Former evangelist and burglar became ‘citizen provocateur’
RWhen he came out as gay, his mother was relieved. ‘‘We were afraid you might grow up to be a Republican.’’
ay Hill, who has died aged 78, was a former Baptist evangelist and convicted cat burglar who helped organise the first gay march on Washington and drew on his own experience behind bars to host a radio call-in show for inmates and their families.
He died in a hospice in Houston, Texas, that he had helped establish in the 1980s as a refuge for Aids patients. He had congenital heart defects and had lost his left leg and part of his right foot because of diabetes.
After being hospitalised earlier this year as a result of his heart problems, he ‘‘decided to go off most of his medications,’’ said his friend Richard Nevilles.
‘‘With help, he could get into a wheelchair, and
that’s not who he
was or how he
wanted to live.’’
Raised in nearby Galena Park, Houston, where he was quarterback of the high school football team and tried to upstage his senior prom by joining the communist revolution in Cuba, Hill turned from preaching to stealing, and was sentenced to 160 years in prison on burglary charges. He successfully appealed and, after a little more than four years, was released in 1975 for good behaviour, leading him to embark on a four-decade career as an activist and rabble-rouser.
‘‘I was born to rub the cat hair the wrong direction,’’ Hill once said. When asked to describe his primary occupation, he called himself ‘‘a journeyman-quality hell-raiser’’.
In 1987, Hill successfully took the city of Houston to the US Supreme Court, where he won the right to interrupt police officers on First Amendment grounds. He had been arrested five years earlier for shouting ‘‘Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?’’ while officers confronted his friend. When Hill was described in the court’s decision as a ‘‘citizen provocateur’’, he adopted the description as a formal title and had it printed on business cards.
While his focus was on grass-roots efforts in his hometown, he developed a friendship with Harvey Milk, the San Francisco gay rights activist and city supervisor, and partnered with him to organise the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. ‘‘We only got about 80,000 people to DC, but no-one had ever seen that many queers in one pile in history,’’ Hill once quipped. A second march he helped coordinate, in 1987, drew 200,000 people to Washington and was considered the largest gay rights demonstration on record.
An occasional stage performer who did one-man shows, Hill partied with writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams and spent much of his professional life as a radio broadcaster. At KPFT-FM, a radio station he co-founded in Houston, he served as a station manager and started a programme on LGBTQ issues. When he received the occasional death threat from anti-gay listeners, he replied by giving callers directions to the station.
In 1980, he created The Prison Show, which featured muckraking reporting on the Texas prison system, as well as a novel call-in segment, in which families updated inmates with holiday greetings or family news, including the scores of children’s soccer games and birth or death announcements.
At the time of the show’s creation, Texas prisoners were effectively unable to call home. Hill later lobbied for a 2007 law that enables most Texas inmates to call relatives.
His work on the air dovetailed with his efforts as an organiser, which took off in 1977 when he led a Houston demonstration against Anita Bryant, whose platform as a singer, beauty pageant winner and orange juice spokeswoman made her one of the country’s most prominent opponents of homosexuality.
While Bryant headlined the Texas Bar convention at a downtown hotel, Hill led several thousand protesters in chants of ‘‘Go home, Anita’’ and ‘‘Equal rights now’’. ‘‘That night was to me the revelation my dreams were not wasted,’’ Hill said.
Houston was simultaneously home to one of the largest gay communities in the Southwest and a fierce brand of Bible Belt conservatism, in which mayoral candidate Louie Welch said in 1985 that one way to curb Aids would be to ‘‘shoot the queers’’.
Raymond Wayne Hill was born in Houston, to parents who were both union activists. When he came out as gay in high school, his mother was relieved. ‘‘She said, ‘Well, we notice you dress up more than the other boys, and we thought you were trying to pretend to be wealthier than we are, and we were afraid you might grow up to be a Republican. So if you’re gay, we can handle that.’’
Hill had served as an itinerant evangelist until, at the age of 17, ‘‘I decided that was dishonest work and I gave that up and took up more honest work. I became a burglar’’. He stole ‘‘jewellery, antiques, art – you know, stuff queers really like’’, before being arrested in 1970 and imprisoned.
When his sister Mary died in a car crash in 1977, Hill raised her two children. He leaves no immediate survivors. – Washington Post