American activist and writer Peter Fisher was BOTD in 1944. Born in Richmond, Virginia, he attended Amherst College for two years before enlisting in the US Air Force. After being discharged, he completed a degree at Columbia University in 1969, and pursued post-graduate study, resigning “to become a full-time homosexual”. In 1970, he joined the militant activist group Gay Activists Alliance, where he met his life partner Mark Rubin. He led a number of sit-in protests, storming the offices of the Daily News when its editors derided gay people as “fairies, nances, and queers” and repeating the stunt at Harper’s magazine after it published Joseph Epstein’s infamously homophobic article Homo/Hetero. In 1971, he led more than a thousand people from a nightclub to the residence of New York City councillor Saul Sharison, to protest Sharison’s refusal to consider a gay rights bill. The following year, he published The Gay Mystique: The Myth and Reality of Homosexuality, a support guide for gay men that sought to dispel prejudices about homosexuality. A national bestseller, it won the Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction and citations from the American Library Association. In 1979, he and Rubin co-wrote the novel Special Teachers/ Special Boys, based on Rubin’s experiences teaching troubled LGBTQ students. Fisher spent several years nursing Rubin through cancer. Bereft after Rubin’s death in 2007, Fisher made a series of suicide attempts, finally killing himself in 2012 aged 68.