Former evangelist and burglar proudly adopted title of ‘citizen provocateur’

Ray 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