writer and gay rights activist. She was the first openly lesbian American photojournalist. Under Lahusen's art direction, photographs of lesbians appeared on the cover of The Ladder for the first time. It was one of many projects she undertook with partner Barbara Gittings, who was then The Ladder's editor. As an activist, Lahusen was involved with the founding of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in 1970 and the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). She contributed writing and photographs to a New York–based Gay Newsweekly and Come Out!, and co-authored two books: The Gay Crusaders in 1972 with Randy Wicker and Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, collecting their photographs with Diana Davies in 2019.
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The Gill Foundation is an American philanthropic foundation based in Denver, Colorado. It is one of the funders of efforts to secure full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people in the United States. The foundation's mission is "to secure equal opportunities for all Americans, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity and expression."
The Annual Reminders were a series of early pickets organized by gay organizations, held yearly from 1965 through 1969. The Reminder took place each July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and were among the earliest LGBT demonstrations in the United States. The events were designed to inform and remind the American people that gay people did not enjoy basic civil rights protections.
The Delaware Valley Legacy Fund (DVLF) is a community foundation whose mission is to support the needs of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and straight-allied communities in Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. It is engaged in building a permanent endowment and philanthropic apparatus to serve the fundraising and grant making. DVLF was founded in 1993 and is based in Center City Philadelphia.
Jon Lloyd Stryker is an American architect, philanthropist, and billionaire heir to the Stryker Corporation medical technology company fortune.
Tim Gill is an American computer software programmer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and LGBTQ rights activist. He was among the first openly gay people to be on the Forbes 400 list of America's richest people.
Mark Allan Segal is a social activist and author. He participated in the Stonewall riots and was one of the original founders of the Gay Liberation Front where he created its Gay Youth program. He was the founder and former president of the National Gay Newspaper Guild and purchased the Philadelphia Gay News. He has won numerous journalism awards for his column "Mark my Works," including best column by The National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspaper Association and The Society of Professional Journalists.
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Gloria Casarez was an American civil rights leader and LGBT activist in Philadelphia. Casarez served as Philadelphia's first director of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) affairs. During her tenure as director, Philadelphia ranked as the number one city nationwide for LGBT equality. Casarez served as the executive director of Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative (GALAEI) from 1999 to 2008.
Malcolm L. Lazin is an American social activist, prosecutor, entrepreneur and educator. His endeavors include Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) civil rights, federal and state law enforcement, developing Philadelphia's waterfront, lighting the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and incorporating Washington Square—the largest revolutionary war burial ground—into Independence National Historical Park.
Ada C. Bello was a Cuban-American LGBT rights activist and medical laboratory researcher of Portuguese descent. She was a founder of the Philadelphia Chapter of Daughters of Bilitis and the Homophile Action League. Bello led activism efforts for the LGBT community beginning in the late 1960s and served in advocacy roles including as a board member of the LGBT Elder Initiative.
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