The Liberator

A teenager with a huge green afro drifts across Hollywood Boulevard with his pink-haired boyfriend, oblivious to Morris Kight leaning against his walker. Kight’s mind wanders back to a seminal day in Los Angeles history, when he risked his life for this passing pair of wild coifs.

Kight is 79 now, and white-haired, but passionate as he was the day he and a band of other activists led the West Coast’s first gay pride parade through the streets of Hollywood, effectively galvanizing the homosexual rights movement here.

“The first entry was a lesbian on horseback--where they got that horse I have no idea--then a man with a big ‘Homosexuals for Reagan’ banner,” Kight recalls with amusement.

It was the evening of June 28, 1970.

“There were 18 floats,” he continues, standing on the corner where the parade turned from McCadden Place onto Hollywood Boulevard. “Thirty-five thousand people cheering. Police Chief Ed Davis--we should have declared it ‘Thank you Ed Davis Day,’ because all his ranting and raving about our march gave us publicity we couldn’t have bought.”

His mood downshifts abruptly; his face clouds over with emotion.

“Why did we wait so long to do anything?” he cries out, tilting back his straw hat, brushing off tears. “I’m asking myself, why ever did we wait so long--[and] accept being treated so badly? It took somebody with courage, and I’m feeling pretty good about myself today,” he adds with unapologetic--and not uncharacteristic--immodesty.

This weekend will bring the 29th annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration parade. A half-million people are expected, and Kight, as one of its key founders, will ride in the first car.

“I’ll be doing my Pope routine,” he says with an imperious wave and mocking grin.

Although no longer in the driver’s seat of gay politics, Kight remains active on numerous boards and causes, from housing the homeless to AIDS education to vigils for hate-crime victims like Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten to death in October by two men. Since 1980, Kight has been a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission and remains its most senior member.

“Morris is a character. But let me tell ya, he’s been through a lot, he’s done a lot, he’s contributed a lot. He’s basically now a father figure in not only the gay community but in the human relations community,” says Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who has known Kight for a generation. He reappointed Kight to the commission, even after the activist endorsed a campaign rival a decade ago.

“Morris comes from an era where to be openly gay, you were putting your physical safety on the line,” Yaroslavsky says. “People today forget that. I remember. In those days you were risking your well-being. Not just your financial well-being: You were risking harassment, you were risking arrest, you were risking getting beaten up by hate mongers. And the law enforcement community didn’t think twice about hassling gays.

“When the history of civil liberties is written, he’ll be on the list.”

Sincere Activist

or Publicity Hound?

Such accolades make Kight swoon. Five strokes in nine years, and having to relearn to speak, have turned his thoughts toward his legacy: How, he wonders, will he be remembered?

Even in his halcyon years of activism, though, Kight had a reputation for seeking the spotlight. A few critics groused that he hogged it; fans say he simply rallied people in ways that drew attention and--most significantly--served the cause.

“Though he’d only become a gay activist two years earlier, by 1971 Morris Kight was omnipresent in Los Angeles’ Gay Liberation Front,” reports “Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement,” a chronicle published in 1994 by the nation’s largest gay newspaper.

“A political wheeler-dealer par excellence. . . . Kight had a genius for publicity. His rhythmic Texas cadence and gracious manner masked a sharp, creative intellect, and although some denounced him as a ‘media freak,’ he became an often-quoted and much-photographed spokesperson for gay liberation.”

Not much has changed in this regard. On a recent first encounter, Kight so bombarded two journalists with a 60-minute sortie of personal history and support documents that they abandoned any effort to capture it and ate chicken soup as he yacked genially on. Lest the listener miss something, he compulsively spells virtually every name he mentions, making for a very long talk indeed.

Yet something strange happens when one’s ear is bent long enough by the theatrical, formidable, humble-but-mostly-not-so-humble Morris Kight.

His consuming passion and focus on a wrong that needs righting, his indefatigable purpose as he gets up at 4:30 each morning and jots his day’s agenda on a yellow legal pad, even his 6 a.m. telephone calls that pierce many a slumber, are infectious--and cannot be denied. At almost 80 years old, he has the drive of a repo man.

For all the decades of unselfish attention he has spent and will spend on the less healthy, less courageous, less persistent, it is easier to forgive his occasional lapses into grandstanding.

John Heilman, the openly gay mayor of West Hollywood, got warm laughs last year when he introduced Kight to an audience: “In the gay and lesbian community, Morris has started so many organizations, we sometimes joke that he probably invented sex, chocolate, disco music--and almost everything else.”

It’s hard to imagine a time when merely being in a gay bar could make one a target for arrest. And unwarranted arrest wasn’t the only form of harassment. Activists say that a generation ago, anyone with a sexually transmitted ailment like venereal disease was reported to public health officials, who then required the patient to identify his or her sex partner. This was embarrassing to all, but especially terrifying to gays who feared their homosexuality would be revealed.

