John C. Graves
John Cowperthwaite Graves was a professor, psychotherapist, singer, and philanthropist associated with the LGBTQ+ rights movement in Boston, Massachusetts and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He died on October 13, 2003, from heart failure at the age of 65.
Biography
Graves was born on May 16, 1938, in New York City into an affluent family. He attended Princeton University where he received his doctorate degree in philosophy. He then went on to work as a professor teaching philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for ten years between 1964 and 1974. After receiving a sizable inheritance, Graves left teaching and began working as a psychotherapist with Homophile Community Health Service in Boston.In 1972, three years after the Stonewall riots, Graves came out to his students at MIT, becoming the first openly gay professor at the university. In addition to his work with Homophile Community Health Service, Graves became involved in Boston's LesBiGay community, which included helping to found the Boston Center for Lesbians and Gay Men and the Gay Academic Union of New England. Graves was also an opera singer who sang in choirs in Provincetown, Fort Lauderdale, and Boston, including the Boston Gay Men's Chorus. Graves was interviewed in 1994 for the book Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America.
In 1990, Graves moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and became involved in local LGBTQ+ organizations. Notably, Graves was elected president of Stonewall Library and Archives in 1992 and subsequently as president of its honorary board of trustees until his death. Other local involvements included singing in the choir at the Sunshine Cathedral Metropolitan Community Church and serving as president of Gays United to Attack Repression and Discrimination.
Graves put a great deal of wealth towards various institutions, including the Gay and Lesbian Community Center, MIT, Princeton, Boston Concert Opera, Institute of Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, Pride Center at Equality Park, and the American Civil Liberties Union Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Project. Graves also donated $100,000 to Stonewall Library and Archives to help the institution's expansion and $300,000 to Metropolitan Community Church’s Sunshine Cathedral to help support a move to a new campus.
The John C. Graves Charitable Fund, which began with $3.1 million managed by the Community Foundation of Broward, was set up to fund the Metropolitan Community Church, the Stonewall Library and Archives, and a new facility for the Pride Center and was intended to be fully spent within ten years of Graves’s death. A $50,000 grant awarded to the ACLU from the fund led to the creation of the John C. Graves Fellowship to advance gay and lesbian rights. The first recipient of this fellowship was Robert Rosenwald Jr., the attorney who helped overturn Florida’s ban on gay couples’ ability to adopt in 2010.