After his 1966 divorce and his wife’s remarriage, James Hormel, JD’58, felt his ties to Chicago loosening. With trepidation, he told his two brothers he was gay; they took the news in stride. Soon after, he stepped down as the Law School’s dean of students and moved to New York to begin a new life. “While not so direct in coming out to other people, I started to conduct myself in a way that would let them make assumptions about me,” Hormel writes in his memoir, Fit to Serve. “I tiptoed out of the closet and found that the more open I was, the more confident I became, and the easier it was to be out.”

Hormel left New York for Hawaii and later San Francisco. In 1978, spurred by a proposed ballot initiative that would have barred gay people from teaching in California schools, he threw himself into the nascent movement for gay rights. Two years later Hormel helped launch the Human Rights Campaign Fund and began to raise and donate funds for civil-rights causes.

As a scion of the Hormel Foods family—the makers of Spam—he had formidable financial resources to give. At first his contributions were anonymous. But at the height of the AIDS crisis, Hormel realized that public philanthropy could attract other donors to projects he supported, so he attached his name to gifts and a pink triangle pin to his lapel. “It felt good to let people know who I was and what I stood for,” he writes. “It took away the power of others to define me.”

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