Anniversary of

Stonewall Uprising

In 1969, the gay rights movement was launched in New York when homosexual patrons of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street refused police orders to leave. Morris Kight--by then a seasoned civil-rights activist, best-known for launching a campaign against Dow Chemical and the napalm it manufactured for use during the Vietnam War--was challenged by a friend on the East Coast to make a Stonewall statement here. The transplanted Texan, then 50 years old, decided with a handful of other gays and lesbians to march through Hollywood on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

And so the Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration was born.

Others were working on other fronts of the fledgling gay rights movement, and as they met each other, they started cooperating. In 1968, in Huntington Park, the Rev. Elder Troy Perry founded the Metropolitan Community Church, which went on to become the largest gay church in the world, with 42,000 members in 15 countries. In those days, Perry wasn’t pounding the pavement in protest like Kight.

But then a young gay man was fatally beaten by LAPD officers at the old Dover Hotel, in what they claimed and a jury agreed was justifiable homicide. Perry says he became “radicalized.” A short time later he was introduced to Kight.

“He was sort of hippie-ish,” Perry recalls with amusement. “And he wore this beret, and the only people who wore berets were revolutionaries. And, oh, my God, we had the worst Police Department in the country in my opinion. Gay and lesbians could be arrested and were arrested by police officers, who would walk into a bar and say, ‘You, you and you, you’re arrested.’ Nobody would have done anything wrong, but they’d be arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior.

“Why? Because they existed. Because there was no one to stop it.”

Perry and others say that Kight was simply fearless when dealing with law enforcement--much as he is with anyone.

“He had a lot more savvy when it came to how you dealt with the police,” Perry says. “He was a real inspiration to me. He never asked for permission, which we would do. He just told them, ‘We are doing such-and-such.’ ”

Underground Network

of Medical Care

Even before AIDS was discovered, obtaining humane health care was a critical issue for gays. Because sexually transmitted diseases were vilified, homosexuals quite often did not get medical help. Kight started an underground through which he persuaded a few local doctors to come to his home once a week to treat patients confidentially.

“People would pass around his card as someone who would find them help,” recalls Miki Jackson, who with Kight runs one of the Out of the Closet thrift stores and Aunt Bee’s, a free laundry and housekeeping service (named after the “Andy Griffith Show” matron) for ailing AIDS patients. Jackson, 47, has known Kight since she was 17.

Kight went on to co-found the Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center of L.A. (now called the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center), the first of its kind in the country, and Christopher Street West, a nonprofit organization in West Hollywood that organizes the annual gay rights celebration. Other achievements fill pages.

And yet, apart from politically connected activists, the larger gay population--especially the youthful--is unfamiliar with the man whose work secured rights and acceptance that they now may take for granted.

Activists say this is partly because AIDS has wiped out a sizable part of a gay population that otherwise might fondly remember pioneers like Kight.

“AIDS was a holocaust in our community,” observes Nancy Cohen, a member of the City of West Hollywood’s Lesbian and Gay Advisory Board, “and when I see our community, so many people of my [younger] generation don’t know who Morris is. If we didn’t have Morris and a handful of others like him, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

“It wouldn’t be AIDS we’re worrying about. It would have been suicide, which was very high in the gay population and still is among teenagers. He has paved the way for people to feel comfortable in their own skin.”

Cohen marvels that straight male USC film student Andrew Colville has been the one to capture the colorful world of Kight on celluloid. Colville showed up with a crew at a conference last fall of mental health practitioners exploring the potential for converting homosexuals into heterosexuals. He was looking for a possible subject and was almost instantly approached by one of the picketers, whom he didn’t want to talk to because he was “about 40 years older than anybody else.” It was Kight.

“I didn’t pick him, he picked me,” Colville says, laughing. “He even decided a name for the film for me: ‘The Life and Times of Morris Kight, Liberator.’ ”

Colville could not resist Kight’s conviction, compassion, bluster and unflinching candor. Colville wonders aloud on his 26-minute film what it is about this guy that is so endearing. He concludes: “He’s the gay grandfather I never had.”

When it was screened for film students and their families, Colville’s movie met with a boisterous standing ovation. It was to be shown Monday at the monthly meeting of the L.A. Human Relations Commission--a screening arranged, naturally, by what Colville calls the film’s main distributor and publicist, one Morris Kight, liberator.

* The 29th Annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration takes place Saturday from noon to midnight and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. at West Hollywood Park on San Vicente Boulevard between Santa Monica Boulevard and Melrose Avenue. A group commitment ceremony will take place Saturday at noon; the annual Run for Pride starts Sunday morning at 9. The annual parade will begin at 11 a.m. Sunday, from Santa Monica Boulevard at North Crescent Heights and head toward Robertson. (323) 658-8700.

* Nancy Wride can be e-mailed at Nancy.Wride@latimes.com.