One of America's foremost gay civil rights advocates, Thomas B. Stoddard, died Wednesday, February 12 in his Manhattan home. His longtime comrade, Walter Rieman, said it was AIDS that had felled the earnest constitutional law expert and professor. Stoddard was a genuine American pioneer, initiating the teaching of legal courses designed to fight anti-gay discrimination as well as unfair AIDS-patient policies. He became a familiar face on TV news networks, especially during times of heightened AIDS hysteria and during the "gays in the military" fiasco. Stoddard was known for thoughtful, measured and often passionate arguments about gay issues, effectively delivered in many major public forums.

Between 1986 and 1992 Thomas Stoddard was executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. He was also an adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law. He became the author of the 1986 bill that protects New York City's gay men and lesbians from discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations. In the early 1970's New York's Gay Activist Alliance had struggled desperately to pass such a bill, one that Stoddard helped see through to completion.

In 1993, Stoddard was part of the first gay activist assemblage ever welcomed by the White House into the Oval Office. It was at this meeting, say those attending, that the president promised to end anti-gay military policies. Later, when that same president forgot most of his promise, it was Thomas Stoddard--his sense of betrayal clear-- who led the public charge for gay men and lesbians in the military. His anger, memorable because viewers had not seen it before, flared with a riveting intensity. As his health problems took their toll, his undeniable passion for living retained its vigor. Stoddard, say those who knew him best, was indefatigable.

In June, 1996, he was a grand marshal in the Gay and Lesbian Pride March in Manhattan. When it appeared that the parade might be rained upon, he spoke in advance to reporters whom he suspected could draw some undue significance from dreary weather, quickly explaining that "the rain is not a metaphor. The future of the movement is full of sun."

Stoddard also attended the first White House Conference on AIDS in December, 1995. Though frail, he flew to Vancouver for the 11th International AIDS Conference last July.

Hundreds of friends and colleagues of the great lawyer gathered late last year to pay tribute to him at Manhattan's New York Bar Association building. New York University celebrated his sterling legacy by establishing the Tom Stoddard Fellowship, under which a third year law student works with public interest organizations on civil rights cases involving same-sex attraction. Stoddard's last words to the assembly, taken from the American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, captured this eminent legal warrior's vigorous and unflagging spirit: "I am defeated every day, yet to victory I'm born."