Fred Cherry

Who was Fred Cherry?

Fred Cherry was an American activist for greater rights for johns. He gained some measure of fame as self-styled "elector of homophobia" in his fight against "the Organized Homosexual Conspiracy of America", who he said opposed his own fight to get his freedom to patronize prostitutes recognized as being a matter of civil rights.

In 1985, Cherry, and Margo St. James, filed a lawsuit against Ed Koch, then mayor of New York City, seeking to overturn New York's laws banning prostitution on the grounds that Cherry's disability would make it impossible for him to find sexual companionship other than prostitutes, thereby violating the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The lawsuit was dismissed.

Fred Cherry helped make mathematical history when he published, in collaboration with such distinguished combinatorialists as E.T. Parker and Walter Wallis, a construction of orthogonal pairs of doubly diagonal Latin squares of order 10, thus completing the proof that such pairs exist for all orders other than 2,3 and 6. In his words: "this accomplishment gave me a tremendous boost in my self-esteem.