ABilly S. Jones-Hennin (Photo via Washington Blade)
ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, a longtime D.C. LGBTQ rights advocate who co-founded the National Coalition of Black Gays in 1978 and helped organize the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979, died Jan. 19 at his and his husband’s winter home in Chetumal, Mexico.
His partner and husband of 45 years, Christopher Hennin, said the cause of death was complications associated with Parkinson’s Disease and advance stage spinal stenosis. He was 81.
Jones-Hennin, who identified as bisexual, is credited with advancing the presence of the bisexual community within the LGBTQ rights movement while working through several organizations he helped to form to advance of the overall cause of LGBTQ and African-American civil rights.
He was born in St. Johns, Antigua in 1942 and was adopted at the age of 3 by an American civil rights activist couple. According to biographical information on Jones-Hennin released by organizations he worked with, he grew up in South Carolina and Virginia. He served in the U.S. Marines after graduating from high school in Richmond before graduating from Virginia State University in 1967. He later received a master’s degree in social work at Howard University in D.C.
A biographical write-up on Jones-Hennin by the National Black Justice Coalition, an LGBTQ organization, says he was married to a woman for seven years and had three children before he and his wife separated. In a 2022 interview published by the AARP, Jones-Hennin said the separation came after he came out as gay before coming to the self-realization that he was in fact bisexual. He said he remained on good terms with his children and even took them to LGBTQ events.
Christopher Hennin said he and Jones-Hennin met in 1978 in D.C. while Jones-Hennin worked in accounting and management for different consulting firms, including the firm Macro International. At one point in the 1980s Jones-Hennin worked for D.C.’s Whitman-Walker Clinic where he became involved with providing services to people with HIV/AIDS in the early years of the epidemic.
A write-up on Jones-Hennin by D.C.’s Rainbow History Project, which named him a Community Pioneer, its highest honor, said Jones-Hennin managed several federal and state HIV/AIDS research and evaluation projects while working for a national management consulting firm.
Jones-Hennin is credited with breaking ground in the then gay and lesbian movement in 1978 when he co-founded the National Coalition of Black Gays, which became the first national advocacy group for gay and lesbian African Americans. One year later in 1979, he served as logistics coordinator for the first ever National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
During the March on Washington weekend Jones-Hennin helped to organize a National Third World LGBT Conference at Howard University, which led to the creation by students of the Howard University Lambda Student Alliance, the first known LGBT organization at a historically Black college or university in the U.S.
Among his other activities, Jones-Hennin worked as minority affairs director of the National AIDS Network, was a founding member of the Gay Married Men’s Association, and helped co-found the National Association of Black & White Men Together. During the administration of President Jimmy Carter, Jones-Hennin participated in the first delegation of gay people of color to meet with officials working for a U.S. president, according to the National Black Justice Coalition write-up on Jones-Hennin.
Christopher Hennin said he and Jones-Hennin were married in 2014 and began spending winters in Mexico around 1998, in part, because the cold weather had a negative effect on Jones-Hennin’s spinal stenosis condition, which at one point, required that he undergo surgery to treat the condition, which sometimes caused intense pain.
“He was a person totally dedicated to turning adversity into hope,” Christopher Hennin said of his husband. “His passion was definitely social change and improving people’s well-being,” said Hennin, describing Jones-Hennin as a “very impressive 21st century renaissance thinker.”
Hennin said a memorial service and celebration of Jones-Hennin’s life was being planned sometime later this year at D.C.’s Metropolitan Community Church, where Jones-Hennin’s ashes will be placed in a crypt.
Lesbian activist Susan Silber, one of Jones-Hennin’s longtime friends, said she viewed him as the LGBTQ community’s Bayard Rustin in his role as the “amazing organizer” of the first national Lesbian and Gay March on Washington and as lead organizer of the Third World LGBT Conference.
“ABilly lit up the room with his warmth and charisma,” Silber said.
Jones-Hennin is survived by his husband Christopher Hennin; his sister Pat Jones; his children Valerie Jones, Anthony ‘TJ’ Jones, Forrest ‘Peaches’ Taylor, Danielle Silber, and Avi Silber; 10 grandchildren; and 11 great grandchildren.
Family members have invited those who knew Jones-Hennin to share their memories of him online, which they plan to compile and share with his friends and family members.
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