Randy Wicker roared as UT student activist in the 1950s
He went on to a career as an LGBT activist, journalist and businessman with many causes.
Randy Wicker, a nationally recognized gay journalist and businessman who had been a radical student activist on the University of Texas campus during the 1950s, was having no luck in his quest to share his singular life story with current LGBT student groups in Austin. Then came a minor miracle. After a good deal of missed chances during a recent visit to Austin, he spied an electronic notice for a meeting for transgender students on the UT campus. “What are you doing?” a man inquired as he stood, camera in hand, focusing on the rolling screen notices. “I’m trying to get the details on a trans group I see a notice for,” Wicker replied.
“I explained I had been a very close friend of both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the two founders of the worldwide trans movement, and shared a brief summary of my experiences as a student politician at UT,” Wicker, 79, says. “Then the young man told me: ‘Well, I happen to be president of that group. We are having our first meeting of the semester, a get-acquainted social, in 20 minutes. I’m sure everyone would be interested in hearing you give a brief talk.’”
The room was packed with perhaps 60 students by the time the meet-up commenced. The president introduced Wicker and videotaped the speech. He talked about his friends Johnson and Rivera, but he also went further back in time.
“I joined the gay movement in 1958,” he announced. “In 1958, there were not as many activ-
ists in the LGBT movement as there are people in this room tonight. We were a small group of people who thought we could change the world — and did.”
Wicker explained that he was the last of the “Mattachinos” from the Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay activist group.
“You will probably never hear another person of my generation, an activist from the first LGBT organization in this country, talk,” he said. “I’m here to tell you that the future is yours. As I look around this room, I am convinced that you will continue the work we commenced, that you will leave this world a better place for those who follow you, just as we have left the world a better place for you.”
Ahead of his time
Could a campus radical take on the whole University of Texas establishment during the 1950s? And, in some cases, come close to winning?
Doesn’t seem a likely outcome amid the relative peace of postwar academic and athletic expansion in higher education, while much of the country snoozed through the Eisenhower Era.
But then there was Charles Hayden, a young gay man who later took the name of Randolfe “Randy” Wicker to satisfy his father’s unease with his public stances, raging on the front lines of protests about censorship, tuition increases and student government.
He was featured regularly on the front pages of The Daily Texan and became the subject of a major story for the Texas Ranger, UT’s humor magazine, under the headline: “Arise! The thrilling story of one man’s fight against the forces of virtue, peace and complacency.”
Wicker organized petitions and ran for student body president and came within 30 votes of winning. (More on that later.) He left Austin after graduating in 1960 and landed in the New York area, where in 1964 he organized one of the country’s earliest gay rights protests.
Always a bit of a scamp, his first business was publishing and distributing political or message buttons, and during the 1960s he was known as the “Button King.”
At one point during his campus activism during the late 1950s, Wicker put together a group of students to march on the state Capitol to protest a proposed tuition increase from $50 to $100 a semester.
“Not many people showed up,” Wicker says. “Frat rats were chanting, ‘Hayden in the fountain!’ They picked me up and threw me in Littlefield Fountain in my green seersucker suit. I jumped up and shouted, ‘I always said that what this campus needed was a good riot, and now we have one.’”
Road to Austin
Wicker was born in Baltimore and lived with his grandmother until age 12, when his family moved to a town not far from Lakeland, Fla. A contrary streak showed up early.
“I was not supposed to tell people that we were Roman Catholic or that my mother had tuberculosis,” he says. “It’s the first thing I told them.”
Entrepreneurial from an early age, he kept up a paper route and escaped the terrors of teenage social life through an obsession with pinball games. Wicker recalls that his first crush on another boy came at age 10.
“At first, I was more interested in finding out about myself than social justice,” he says. “I had read that homosexuality was rampant at men’s schools. So I went to Washington and Lee University. Turns out it was just an unhealthy environment. Men drink beer, gain 60 pounds and speculate on who was queer on campus.”
During a break in New York, Wicker met a “lean, lanky, charming guy from UT” who redirected Wicker’s collegiate efforts.
“I found Austin was a wonderful environment,” he says about his arrival in 1958. “Things were adventuresome for about a month, then you knew everybody in town.”
