City College of SF pioneer John Collins dies

John “Jack” Collins, Ph.D., a gay man who founded the nation’s first Gay and Lesbian Studies Department at the collegiate level at City College of San Francisco, died October 30 after a brief illness. He was 77.   Dr. Collins had lived at The Sequoias retirement community in San Francisco.   According to an obituary on legacy.com, Dr. Collins was the founding chair of the department, which was established in 1989 and provided academic services to hundreds of students at the height of the AIDS epidemic. He retired in 2012. A collection of his papers and catalogs is available for research at the San Francisco Public Library.   In a 2021 article for San Francisco Senior Beat, reporter Jan Robbins wrote that Dr. Collins “found his calling in 1980, when he started teaching ‘Gay Literature’ at