Andy Lippincott

Andy Lippincott was a character in the comic strip Doonesbury. The character first appeared in January 1976, in a law library. Joanie Caucus fell in love with him while working before Lippincott confessed he was gay. Joanie was heartbroken, and took some time to recover. Lippincott contributed position papers to Virginia Slade's failed run for U.S. Congress in 1976. He disappeared from the strip for a few years after this storyline.

In 1982, the character reappeared as an organizer for the Bay Area Gay Alliance, and contributed to the congressional re-election of Lacey Davenport. In 1989 he returned to the strip again when he was diagnosed with AIDS. Over the course of the next year, Lippincott's battles with the disease, and eventual death from it, helped bring the AIDS crisis into popular culture (Andy is shown as dying to the sound of the Beach Boys' Wouldn't It Be Nice). The character has re-appeared in the strip since, in the dream sequences of other characters, notably Joanie Caucus and Mark Slackmeyer.

Andy Lippincott may be the only fictional character with a panel on the AIDS quilt. The panel (created by G. Scott Austen, Marceo Miranda and Juan-Carlos Castano) reads: "In Loving Memory: Andy Lippincott 1945-1990. Community leader, conservationist, author, olympic medalist, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!" (Note that the panel hangs in The NAMES Project Foundation's offices in Atlanta and is not actually sewn into a block of The AIDS Memorial Quilt.)

Note
Details on Lippincott's panel for the AIDS quilt from the Doonesbury Flashbacks computer program by Garry Trudeau, published by Mindscape in 1995.