By Tim Redmond
Hank Wilson, longtim e queer activist and overall wondeful guy, died yesterday of lung cancer. There’s a memorial for him tonight (Monday, Nov. 10) at 18th and Castro starting at 6 pm.
I always liked Hank; he was so upbeat, so full of energy.
A lot of people may not remember, but Hank was was also the one who started the amazing Tom Ammiano mayoral write-in campaign in 1999, when Ammiano agreed at the last minute to take on Mayor Willie Brown. Hank was the one standing in the Castro — all alone, at first — with the posterboard getting signatures; he was the one who really convinced Ammiano to run. I never forget him calling me the day Tom agreed to be a candidate and saying, with his usual excitement: “It’s real, it’s real, it’s going to happen.”
And that campaign — and the activists it brought out and the movement it helped spark — was as the heart of many of the progressive victories we’ve won since then.
“It’s a cliche, but with him they broke the mold,” Amminano just told me. “He was really one of a kind.”
We’ll all miss him.