After hearing Supervisor Harvey Milk deliver his "Hope Speech," at which Milk encouraged lesbians and gays to come out of the closet in order to oppose anti-gay political efforts and activists, Sims was inspired to form the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, which was, at its founding in June 1978, the first openly gay musical group ever formed in United States history. In the same year, he founded the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, which was also the first openly gay American choral grouping. The Chorus held its first rehearsal on Oct. 30, 1978. It made its unplanned debut a mere four weeks later, on November 27, 1978 when its members sang on the steps of the San Francisco City Hall at an impromptu memorial for Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, who had been assassinated earlier that day. Sims stayed on to appoint a new director for the SFGMC, Dick Kramer, who helped helm the formal inaugural performance of the 115-voice SFGMC and the Marching Band at Everett Middle School on December 20, 1978. In Summer 1979, Sims directed the band in the first of several annual Gay Musical Celebrations for Pride Month. Sims founded Golden Gate Performing Arts, Inc., an organization that sought to unify a diverse number of musical groups under the same umbrella. Member groups included the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Men's Community Chorus in 1980, Lambda Pro Musica orchestra, David Kelsey & Pure Trash, Varsity Drag, the FLAG Corps, the San Francisco Tap Troupe, Published Wayne Fleisher and encouraged the formation of the Big Apple Corps GLBT band in New York by Nancy Corporon and The Great American Yankee Freedom Band of Los Angeles by Wayne Love.
Illness and death
Sims, who complained some two years earlier of exhaustion from what he thought to be hepatitis, was diagnosed with AIDS in January 1984 and died of the little-known disease on July 16 at Garden Sullivan Hospital in San Francisco. He was memorialized by more than 1,500 people at a service at Grace Cathedral, with an obituary written for Sims by a friend claiming that he offered "an alternative to the baths and the bars."
