Lucy Gwin

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Lucy Gwin (January 5, 1943 – October 30, 2014) was an American disability rights activist who started Mouth, a disability rights magazine. She was born in Beech Grove, Indiana, to Robert Willard Gwin and Verna Bodine Gilcher Gwin. Her father worked in advertising and her mother was a teacher who later designed window displays for department stores. She finished high school at Thomas Carr Howe Community High School in Indianapolis in 1960.

In her early career she ran a restaurant in Rochester, New York and wrote advertising copy. She published a memoir, Going Overboard, in 1982 about a year she spent working on an oil-rig ferry in the Gulf of Mexico. In the mid-1980s she was working on a book about marriage and gave lectures on the topic.

Gwin became disabled after a car accident in 1989. The abuse she witnessed in a rehabilitation facility led her to fight for the rights of people in institutions. The facility was eventually closed because of her efforts and the investigations that followed.

In 1990 she started Mouth, a disability rights magazine. It gave a voice to activists who were often ignored, and she was known for a fierce, outspoken style. She worked with photographer Tom Olin and writers Josie Byzek and Dave Hingsburger. Mouth published 109 issues before it stopped in 2008.

Gwin also joined protests against assisted suicide outside the Supreme Court in 1997. She said she wouldn’t die for someone just because they thought she was not pretty to look at.

She married three times and had two children. She died in 2014 at age 71 in Washington, Pennsylvania. Her papers, including copies of Mouth, are at the University of Massachusetts. A biography about her, This Brain Had a Mouth, was published in 2021.