Dick Wagner (activist)

Roland Richard Wagner (September 23, 1943 – December 13, 2021) was an American historian, activist, and politician, most noted for his work in Wisconsin LGBT history, the creation of organizations to elect gays and lesbians to public office, and public service to Madison, Wisconsin and Dane County.

Life and career
Wagner was born on September 29, 1943, to Roland A. Wagner and Katherine Moorman Wagner in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from the University of Dayton in 1965, and from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a master's degree in 1967 and a doctorate in 1971 in American History. His dissertation was titled “Virtue Against Vice: A Study of Moral Reformers and Prostitution in the Progressive Era.” As a student at UW-Madison, Wagner organized rallies against the Vietnam war and was involved with the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign and the 1970 gubernatorial election. He was also involved in protesting for fair housing in Milwaukee with James Groppi, a civil rights activist based in Milwaukee. As a student in Madison, he attended the Catholic chapel on campus, but in his later years attended the ecumenical Holy Wisdom Monastery due to increasing conservatism in his Catholic community. In 1972, he was named executive director of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. In 1977, Wagner managed the executive residence for Governor Martin Schreiber. In 1979, Wagner became a budget analyst at the Wisconsin Department of Administration. He retired from civil service in 2005.

Wagner ran for the Madison Common Council in 1974, but was not successful. In 1980, Wagner was elected to the Dane County Board of Supervisors, and served until 1994. He was chair of the board from 1988 until 1992. While on the County Board, Wagner arranged for the Gay Liberation Monument sculpture by George Segal to be a long-term loan to the City of Madison until its ultimate home in New York City was ready.

In addition to his service on the Dane County Board, in 1993, he co-founded the New Harvest Foundation, which funds Wisconsin’s LGBT communities. Wagner also served on the Madison Plan Commission, the Board of Downtown Madison Inc, the Madison Urban Design Commission, Madison Landmarks Commission, Wisconsin Humanities Council, Historic Madison, Wisconsin Arts Board, the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation, the Board of the Olbrich Botanical Gardens, and the Board of the Friends of UW Libraries, and was the first chair of the Dane County Regional Transit Authority. In 2007, Wagner became first recipient of Madison’s Jeffrey Clay Erlanger Civility in Public Discourse Award.

LGBT electoral activism
In 1972, Wagner organized the campaign for then 18-year-old David Clarenbach to the Dane County Board of Supervisors, though neither Wagner nor Clarenbach were out publicly at the time. Wagner assisted in Clarenbach’s election to the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1974. At a local level, Wagner also lobbied for a gay rights ordinance in 1974, and in 1975 the City of Madison amended its Equal Opportunities Ordinance to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the first gay rights ordinance in Wisconsin. In 1981, Wagner recruited Kathleen Nichols to run in the upcoming 1982 election for the Dane County Board of Supervisors as an out lesbian. Although Wagner had been out to friends for some time, he himself came out to the press that spring.

In 1982, Wagner again worked with Clarenbach and others in the state legislature to statewide bill to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. It was signed into law by Republican Governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus. Clarenbach later says “I don’t think I can overstate the role he played…If there was no Dick Wagner, I doubt Wisconsin would have become the Gay Rights State.”

In 1983, newly elected Governor Tony Earl, who had campaigned on gay rights, asked Wagner and Nichols to travel around the state and meet with LGBT groups and communities and report back to him on what issues his administration could tackle. After they completed their visits, Earl appointed Wagner and Nichols as co-chairs of the newly established Governor’s Council on Lesbian and Gay Issues. The Council began coordinating a response to AIDS in Wisconsin almost immediately after it was created. In November 1985, Wagner and Nichols joined 10 other out elected officials for the first National Conference of Openly Lesbian and Gay Elected Officials (at the time, there were an estimated 19 out elected officials in the United States). The conference would continue annually, under the auspices of the International Network of Lesbian and Gay Officials (INLGO). INLGO would later merge with the LGBTQ Victory Fund (then known as the Gay and Lesbian Leadership Institute.)

Books
In 2019, Wagner authored We've Been Here All Along, which discussed Wisconsin's LGBT history from the media's reporting of the trials of Oscar Wilde to the Stonewall Riots. Wagner drew on archival material to uncover previously untold stories of LGBT Wisconsinites and the development of their communities, identities, and support networks. The book tells of the ways they managed to thrive despite hostility from the government and the general public such as the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. Wagner's next book, Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin's Recent Gay History, discusses the challenges that the LGBT community in Wisconsin faced after the events in Stonewall—between 1969 and 2000. In 2023, those two books were turned into a two-part series, "Wisconsin Pride".

Wagner also wrote a history of the Wisconsin Department of Administration in 2002 titled DOA, the story: four decades of Wisconsin‘s Department of Administration, and contributed a chapter titled ‘Wisconsin Academics Outing LGBT Policies’ to Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea (University of Wisconsin Press 2020, ISBN 9780299328900 ), a book edited by Chad Allen Goldberg that argued public higher education institutions remain a bastion of collaborative problem solving, using the Wisconsin Idea as a framing.

Death and legacy
Wagner died on December 13, 2021    in what was then Kerr-McGee Triangle Park, a downtown Madison park that he was instrumental in creating. Wagner was delivering groceries to a neighbor that had accidentally been delivered to him. The park has since been renamed as the R. Richard Wagner Park. His funeral, an ecumenical Christian service, was held at Holy Wisdom Monastery.

At his death, US Senator Tammy Baldwin released a statement. Congressman Mark Pocan recorded a video tribute to Wagner, and there were statements from among others Governor Tony Evers, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, Dane County Executive Joe Parisi, and former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, who had several years earlier proposed renaming Madison city hall in honor of Wagner. The UW History Department also posted a tribute to Wagner.

Rhodes-Conway later selected a portrait of Wagner as the 2022 Mayor’s Purchase Award. The portrait, painted by Rae Senarighi, aka Transpainter, was dedicated in a joint ceremony with the City of Madison and Dane County, and joins a portrait of Nathan Dane as the only other portrait of an individual outside of the chambers of the Madison Common Council and Dane County Board of Supervisors.

After Wagner's passing, the University of Wisconsin Libraries established the R Richard Wagner Pride Archive fund. Wagner’s archives form a large part of the university’s collection of LGBTQ+ material from Madison and Dane County.