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Raised in a small town in upstate New York by his father, who designed missile parts, and his mother, an activist who secretly helped Vietnam draft dodgers escape to Canada, he was a misfit from the start.

His mother’s commitment to “take risks for what she believed in” left a mark, he says. By the age of 17, he’d written articles exposing corruption, articles that upset his teachers so much that they closed the high school newspaper.

It was in Chicago that his activism flourished. Enrolled as a journalism student at Northwestern University in 1978, he was sent to cover a protest at the gates of ComEd’s Zion nuclear power plant. Instead he joined in and was arrested and charged with trespassing and eventually was acquitted by a Lake County jury, which found that the protesters’ actions were necessary to prevent a greater harm to the public.

The experience was “exhilarating and scary,” he says.

Thayer took a hiatus from Northwestern when he came out of the closet — he now lives in Uptown with his partner — but became a campus leader upon his return, protesting against the school’s investments in apartheid South Africa.

By the 1990s he was a leading voice against police brutality and for the Gay Liberation Network, which he co-founded.

He’s since been arrested for everything from demanding gay rights in Moscow to attempting to stop President George W. Bush’s motorcade in the Loop. Convicted of misdemeanor resisting arrest in 1989 and again in 2005, he had three other minor cases thrown out, and was cleared of more serious charges of aggravated battery of a police officer in 2009 after video evidence undermined the case against him.

He’s taken on beloved conservative institutions — the Chicago Boy Scouts Council lost most of its funding from United Way in 2001 after Thayer led protests against the scouts’ policies on homosexuality — but also infuriated elements of the left, including other gays angered by his support of the deported Muslim cleric Rabbih Haddad.

But it was his leading role in the raucous anti-Iraq war march of March 20, 2003, that may offer the best clues into how he’ll react in the heat of the moment this May.

http://www.suntimes.com/9928700-417/g-8-protest-organizer-agent-of-change-or-pain-in-the-butt.html