The gay activist David Mixner and Senator Joe Lieberman died last month at the ages of 77 and 82, respectively, and were it not for the coincident timing of their passing, I would have no reason to reflect collectively upon their legacies. Biographically, ideologically and temperamentally, they were very different men, and to my knowledge, never interacted. But I was fortunate to know them both, and after attending their funerals last week, I’ve come to appreciate some important qualities they shared.
In the summer of 1993, Mr. Mixner was at the height of his political influence. An old friend, Bill Clinton, was occupying the White House. In April, Mr. Mixner spoke to an estimated one million people assembled on the National Mall for the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi-Equal Rights and Liberation. And the next month, he featured prominently in a Vanity Fair spread celebrating America’s “new gay power elite.”
As would become evident once Mr. Clinton reneged on a promise to repeal the ban on gay people serving in the armed forces, however, the trappings of power were not what attracted Mr. Mixner to politics. Even before Mr. Clinton entered the White House, military leaders had expressed strong support for the ban, and the administration eventually agreed to a compromise allowing gays to serve provided they kept their sexual orientation secret, a policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Mr. Mixner did not limit his displeasure with Mr. Clinton to words, leading a protest at the White House in which he was arrested along with 28 other people. “I just have to do what is right,” Mr. Mixner said.
Though he would later reconcile with Mr. Clinton, Mr. Mixner paid a heavy cost for his fidelity to principle. “In 24 hours, every one of my clients canceled,” he told me in 2019 of the business consultancy he operated alongside his political activities. To pay his rent, Mr. Mixner pawned old watches.
In 2006, Senator Lieberman faced a similar conundrum. Only six years earlier, he had made history as the first Jew to appear on a major party presidential ticket when Vice President Al Gore chose him as his running mate. But Mr. Lieberman’s refusal to join other Democrats in condemning the Iraq war, which most of his Senate colleagues had initially supported, infuriated the party’s left-wing base, fueling a primary challenge to his re-election bid by the antiwar scion of a prominent family, Ned Lamont.
Had Mr. Lieberman joined the rest of his colleagues in washing his hands of Iraq, he might have staved off Mr. Lamont’s campaign and handily won re-election. But to do so would have been out of character for Mr. Lieberman, who believed strongly in the justice of the war and securing a democratic future for the Iraqi people. Though Mr. Lieberman lost the nomination to Mr. Lamont, he refused to let the Democratic primary electorate have the final say. He mounted an independent candidacy in the general election and became the first and only senator in American history to lose a party primary and regain his seat in the same cycle.
Though Mr. Mixner was a pacifist who got his political start in the movement against the Vietnam War, and Mr. Lieberman personified the liberal hawk, both men were inspired by the two forces that most captured the imaginations of young people in the 1960s: John F. Kennedy and the civil rights movement. The 35th president’s appeal that Americans “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s insistence that that country live up to its founding principles, motivated Mr. Mixner and Mr. Lieberman to pursue lives devoted to public service. Theirs would be careers guided by idealism.
Mr. Mixner and Mr. Lieberman were also members of minority groups that, in different ways and to varying degrees, had been excluded from the promise of equal American citizenship. This experience of being outsiders deeply affected their political worldviews and caused them to embrace the struggles of other excluded Americans as their own. Mr. Lieberman was a longtime supporter of gay rights, sponsoring the legislation that ultimately rescinded “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Allowing gay people to serve openly in the military, Mr. Lieberman told me at the time, was “an extension, the next step of the civil rights movement.” Meanwhile, in one of his last video blogs, posted in late October, Mr. Mixner spoke emotionally about the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, declaring, “We will never allow the kind of pogroms that haunted the people of Jewish faith in Russia and Eastern Europe again.”
Mr. Mixner and Mr. Lieberman lived their lives openly and proudly — one as a gay man, the other as an observant Jew — serving as role models for their communities, and indeed for all Americans.
Though their independence of mind could sometimes lead to charges of stubbornness, Mr. Mixner and Mr. Lieberman were adept at working across political divides. In 1978, Mr. Mixner persuaded Ronald Reagan to publicly oppose a California ballot initiative that would have banned gay people from teaching in public schools, an intervention that proved decisive in defeating the measure at the ballot box. When Mr. Clinton later came out against the Defense of Marriage Act, the law he had signed as president in 1996 that forbade the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages, many gay activists responded with self-righteous anger, given that he had signed the law as president. Mr. Mixner counseled forgiveness. “The purpose of a movement is to change minds, not in some Stalinistic way to punish those who are not ideologically pure,” he said. And in a final act of grace, before he died, Mr. Lieberman asked Mr. Lamont, who since their bruising Senate campaign became governor of Connecticut, to deliver the first eulogy at his funeral.
In his own eulogy to Mr. Lieberman, Mr. Gore used the Yiddish word mensch to describe his former running mate, explaining: “Those who seek its definition will not find it in dictionaries so much as they find it in the way Joe Lieberman lived his life. Friendship over anger. Reconciliation as a form of grace. We can learn from Joe Lieberman’s life some critical lessons about how we might heal the rancor in our nation today.”
And we can learn the same from the life of David Mixner, who though raised in an Irish Catholic family also qualified as a mensch.
Sitting in the pews at each of their services, I had the distinct feeling that not just two menschen, but an entire style of politics, was being laid to rest.
James Kirchick (@jkirchick) is the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington” and a contributing writer at Tablet magazine.
Source photographs by CQ Archive and Brooks Kraft, via Getty Images.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.
