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March 24, 1939 - Sept. 20, 2025
Socialist, gay liberationist, militant unionist, atheist

See below for details of the 11/13/2025 gathering.

On September 13th we lost our dear friend and partner in struggle, Bob Schwartz. This is a remembrance of his political legacy put together by people younger than he. As such, our knowledge of his activism in the years before we met him is unfortunately very fragmentary, mostly based upon occasional conversations we had over the years.

A non-religious memorial gathering for Bob will be held beginning at 6:30 pm on Thursday, November 13th at Haymarket House, 800 W. Buena Ave, Chicago. Light refreshments will be served.

Bob spent most, if not all, of his long adult life as an activist.

As a young seminarian he was inspired by Black people’s fight for freedom. He joined Civil Rights marchers, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a week after the infamous 1965 “Bloody Sunday” attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. He also marched with Dr. King and others for open housing in Chicago on August 5, 1966 in Marquette Park, another dangerous initiative which was also set upon by violent racists. It was also while he was in seminary school that he lost his faith and became an ardent, lifelong atheist.

He was a fervent opponent of the United States war on the peoples of Southeast Asia. He welcomed the Cuban people’s 1959 overthrow of the hated US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. He supported what he saw as a socialist government there, but didn’t hold back on his criticisms of it, especially its internment of gay people at the start of the AIDS crisis.

It is unclear exactly when Bob came to terms with his gay sexuality, but by the late 1970s he was a committed revolutionary socialist and steadfast atheist. He was an early and active member of Black and White Men Together, a bi-racial gay group which, besides being a social group, organized protests against the widespread racist practices of Chicago’s gay clubs in the 1980s and 1990s. The group played a critical role in waking up the rest of the LGBTQ community to the entrenched racism within and outside of our community.

A devoted socialist who believed in the need of working people to chart their own destinies independent of the rich and powerful of both major political parties, Bob fought the collusion of Democrats and Republicans to undermine the labor movement during the ‘70s and ‘80s by joining others in a failed attempt to establish an American Labor Party. In addition, it was sometime in these years that he helped his fellow workers in the juvenile court system form an AFSCME union in his own workplace.

Sometime in the late 1980s Bob became an early and active member of ACT-UP Chicago, a direct action group formed to combat President Reagan’s and the City of Chicago’s murderous responses to the AIDS crisis. This group demanded real resources to support people with AIDS and expedite research funds to find therapies and a cure. A particular focus of ACT-UP Chicago was to improve the City’s funding of AIDS services which, on a per capita patient basis, had been 1/3 of that compared to San Francisco and New York. Despite Richard M. Daley’s machine having 49 of the city’s 50 aldermen on its side, a series of militant protests led by ACT-UP forced the seemingly all-powerful Daley administration to cave.

In 1993 Bob lost his first partner, Kerry Jones, to AIDS.

In 1998, shortly after its founding, Bob became one of the earliest members of what later became known as the Gay Liberation Network (GLN). Originally called the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network (CABN), the group formed in response to three gay bashings within as many weeks, each of which happened in and around Chicago’s main gay entertainment district on N. Halsted Street. Just a few days before the group’s second protest, a gay student in Wyoming, Matthew Shepherd, was found tortured, strung up on a barbed-wire fence and left to die.

Amplified by the new internet technology, Shepherd’s lynching sparked the first large-scale example of internet organizing the world had seen. CABN joined hundreds of thousands of people and innumerable other organizations around the country in repeated protests over the course of the next month. The rapid sharing of the horrific story shocked the country and challenged the anti-gay narratives that had dominated political rhetoric since the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

But the counter-narrative, that anti-gay violence was “bad” and based on easily removed individual prejudice, failed to address the deeply entrenched systemic nature of anti-LGBTQ hate. This hate was buttressed by most leading politicians and religious figures, their laws, judicial precedents, and theological doctrines.

Bob was a key voice in helping CABN navigate beyond the simple “anti-gay violence is bad” narrative to focus on the institutional and social supports that promote anti- LGBTQ hatred, discrimination and violence. He knew that every anti-gay politician, law and court ruling provides informal governmental sanction to anti-gay hate in society at large. He knew that every anti-gay religious leader who preaches second-class citizenship lends the authority of their god to such hatred.

For all the progress queer people have made since the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, we still have yet to succeed in taking the first baby step achieved by other groups: winning full de jure equality -- equality at least in formal law. As the Black-led Civil Rights Movement came to realize, formal legal equality was far from sufficient by itself. But it was still an important and necessary first step that queer people have yet to realize. No one knew this better than Bob.