Given his sexual proclivities during a time of rampant repression, his subsequent campaign for student body president was fraught from the start.
“The dean of students called me in to say that we cannot have a homosexual as the public representative of student body,” Wicker recalls. “I was going to appoint an African-American woman, Jennie Franklin, as cheerleader, which would have integrated the Southwestern Conference. I was big trouble for them.”
Activism elsewhere
Civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, military veterans’ rights, transgender rights and so on: Wicker’s energetic sense of outrage has never waned.
During the summer break of 1958, he began attending the monthly New York City meetings of the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950. Wicker was 20 and lied about his age. One had to be 21 to join the club.
It was a heady time for activists, more than a decade before the Stonewall Riots that kicked off modern LGBT activism in 1969. While hundreds of curious New Yorkers might show up to Mattachine events, fear of arrest and other official persecution kept the activist core of the group very small.
“All homosexuals were illegal in every state except Illinois,” Wicker says. “We were considered thrill killers, communist defectors, drag queens who were picked up in dresses and mascara and thrown in the back of a police van. When I went on the speaking circuit, I was asked, did I wear a dress or did I want a sex change operation?”
After Wicker settled in the New York area, a friend needed an illegal abortion but couldn’t afford one, so she induced a miscarriage.
“That’s when a big flash bulb went off in my head,” Wicker says. “I realized society is not just screwed up about homosexuality. It’s screwed up about sexuality. We needed women’s rights.”
Later, the restless agitator edited the country’s first pro-marijuana newsletter.
“But then I discovered that drug culture is empty and dead,” he says. “Hippies felt betrayed when I attacked ‘drug culture’ in documentaries.”
A longtime journalist for LGBT newspapers, Wicker was involved in the negotiations — famously dramatized in the movie “Dog Day Afternoon” — that paid for the sex change operation for a bank robber’s lover.
“That’s how I met my lover of 18 years,” Wicker says of David Edward Combs, with whom he ran an antiques business in Greenwich Village after 1972. “He started getting sick (from HIV/AIDS) in the early ’80s. I took care of him for six years. He wouldn’t go to the hospital, because he feared they would pick the sick people up for concentration camps.”
The couple married in a death-bed ceremony at home officiated by an Episcopalian outreach ministry just before Combs died.
“It rained so hard, we were walking through an incredible downpour through the gutters of Hoboken to ask some priest to marry my lover and I; if you had asked me, I would never have done that,” Wicker says. “Never say never. You never know how life will unfold, and you don’t know what you will do someday.”
Wicker’s political identity has evolved over the years from being a liberal Democrat to founding the Conservative Gay Alliance. He was on the Republican ballot as a delegate for presidential candidate John Anderson in 1980.
“Ronald Reagan and the rise of the Christian right drove me out of the Republican Party,” he says. “Whenever I take political tests, I find that I am a ‘conservative libertarian.’ But the AIDS epidemic made me realize that there was a need for a social safety net, and I returned to the Democratic Party as a Clinton Democrat. I like libertarians, but they take good ideas too far.”
Austin in the ’50s
“At New York interviews, because I said I came from Texas, it was as if John Wayne just walked into the room,” Wicker says of his post-Austin years. “The Texas image had real punch in the wily wilds of Manhattan. You were suddenly real.”
Plus, Wicker had come into his own during his short time in Texas.
“In Austin, I was young, frisky, unattached,” he says. “Funny thing about Austin, after you had made the rounds and slept with everyone attractive in town, what did you do? There was one gay bar back then at the back of a deli. You entered through the restaurant and went to the back. The room was very, very small. Any Longhorns football game would bring people into town, so there might be as many as 18 new people.”
Wicker confirmed that the Manhattan Deli at 905 Congress Ave. was among Austin’s earliest gay bars.
“Once a week, there would be a party at someone’s house,” he says. “But pick your enemies with great care, because when the night came, you might be sitting there alone, unable to go to the big party.”
Despite his experiences in the city’s small gay scene, he was not as open on campus.
“Everyone was terrified here,” he says. “There was big purge in the early ’50s. A lesbian had written a girlfriend in Houston about a big gay party. Her parents intercepted the letter and alerted the police, who had the party staked out. Every person who came to party had their license plate written down, even if they were someone who dropped off a friend. It was a very touchy subject.”