NIKOS DIAMAN, who was born in San Francisco on this date, was  novelist and activist (d: 2020). He was an early member of the Gay Liberation Front, the Radical Faeries, the Billy Club, and other gay organizations. 

He received a BA in 1958 from the University of Southern California with a major in humanities. He returned to San Francisco after graduation and was introduced to the local poetry scene by George Stanley. Diaman became part of the Jack Spicer circle in North Beach and joined Robert Duncan’s poetry workshop at the San Francisco Public Library.

During the early 1970s, he was active in the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Revolution Party. He wrote for Zygote magazine and Come Out! before co-founding Queer Blue Light, an independent video production group.

After moving back to San Francisco in the fall of 1972, he was the executive director of the Antares Foundation, which sponsored the San Francisco Gay Video Festival and published Paragraph: A Quarterly of Gay Fiction. Ed Dean Is Queer, his first novel, was published in 1978. Following My Heart: A Memoir, and The City, his seventh novel, were published in 2007.

In 2000, he launched a new career as a photo-based artist. His work is in private and corporate collections in Paris, Santa Fe, San Francisco and San Miguel de Allende. He lived in San Francisco but traveled regularly to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Athens, Greece as well as the Aegean islands of Ikaria and Samos, where his parents and grandparents were born.

Diaman died in 2020 in Athens, Greece, where he had gone to help his father. Mr. Diaman died of multiple organ failure after emergency surgery to repair a ruptured and likely cancerous tumor in his intestines.