LGBTQ+ Denver: Phil Nash on Our History and His Life of Advocacy

Sharing a table and chatting over a cup of joe, Phil Nash shares about the making and inspiration of his new pictorial history LGBTQ+ Denver and his experiences as a gay elder and life-long LGBTQ+ advocate.

The moment Phil sat down across from me, I felt more than admiration I had originally anticipated—I felt a connection to my history and my sense of reflection bloomed more after I read LGBTQ+ Denver.

Nash’s roots dive deep into Denver’s LGBTQ+ civil rights movement—His hands-on role uplifted a community that was under scrutiny, criminalized, and ostracized during a health epidemic. 

He was the first paid staff member at Denver’s historic LGBTQ+ Center. He was a journalist for our very own OFM. He advised and connected with Mayor Federico Peña. He was a founding member of the Colorado AIDS Project. His accolades and contributions to Denver’s LGBTQ+ community continue to go on and on.  

While working on this mostly pictorial historical book, Nash wanted to “share the sense of how the community evolved and what were the big points of inflection when things really began to change around many different issues … There are nine chapters in the book and they are sort of based on what I perceived to be those inflection points.”

LGBTQ+ Denver begins prior to the city’s birth, and explores indigenous people’s concept of queerness and the term “Two-Spirit.” RE:SEARCHING FOR LGBTQ2S+ HEALTH defines the term as referring “to a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit, and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity.”

Among the tribes local to the area, each group had their own connection and words for queer indigenous folks who were celebrated in their societies. Arapaho Two-Spirit people were called hoxuxuno; Cheyenne were he’eman, and Southern Ute were tuwasawits.

Once settlers started moving westward, the large population of men (drawn to the state to pursue life as a cowboy or enter the mining camps) made intimate connections and partnerships amongst themselves. The modern idea of homosexuality had not entered the lexicon, and these men often engaged in partnerships with other men (whether that be to offer support emotionally, physically, and, perhaps, sexually). 

But as the 19th century reached its end, the state’s aim to create societies deemed as “civilized” rapidly escalated discrimination against LGBTQ+ folks. Perspectives on same-gender relationships, and LGBTQ+ folks in general, were socially quite negative and laws against sodomy, cross-dressing, and same-sex relationships pushed queer people to shadows. But the 1970s finally began to propel a shift that would lead to inclusivity on a national level. 

With the logical challenges of finding photos and Nash’s personal relationship with this era in history, the 1970s and upward make up the majority of this pictorial history. Given Nash’s role in the LGBTQ+ history in Denver, he not only holds the torch of the past, but is the perfect oracle to lay out this history. 

With the Center On Colfax celebrating its 50 year anniversary this year, reflecting on the past, creating change in our pent, and working towards our future can ensure that history does not repeat itself. 

Phil Nash knows very well how important it is to preserve the work he and others did throughout Denver’s LGBTQ+ rights movement. And he cannot be separated from The Center’s earliest days—He was the first paid employee and aided in elevating the space to what it is today.

“We could not have known how successful the center would become back then … The Center was developed on paper, through community meetings and so forth. Beginning in about 1975, it finally opened its doors in 1977. I was chosen to be the first paid employee, the title that I had was called coordinator, and it was a time where there was no foundation funding; there was no corporate funding, this was all the community raising money for itself … For the first 15 or 20 years that the center existed it was just getting by on a shoestring.”

The Center has come a very long way in spite of the challenges the space has faced since opening its doors. But despite financial insecurity, societal discrimination, and a health epidemic, the Center on Colfax has been on the forefront of aiding LGBTQ+ folks in need of safety, health care, and love since its conception in the early 1970s. In 2010, the Center moved to its current location on Capitol Hill and has continued to prosper. 

Given his connection to The Center, Nash met people across the queer community and worked with many organizations, including Out Front Magazine.

As a journalist for OFM, Nash reported and recorded a span of LGBTQ+ history that would have otherwise likely fallen to the wayside given the hardships from police brutality, social discrimination, and the AIDS Epidemic. 

On the magazine’s origins, he says, “It was very exciting. OUT FRONT came out at the right time and the right place. Phil Price, the founder and publisher, started the publication in April of 1976 … (He) brought a much more polished and professional approach to journalism in the gay community—covering politics and the emerging of gay sports groups, the business that were developing, like clothing stores, neighborhoods, gayborhoods, (covering) what was happening. So it brought a much more diverse and professional perspective. So it was kind of exciting, because, well into the 1980s, we were still having a lot of trouble with police oppression of the community.

“From the early 1980s on, working with OUT FRONT, I met lots of people who were involved in politics, involved in the business community, involved in the social realm, pretty soon, people who were involved in health care … One of the things I did at OUT FRONT was (that I) wrote the first story in Colorado about the AIDs epidemic in 1981.”

“A key inflection point was when AIDS came along and the role of the community newspaper in gay community newspapers all over the country … was to inform and educate readership about this enormous, alarming health crisis.”

“So OUT FRONT, like local gay publications all over the country, was instrumental in really mobilizing people to get involved and to really take what we had already begun to build as a community and transform it into real services and action on behalf of people who were beginning to get sick and die.”

The role that Nash has played in our community, from working at the Center to hard-hitting journalism through OFM, has created and preserved a history that folks young and old can look to in a world that is not always supportive of queer people. 

Nash says, “I want people to understand that you can make history in your own time; we are faced with a lot of pushback right now from our society … (and) part of the job of the younger generation is to preserve the freedom and the rights that we’ve had to earn over the years. But there’s also a lot of new territory that needs to be explored.”

He also dedicates the book “to volunteers because this movement was built on volunteers using the tools of democracy to create a more fair and just society and to create resources for the LGBT community.”

Given his lifelong commitment to the community and the realm of his work, Nash’s qualifications ensure the LGBTQ+ Denver reflects an accurate and insightful reflection of queer history in Denver. 

If you would like to purchase this pictorial history, you can find LGBTQ+ Denver on Arcadia Publishing’s website and wherever books are sold. 

You can also meet Nash at a reading and signing event at the Tattered Cover/East Colfax on Friday, June 7 at 6:00 p.m. You can purchase the book in advance and register for the event on the Tattered Cover’s website.