David Fair (born April 27, 1952) is an American activist who has been a leader in the labor, LGBT, AIDS, homeless and child advocacy movements in Philadelphia, PA since the 1970s. He has founded or co-founded several advocacy and service organizations, including the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force (1977), the Philadelphia Gay Cultural Festival (1978), Lavender Health (1979) (now Mazzoni Center), the Philadelphia/Delaware Valley Union of the Homeless (1985), Philly Homes 4 Youth (2017), The Coalition for Queer Equity, and the Philadelphia Coalition on Opioids and Children (2018), and led the creation of numerous local government health and human service initiatives, including the AIDS Activities Coordinating Office for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (1987) and the Division of Community-Based Prevention Services (2001), the Parenting Collaborative (2003), and the Quality Parenting Initiative (2014) for the Philadelphia Department of Human Services.
Fair has received over 50 community service awards from various Philadelphia agencies and organizations, among them the Philadelphia Inquirer's Citizen Award and the City of Philadelphia Human Rights Award. He was also named among the top 101 Connectors in Philadelphia by Leadership Philadelphia, and has served on over 80 local boards and committees since 1977.
Early life
Fair was born in Southwest Philadelphia and attended Catholic grade and high schools. He attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, where he was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement as well as the local reform Democratic Party movement and later the LGBT rights movement. At Penn he formed and chaired the Penn Voters Rights Council, and won a successful federal lawsuit (Fair v. Osser, 1971), which won Pennsylvania students the right to register to vote from their campus addresses. Also in 1971, he led an effort to organize Penn students to vote against then-Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo in the Philadelphia mayoral race, which was unsuccessful. He also led Penn People for George McGovern in the 1972 Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania.
Fair attended Stockholm University in 1974–75 at its Institute for English-Speaking Students in a Penn junior year abroad program. While there, with the help of his then-wife Sonia, he published a newsletter called Rosten (The Voice) for English-speaking students at the university, advocating for a stronger education program and a student voice in curriculum development in the program.
He graduated from Penn with a degree in political science in 1975.
The Seventies
Fair formally “came out" in 1976 at a meeting of a group of gay and bisexual married men held at the nascent Gay Community Center of Philadelphia. He soon became active in several local gay organizations, including Gays at Penn (GAP). In 1977, GAP led a successful effort to force the university to adopt a sexual orientation nondiscrimination policy. Fair, then an administrator at a local Episcopal Church based on campus, along with others, leveraged that activism to organize a group to form a progressive lesbian and gay rights organization, the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force (PLGTF), which became the leading LGBT civil rights organization in the region until its dissolution in the mid-2000s. In 1978, Fair also led the effort to put on the first gay and lesbian cultural festival outside of New York and California, called the Philadelphia Gay Cultural Festival, which held over 20 events in 1978 and 1979 including films, theatrical performances, comedy performances, lectures and social events. In the summer of 1979, Fair helped form an LGBT Health Committee of the PLGTF, later organized as the nonprofit Lavender Health. The organization is now named the Mazzoni Center, in honor of physician Peter Mazzoni.
Labor and AIDS Activism
Along with fellow LGBT Democratic Party activist Scott Wilds and others, Fair formed a 1979 mayoral campaign committee to support pro-LGBT City Councilman Lucien Blackwell, but the campaign was unsuccessful. However, the effort drew the attention of the politically powerful local labor leader Henry Nicholas, president of the local affiliate of 1199: The National Health Care Workers Union, who hired Fair as his executive assistant in 1980. In 1985, Fair was elected the Union's first openly-gay officer, Secretary-Treasurer, and as a Vice President of the Union's national organization. During his tenure at the Union from 1980 to 1988, Fair was the media spokesperson for the union and was involved in numerous strikes and protests, being arrested by Philadelphia police 13 times.