Carl Wittman was born in New Jersey on February 23, 1943. He attended Swarthmore College in the 1960s and became a student activist, participating in sit-ins against segregation and joining Students for a Democratic Society. He co-authored the influential paper “An Interracial Movement of the Poor,” outlining the need for an interracial class-conscious movement, with another SDS activist, Tom Hayden. In the mid-1960s, however, he became disillusioned with homophobia in SDS and moved to the West Coast, where he became involved in anti-war and queer organizing. He published the influential "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto" in 1969 and later contributed to the rural queer periodical Radical Faerie Digest. In the early 1980s, he moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he co-founded the North Carolina Lesbian and Gay Health Project to address queer health inequality. He was diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s and refused treatment, instead dying by suicide in 1986. For more about Wittman, visit Profiles of Ten LGBT Activists for Social Justice, 2013/2017, by Rich Wilson.