Remembering Morris
By Rob Cole

The June, 1969, gay riots over police harassment at the Stonewall Inn, a drag bar on New York's Christopher Street, upended the old homophile movement and launched the noisy and energetic Gay Liberation Front. Morris Kight was 50 and best known for organizing anti-war demonstrations against napalm maker Dow Chemical. Stonewall galvanized him into coming out and he and several others organized a branch of the GLF in Los Angeles.

A year later, he got a call from New York. The GLF there was planning a march to celebrate the anniversary of the riots. What was Los Angeles planning?

Morris thought about it, and decided, "We are going to have a parade."

He called Rev. Troy Perry, who had started shaking up the Christian world a couple of years before when he organized Metropolitan Community Church, and Rev. Bob Humphries, head of a fledgling gay welfare agency, U.S. Mission. They were all for the idea. It was Humphries who proposed the name, Christopher Street West. They formed a 13-member steering committee, which I was asked to join as news editor of the Advocate, then a tabloid newspaper which had become the voice of the new gay movement. We asked the Los Angeles Police Commission for a permit to hold a parade on Hollywood Boulevard.

The commissioners, afraid that a homosexual parade in Hollywood would set off  a new riot, asked for a total of over $1.5 million in security bonds and fees. Rev. Perry went to the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained a court order allowing the parade with the same police protection that would be given any other group and without the extra costs.

Many on the CSW steering committee were almost as nervous as the police commissioners, but the parade went off on June 28 without a hitch, packing the sidewalks along the boulevard with curious and largely receptive crowds.

It was effectively Morris' debut as a prime mover in the Los Angeles gay rights struggle. He and activist Don Kilhefner went on to start the Los Angeles Gay Community center in a collection of old houses on Sixth Street near downtown Los Angeles. Morris was everywhere and into everything, prodding and provoking—promoting himself as much as his causes, his critics said.

I found him a charmer, a bit of a con man who actually delivered most of the time. Born in a tiny Texas town, he had somehow managed to lose his Texas accent for a vaguely patrician, theatrical way of speaking which made people listen to him. He had a genius for getting media attention. Later in 1970, he took on a landmark eatery, Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood, which had a crudely lettered sign, "Fagots Keep Out", over the bar. After a weeks-long siege by Morris and the GLF, the restaurant took it down, only to put up another one. Finally, in 1985, the second sign was removed.

Then there was Morris' tongue-in-cheek scheme, aided and abetted by the Advocate,  for a gay takeover of sparsely populated Alpine County in Northern California. Alarmed editorials appeared in the local newspaper in Markleeville, the county seat.

Another attention getter was the overnight "sleep-in" which he led at TV station KLAC  to protest the airing of anti-gay remarks by jokester Mort Sahl.

But Morris' tactics and his leftist politics alienated many in the gay community. One of them was David Goodstein, a semi-out San Francisco banker who made an offer for the Advocate in 1974. The paper had started in 1967 as the newsletter of a homophile group called PRIDE. In 1969, the owners hired me from the Dallas Times Herald to turn it into a credible gay newspaper. Circulation grew to 44,000 and activists around the country began to rely on it. But the owners remained closeted, running the paper under assumed names, and its success made it a lightning rod for strife in the community, which kept them on edge. There were indications at one point of a possible FBI wiretap on the paper's phones. They agreed to sell to Goodstein on the strength of his promises that he would maintain its editorial policies. But when he took over at the beginning of 1975, Goodstein immediately dropped most coverage of the more radical Gay Lib activists and for awhile, Morris' name was banned from its pages.

Morris, meantime, had decided after three parades that CSW had served its purpose. He was also annoyed with critics of the parade within the gay community, many of whom were nervous about what the Police Commission called the "unsavory" content of the 1972 parade, which included a giant Vasoline jar and the Cockapillar, a Chinese dragon-like affair in the shape of a penis. Gay liberation included gay sexuality, he said. The steering committee broke up and there was no parade in 1973.

I considered the parade a needed focal point for the L.A. community's pride and determination and began a campaign to revive it, which caught on eventually largely because of the involvement of Pat Rocco, whose chastely erotic gay nude films had made him a community celebrity. After we got a new steering committee together and began planning the 1974 parade, Morris decided he had made a mistake and came back on board.

It was the last time he backed away from anything he had started, but he was gradually forced to the sidelines by the Gay Community Services Center, which moved to Hollywood in 1976, added "Lesbian" to its name and survived several years of internal strife to become the largest institution of its kind in the world. Morris was considered too radical by the people who took over, who were more concerned with getting government and foundation funding than politics.

Ironically, Morris himself was moving more toward the political mainstream. In 1975, he started the Stonewall Democratic Club, which has become a force in California politics. He was named to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, where he was to serve for more than 20 years. He got to be on a first-name basis with city, county and state political leaders, and was able to get city funding for the Crossroads Employment Agency in Hollywood, the first such agency with a specific outreach to gays and lesbians. For much of the 1980's, he rented an old barn of a house with a cavernous two-story living room on McCadden Place in a scruffy Hollywood neighborhood. In this unlikely venue, he held frequent soirees which became a magnet for politicos—including Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, literati, and rights activists of all stripes, through whom he extended his influence. He became the media spokesman for lesbian and gay rights in Los Angeles. Among other activities, he was a principal Los Angeles organizer for a series of lesbian and gay marches on Washington, starting in 1979.

While on McCadden Place, he began to collect paintings, photos, drawings, posters and other memorabilia relating mainly to the gay rights movement. Parts of what became known as the McCadden Place Collection and then the Morris Kight Collection were displayed periodically in Heritage Hall at the CSW festival for years. Eventually consisting of thousands of pieces, it went to the One Institute and Archives on his death.

He always seemed to have inexhaustible energy, persevering in the face of a series of strokes and other health problems starting in the late 1990's. He marched in the CSW parade as late as 1999. One of his last campaigns was to establish a West Hollywood memorial for Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old Wyoming student murdered by gay bashers in 1998. Another was to reorganize Christopher Street West itself in late 1999 after a series of internal problems threatened support and funding.

For most of his life, Morris was little known among the young bar crowd that represents gay life in the eyes of many. In the suburban, largely closeted domestic world of lesbian and gay couples, he tended to be a distant, antic figure. Today, with "Gay Liberation" become an almost quaint phrase, he seems a figure of the past, and his methods and tactics vaguely embarrassing.

In fact, he is one of the people who moved the world for us.

Morris died January 19, 2003. He was 83.