Legally sanctioned discrimination helped make queer people more vulnerable to abuses by law enforcement. Around the year 2000 several cases of gay-bashing by police championed by Bob and others in GLN led Amnesty International to write its first-ever report about gay-bashing by police based on the cases GLN highlighted.

The more Bob and others in CABN pressed the issue, the more we realized that it was no mere coincidence that activists in and around the Democratic Party failed to go beyond the “anti-gay hate is bad” narrative. After all, Bob never tired of reminding people that it was the so-called “enlightened” Democrats, not the proudly bigoted Republicans, who were responsible for the worst anti-gay laws since Stonewall: Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law that prompted more anti-gay purges in the military than previously, and his “Defense of Marriage” law that banned marriage of same-sex couples in every state of the country.

As will be seen in the pictures accompanying this piece, Bob was a pivotal figure in various CABN / GLN initiatives combatting our de jure inequality, from challenging bans on same-sex marriage to equal access to public accommodations and more. If there was a bigoted politician or religious figure to be called out, Bob was right there on the front lines doing it. More than that, Bob was also a key voice in helping articulate what we dubbed, “Solidarity Politics” -- the political theory borrowed in part from the many Gay Liberation Front (GLF) organizations that popped up shortly after the Stonewall Rebellion. Put simply, queer people need to lead our liberation struggle, but we cannot do it alone. As a minority in society we need the solidarity of non-queer people to win.

Strategically and morally, he said, we cannot ask for such solidarity if we are not ourselves in solidarity with “other” groups facing hatred, discrimination and violence. We say “other” in quotes because in reality queers are a true rainbow community -- we’re made up of every color, nationality, religion and gender. That’s why the GLFs opposed and organized against the US war on Vietnam, picketed in solidarity with the Black Panther Party as it faced violent police repression, and many of its women reinvigorated what became the “2nd Wave” of the feminist movement to help win Roe v. Wade.

That’s why when the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and elsewhere helped unleash a wave of bigotry against Arabs, Muslims and everyone who, in the ignorant eyes of bigots, appeared to be such, GLN forthrightly opposed the bigotry that fueled attacks on our civil liberties and two Middle East wars.

As with his defense of Arabs and Muslims during the jingoism after 9/11, Bob enthusiastically encouraged his fellow GLN members to take on the most difficult, most unpopular issues of the times. Such issues included opposing the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan and supporting “gay marriage.” In the early 2000s, percentage support for both positions could only be counted in the single digits.

As the US geared up for its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bob and GLN played a leading role in Chicago’s opposition to it. Two other issues that Bob and GLN took up that many wouldn’t touch because of their unpopularity were the defense of Trans whistle-blower Chelsea Manning and supporting Palestinians’ right to self-determination free of Israeli discrimination and violence.

The ban on equal marriage rights for same-sex couples was both personal and political for Bob, prompting him and his partner then of 10 years, Ruffin Robinson, to travel to Canada to do what they couldn’t do in the land of their births -- be united in a civil union.

One of Bob’s proudest moments was helping lead the successful 2012-2013 campaign to win equal marriage rights in Illinois, which helped pave the way for the 2014 Obergefell Supreme Court decision granting equal marriage rights nationwide. Unlike almost all queer civil rights organizations, which, seeing the issue as a loser, initially opposed campaigning for equal marriage rights, Bob and GLN began campaigning for it in February 2001.

The primary resistance in Illinois turned out not to be Springfield’s Republican minority, but, rather, the Democratic Party majority led by then-all powerful House Speaker Mike Madigan. Breaking with most in the pro equal-marriage-rights camp, GLN loudly called out Madigan and his floor leader, gay rep Greg Harris, at demonstrations at their Chicago offices for stonewalling the equal-marriage rights bill. Bob even managed to corner the House Speaker at a Springfield restaurant and publicly demanded that he support the measure! In churlish embarrassment, Madigan soon caved.

During the last few years, the loss of his beloved husband, Ruffin Robinson, combined with failing health, sidelined Bob from the active political organizing and participation that had previously been an important part of his life. Losing Ruffin to cancer was an incalculable blow, but he never ceased to challenge friends and acquaintances to his political right, including his gay friends, when he disagreed, and he never wavered a second in his conviction that working and oppressed peoples must win their own freedom.

As you’ll see in a forthcoming film history, Bob was a central figure in organizing innumerable actions. His voice and friendship will be sorely missed by those of us who knew him. For younger people looking to unearth the true, grassroots history of how queer people made progress in the decades since Stonewall, it is essential that you focus on the actions and movements of which Bob was an important part.

It was people like him who made the history!