Joe Tom Easley, prominent gay rights activist, dies at 81

Joe Tom Easley, a prominent gay rights activist and lawyer involved in the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that discriminated against gays in the military and whose wedding in 2003 was among the first same-sex marriages featured in the New York Times, died Feb. 13 at a hospital in Miami Beach. He was 81.

The cause was complications of lung disease, said his husband, Peter Freiberg.

A 6-foot-4 Texan with a mellifluous voice honed as a radio announcer during his youth, Mr. Easley became a compelling presence in Washington’s corridors of power. “He was a real networker and outreacher, a great forensic speaking talent,” said consumer activist Ralph Nader, for whom Mr. Easley had worked as one of the earliest of the young public-interest lawyers known as “Nader’s Raiders.”

While affiliated with Nader in 1971, Mr. Easley told Time magazine he was “bent on combining law with social change.”

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Mr. Easley subsequently worked for the Southern Regional Council, a civil rights organization in Atlanta where he monitored the disbursement of federal revenue-sharing funds to African American communities; for a European consumers’ group in Brussels that was investigating price fixing among drug companies; at American University law school as an associate dean and professor; and at the Antioch School of Law in Washington as a professor.

He spent the vast majority of his career — 1983 to 2013 — as a lecturer in contract and property law for Barbri, a bar-exam prep course company. Freiberg said his husband made so much money from just a few months of work at the test-prep company that he could spend the rest of the year as a full-time volunteer and rights advocate.

In the early 1980s, while in Washington, Mr. Easley served on the District’s civilian police review board and was president of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the area’s largest and most influential gay organization.

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After moving to New York, he was co-chairman of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1983 to 1987 and then served until 1995 as president of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, an arm of the country’s largest LGBTQ rights group.

He also was board co-chair from 2006 to 2010 of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an organization that sought to end discrimination against gay military personnel and helped spearhead the fight to terminate the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and allow gay soldiers, airmen and sailors to serve their country without fear of reprisal. (While doing national security work for the Navy in the mid-1960s, Mr. Easley had been outed as gay to the FBI by a former friend and was honorably discharged only thanks to a compassionate commanding officer — by most accounts, a rare act of mercy at the time.)

Servicemembers (now the Modern Military Association of America) provided legal services to many of the thousands of gay men and lesbians investigated and discharged from the military after President Bill Clinton signed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy into law in 1993.

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Under the law, the military was not allowed to ask service members about their sexual orientation, and service personnel were not to disclose their sexual orientation. Clinton signed the bill as a compromise solution to the existing ban on gay people serving in the military, but it left service members at risk of losing their careers if their orientation was found out.

Aubrey Sarvis, an Army veteran who served as executive director of the Servicemembers group from 2006 to 2011, said Mr. Easley was a “steady presence during the long fight to repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ ” and was “instrumental in conveying the sense of opportunity and the urgency to move smartly” amid the Democratic presidency of Barack Obama and while Democrats controlled the U.S. House and Senate.

Obama signed the repeal in 2010, ending the long-standing ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military. But Sarvis said Mr. Easley and other advocates realized there was little political will or support at the time to specifically codify rights for transgender service members, who continue to remain vulnerable. He cited President Donald Trump’s snap Twitter decision in 2017 to ban transgender people serving in the military — a policy reversed by the new Biden administration last year.

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Joe Tom Easley — he always went by his first and middle names — was born in Robstown, Tex., on Sept. 28, 1940. He grew up in the farming town of Truby and then in the border city of Eagle Pass, Tex., where his parents indulged him at 10 with a Harley-Davidson motorcycle to drive to school. His father was a county agricultural agent for Maverick County, and his mother was an elementary school teacher.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 1963 from Texas A&M University, then worked as an English teacher in Eagle Pass before being drafted into the Navy in 1966.

Because of his honorable discharge the next year, Mr. Easley was able to use G.I. Bill benefits to enroll at the University of Texas law school and became managing editor of the law review. During his summer jobs with Nader, starting in 1969, he was assigned to help conduct a comprehensive public interest review of the U.S. Agriculture Department. His work examined the influence of chemical and agribusiness companies in shaping pesticide regulation and other agency decisions that affected public health.

“We were going to make the country what it ought to be by working and pressing the system to work,” Mr. Easley said in the 2006 documentary film about Nader, “An Unreasonable Man.” He completed a master’s degree in public health at Yale University in 1986 because of his continuing interest in public health law.

He met Freiberg, a journalist, in 1983. They established a civil union in Vermont in 2000 and married in Toronto’s city hall in August 2003, soon after same-sex marriages were legalized in Ontario. That same month, the Times published their wedding announcement.

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Freiberg, with whom Mr. Easley had homes in Miami Beach and Elizaville, N.Y., is his only immediate survivor.

Amid his public battle over gay rights, Mr. Easley undertook a private humanitarian mission that drew media attention. It started over breakfast one morning in 2004 when he was deeply affected by a Times story concerning an Iraqi boy, Ayad al-Sirowiy, who had been severely burned over his body and blinded in his right eye by an American cluster bomb during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Ayad’s friends and family members began to ridicule him with the nickname “Gunpowder.”

The Times then reported on Mr. Easley’s year-long saga to bring Ayad to the United States for eye and skin surgery. He tried to contact the boy’s family, initially through an aid worker named Marla Ruzicka, who was then killed by a suicide bomber near Baghdad in April 2005, and eventually with a Defense Department adviser in a position to circumvent the long the visa application process and expedite Ayad’s and his father’s flight out of Iraq and into the United States that July.

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During the boy’s two-week approved visit, American doctors were able to remove some bomb fragments from his skin, but they found his right eye was beyond repair because the optic nerve was dead. Ayad, then 13, and his father soon had to go home, although they said they were desperate to stay. Freiberg said Mr. Easley was unable to maintain contact after U.S. troops withdrew from the region near Ayad’s village.

“People ask me why this boy, why help him, when there are so many others worse off,” Mr. Easley told the Times in 2005. “I tell them, well, I don’t know about the other boys. But I do know about Ayad.”

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