On March 14, 1968, three weeks before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered one of the final public speeches of his life in the predominantly-white, all-Christian Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. As protestors lined the streets outside, King spoke to the nearly three thousand audience members crowded in the gymnasium of Grosse Pointe South High School, uttering the line now engraved in a historic landmark plaque on the campus: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
In the crowd, defying his self-stated “avowedly racist” parents by attending, was Jerry DeGrieck, an active teen Democrat, freshly 18, unaware that history would soon call on him to turn King’s call for justice into reality.
But DeGrieck’s presence was not his only secret that night. He was also gay, and he knew it. An anomaly to the “overtly racist” and “narrow community” of Grosse Pointe, as staffed by DeGrieck, he turned to politics as an outlet for self-expression. In the fall of 1968, upon enrolling at the University of Michigan, DeGrieck finally found his escape. The site of the first teach-in student protest to the Vietnam War, 1960s Ann Arbor was alight with student activism. By his senior year, DeGrieck had led the fight for the first student-led campus bookstore, served as vice president of the student council and was arrested while demonstrating in Washington, D.C. A year later, in a stunning upset, DeGrieck became the youngest-ever person elected to the Ann Arbor City Council.
But for DeGrieck and his fellow Human Rights Party elect, Nancy Wechsler, this was just the beginning. On July 10, 1972, the Council passed the Human Rights Ordinance proposed by the duo, making Ann Arbor the first city in the country to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
The night of October 14, 1973, Wechsler and several lesbian patrons were expelled from The Rubaiyat, a local straight bar, for dancing and kissing. Wechsler attempted to explain the violation of the Human Rights Ordinance to the police, to no avail. In fact, there had been several such complaints since the passage of the Ordinance, all ignored by Ann Arbor City Attorney Ed Pear. Despite its significance, the ordinance and DeGrieck and Wechsler’s call for equality were falling on deaf ears. Frustrated, but determined, the pair made a choice that would change American politics forever.
The next day, on Oct. 15, the City Council was due for a report by Walter Krasney, Ann Arbor’s Chief of Police. Whatever Krasney said that day was lost to history. During the meeting, DeGrieck and Wechsler seized the moment, to come out and become the first openly gay elected officials in American history.
As DeGrieck recalls, all he saw from his fellow council members was “disgust.” They “could not look at us,” recalls Wechsler. During a time when homosexuality was still classified by the American Psychological Association as a “mental illness,” coming out as gay, much less in office, was unthinkable. DeGrieck and Wechsler continued to receive massive amounts of “hate mail.” They incurred the wrath of fellow party members who did not want the association or believed it was a political strategy, and even the gay community for not dressing and acting in a “politically correct” way.
But all DeGrieck felt was liberation. For the first time since he was eight years old, “I finally am who I am, and I can tell the world.”
A month later, Ann Arbor City Attorney Pear sued a local motel owner for the firing of a gay employee, marking the first time the Human Rights Ordinance was enforced in Ann Arbor.
DeGrieck and Wechsler withdrew from politics after their historic first term; both no longer reside in Michigan. But their legacy lives on. The policies they spearheaded in Ann Arbor, from the Human Rights Ordinance, to the first formal declaration of Gay Pride Week, have become the standard across the country. And yet, even in the LGBTQ+ community, most don’t know their names.
“Electoral politics is not about the individual,” said DeGrieck. Yet that is often where it begins.
“Being the first of anything comes with great responsibility, anxiety and fear,” stated Laurie Pohutsky, a former representative in the Michigan State Legislature, herself openly bisexual. “It’s hard to overstate just what Jerry DeGrieck and Nancy Wechsler coming out means for all of us.”
On Sept. 4, 2025, a Michigan historic landmark commemorating the Human Rights Ordinance and the first to honor LGBTQ+ history was unveiled at the University of Michigan. DeGrieck, now 75, spoke alongside former Council member Kathy Kozachenko, his successor and the first openly gay candidate to successfully run for office. “We need to get more young people involved,” DeGrieck stated at the ceremony.
It harkens back to that night in 1968, when DeGrieck defied his parents to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak at Grosse South High School. DeGrieck’s life was a testament to the words King had spoken nearly half a century ago: “Freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
