– Long-tailed LGBTQ+ advocate
– ABilly Jones-Hennin’s lifelong activism.
Prominent LGBTQ+ Advocate and Co-Founder of National Organization for Black Lesbians and Gays Dies at 81
Within a few years of his first Pride festival, Mr. Jones-Hennin had become one of the region’s most prominent advocates for LGBTQ+ rights, especially on behalf of LGBTQ+ people of color.
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He co-founded the first national organization for Black lesbians and gays, a group that began as a political coalition in Washington and Baltimore. He coordinated logistics for the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, a 1979 event that drew an estimated 75,000 people, if not tens of thousands more. And that same year, he helped organize what is often described as the first LGBTQ+ delegation of color to go to the White House, where he and a dozen allies met with Carter administration aides to raise concerns about housing, health care and discrimination.
As conservatives organized against gay rights, Mr. Jones-Hennin “didn’t just lament what was happening,” said Victoria Kirby York, the public policy and programs director for the National Black Justice Coalition, an LGBTQ+ rights group. “He strategized, he organized and he got people who didn’t otherwise want to be in the same room together to be in the same room, knowing that was the only way we would reach liberation.”
Mr. Jones-Hennin continued his advocacy efforts for more than four decades, overseeing health programs in D.C. during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and shifting his focus to disability rights after his health declined in the late 1990s, when spinal stenosis began to limit his mobility. He was 81 when he died Jan. 19 at his home in Chetumal, Mexico, where he lived during the winter. He also had a home in Washington.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease and spinal stenosis, said his husband, Cris Hennin.
A charismatic speaker with a flair for assembling coalitions that transcended divisions of race, gender and class, Mr. Jones-Hennin moved to the front lines of LGBTQ+ activism in 1978. At the time, the city was predominantly Black, but the face of its LGBTQ+ community was White. Mr. Jones-Hennin had grown tired of being the only Black person regularly attending meetings of groups like the Gay Activists Alliance.
With a few like-minded activists, he co-founded the D.C. and Baltimore Coalition of Black Gays, holding the organization’s first meeting near Dupont Circle. The group evolved into the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, with chapters in cities including New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, and championed what would later be called an intersectional approach to advocacy. Their tagline: “As proud of our gayness as we are of our blackness.”
“A gay identity and a Black identity were not compatible prior to that. You couldn’t bring it together,” said Gil Gerald, a co-founder who served as the group’s first paid executive director. (The organization fractured in the late 1980s and was succeeded by organizations like the National Black Justice Coalition.) “Gay was White. Black? Well, that was Black.” He called Mr. Jones-Hennin “the progenitor, the spark,” adding, “We found our voice through his organizing.”
Mr. Jones-Hennin said he was driven by two goals: confronting homophobia in the Black community and confronting racism in the gay community. He promoted the coalition while also serving as a logistics coordinator for the first national LGBT march on Washington, a grass-roots political rally that came together after the 1978 assassination of San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who was openly gay. The event featured speakers including the writers Audre Lorde and Allen Ginsberg, with a platform that called on Congress to pass comprehensive legislation protecting lesbian and gay rights.
“There were no resources, there was no money. It was just entirely spirit,” said Susan Silber, a Washington-area lawyer who worked the event with Mr. Jones-Hennin as a volunteer. (Decades later, she was a co-parent to two of his children.)
“We never knew if people would come because it had never been done before,” she continued. “We didn’t know if people would be willing to be visible. You couldn’t imagine it until it happened, and Billy was the one — along with one or two others — who made sure the buses got there.”
To ensure that African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and other people of color were represented at the march, Mr. Jones-Hennin spearheaded a “Third World” LGBT conference the same weekend. Held at the Harambee House hotel near Howard University, it was billed as the first national gathering of LGBT people of color.
Sessions bore titles such as “Consciousness Raising,” “Chicano Identity,” “Black Gays of the South,” “The Dynamics of the Prison System,” “Alcoholism” and “The Mature Lesbian.” Saturday night was disco night. Lorde served as the keynote speaker, although Mr. Jones-Hennin later admitted that he was so worn down by the planning that he missed her speech.
“When you’re at the front line of organizing — and even on the day of — you’re running around taking care of small details, dealing with the hotel, and dealing with the attendees and you’re trying to smile, and did I remember to zip up my fly? And do I have the right outfit on? Please!” he said in a 2007 interview with Metro Weekly. “You think I’m going to sit there and listen to a speech? I fell asleep. But I was in the room!”
Lannie Bess, as he was first known, was born in St. John’s, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, on March 21, 1942. Adopted at age 3, he was raised in Richmond by parents who gave him the name Allen Billy Scott Jones. Eventually, after years of going by A. Billy S. Jones, Mr. Jones-Hennin decided to condense his name by adding an A to Billy.
His father was a physician, and his parents turned their home into a rehab and nursing center while raising 10 adopted children in all, according to Mr. Jones-Hennin’s family.
Mr. Jones-Hennin said that he joined his parents at civil rights protests, demonstrating against segregated department stores in Richmond, and later attended the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights.
“The messages that day were as relevant to me as a gay person as they were to me as a black person,” he told the New York Times decades later.
By the time of the march, he had started to identify as a gay man, en route to adopting the term “bisexual” in an era when, he said, bisexual men were ostracized or overlooked within the gay community.
His parents were generally supportive, and after his father died his mother revealed that he, too, was bisexual. Mr. Jones-Hennin recalled in an oral history for Outwords, an LGBTQ archive, that when he came out to his father, he was told “that I needed to be aware of sexually transmitted disease, I should get married and have kids, and that I should be discreet — which was how he managed his life. I did that. I did marry a woman that I love very, very much and still do to this day.” (He and his wife separated after seven years.)
After serving in the Marine Corps, Mr. Jones-Hennin studied business and accounting at Virginia State College (now a university), graduating in 1968. According to his LinkedIn profile, he earned a master’s degree in social work from Howard in 1990.
By the early 1970s he had settled in the Washington area, living in Columbia, Md., before moving to the District. He became a founding member of the Washington chapter of the Gay Married Men’s Association, or GAMMA, which formed as a support group in 1978 after a fire broke out at the Cinema Follies, a gay theater, killing nine people who were trapped inside.
Through the group he met Hennin, his future husband. They soon started a relationship and married in 2014. In addition to his husband, of Washington and Chetumal, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Valerie Jones of Las Vegas, Anthony “TJ” Jones of Manhattan and Forrest “Peaches” Taylor of Atlanta; two children from his partnership and marriage to Hennin, Danielle Silber of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., and Avi Silber of Rockville, Md.; a sister; 10 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.
Although he spent most of his career in Washington, Mr. Jones-Hennin lived on the West Coast for a brief period in the 1980s. According to a report in the Philadelphia Tribune, he was sentenced to one year in prison for embezzlement in 1985, after he was found to have taken between….
1. “ABilly Jones-Hennin, longtime advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, dies at 81”
2. “ABilly Jones-Hennin, advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, passes away at 81”.
