America’s first out elected officials were two civil rights warriors you’ve probably never heard of

Three weeks before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan to deliver what was to be one of the final public speeches of his life. Hundreds of people packed the gymnasium at the local high school to hear the civil rights icon speak. In the audience that night was an 18-year-old boy named Jerry DeGrieck. DeGrieck, already a longtime supporter of the Civil Rights Movement from an early age, was defying an edict from his avowedly racist parents prohibiting him from attending.

DeGrieck’s presence that night, however, was not the only secret he was hiding. Jerry DeGrieck was also gay, and he knew it.

Related: A lesbian WWII vet was renowned for standing up to Eisenhower. Was it all a lie?

Johnnie Phelps may have fabricated the story, but she was still a pioneering lesbian advocate.

“From the time I was eight years old, I knew that I was different,” he told LGBTQ Nation. “I didn’t even know what the word homosexual was, I never really heard it. But I knew that I was different.”

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700 miles away, in Levittown, New York, Nancy Wechsler’s parents were raising her in a much different way. As ardent socialists, they instilled in the young Nancy a deep commitment to the causes of social and economic justice, including aggressive support for the Civil Rights Movement. She was, as she described, a “red diaper baby.” And like Jerry DeGrieck, Nancy Wechsler knew early on in life that she was gay.

Despite the differences in their upbringings, the shared core values they acquired early in life made it inevitable that DeGrieck and Wechsler would eventually come to know each other as political compatriots when they both began attending the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. As student movement colleagues, they would eventually make history by being elected to the Ann Arbor City Council in April 1972 under the banner of the socialist Human Rights Party.

Nancy Wechsler and Jerry DeGrieck became the first openly lesbian and gay elected US officials in 1972 pic.twitter.com/HTwIFy6P9l

— Augustana SD Diverse (@AUdiversitySD) June 21, 2017

As members of the Ann Arbor City Council, the pair would spearhead a number of bold initiatives. Within their first few months, they were successful at pushing through several progressive policies that have since become standard in many areas across the country. From a formal declaration of Gay Pride Week, to eliminating local criminal penalties for possession of marijuana, to a Human Rights Ordinance which made Ann Arbor the first city in America to outlaw discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, DeGrieck and Wechsler’s influence was changing the game in Ann Arbor, as well as the entire United States.

TODAY IN LGBTQ+ HISTORY: On July 10, 1972, the City Council of Ann Arbor, Michigan votes 7-4 in favor of an ordinance by members Jerry DeGrieck (left) and Nancy Wechsler (right) to make Ann Arbor the first city in the US to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. pic.twitter.com/jRxIzhvncR

— Tyler the ✨