Name: Henry Walden Digger Mitchell
Age: 42 (DOB: 3-30-1967) Note: The series opens in April 2009.
Height: 6'5
Weight: 400 lbs

Hank is a second generation academic, born to a father who was using college and graduate school to avoid the draft, and a mother who also went to grad school. They are established research professors in the arts. Both being what we'd call radical hippies, Hank was steeped in a childhood of progressive left-wing politics and ideology. He came out to his family at 18, amidst the AIDS crisis, and saw several friends fall to the disease early on, driving him to pick up the civil rights banner of his parents and carry on with it. His parents not only accepted their gay son, but encouraged him to learn who he was, supporting his study abroad semesters and civil rights activism.

He is a widower of four years at the start of the series. He got into a relationship with his graduate advisor, who oversaw his schooling until suffering a fatal stroke as Hank was entering his dissertation. Due to drinking and depression, Hank never finished his work, leaving him a career college adjunct in literature and the humanities. Three years before the series opens, on the night Hank learned that his partner's will was successfully contested, he meets Thomas Mulligan at a local bar. Mulligan takes him into the boarding house, so he can get back on his feet.

Hank is a left-wing progressive who is finding himself challenging his political beliefs more and more, in the face of a gay lobby that's become increasingly docile and passive and a younger generation of progressives whose views often make him feel stodgy, antiquated, and conservative.