Love, last respects for activist Hill
LGBT ‘movement builder’ gets final City Hall win at his memorial service
A couple of hundred people — LGBT activists and KPFT-FM staff, ex-cons and politicians, a few college professors and a lot of rabble-rousers — gathered outside City Hall on Sunday afternoon to pay respects to Ray Hill, for decades one of Houston’s leading hell-raisers.
Black-and-white photos of Hill in his ’70s heyday hung behind the speakers, including a bearded young Hill leading a march and Hill at the AstroArena Town Meeting that he organized, a seminal moment in Houston’s LGBT history. Speakers remembered his work with “The Prison Show,” his Supreme Court decision, the stories he spun, the careers he helped get started. Lots of the stories were funny; a couple were raunchy.
But the most moving was told by Annise Parker — Houston’s former mayor, herself a star in the city’s LGBT history.
“Ray Hill was not my friend,” Parker said. “I can’t tell you how he liked his coffee.” He called her “Parker,” not “Annise,” not
“Mayor.”
He wasn’t her mentor, she said. She didn’t ask his advice. And they were wildly different human beings: She a policy wonk, he the master of the grand gesture. “He wasn’t an organization builder,” she said. “He was a movement builder.”
So why did Hill ask her to organize his memorial service? “For the life of me,” she said, “I do not know.”
They met in 1975, when Parker was a lesbian feminist undergraduate at Rice University. Hill was from her parents’ generation, “an elder statesman from a movement we didn’t yet know to call a movement.” They worked together on causes such as ending police harassment of gays and lesbians in Montrose.
But, said Parker, they butted heads, disagreeing as often as they agreed. Twice they ran against each other for the presidency of Houston’s GLBT Political Caucus, and twice, she won — once by a single vote.
Eventually Parker entered not just LGBT politics but mainstream politics. She was elected Montrose’s representative to City Council, then city controller, and eventually, mayor. They were sorta-kinda allies, not friends. But Hill basked in Parker’s ascension to mainstream power. It was proof of how far the LGBT movement had come. And when he wanted a political favor — for instance, when he’d heard that Houston police had turned down an applicant for being gay — he didn’t hesitate to call her.
Sometimes the favors were political. Sometimes, more personal.
“Remember that time he declared he was retiring from activism?” she asked. “And he scored a great story in the Chronicle, but then didn’t retire?” She spoke at his retirement roast. And there, he asked her to do his eulogy.
She laughed. She didn’t think he was serious.
But years went by, and every time she saw Hill, he’d talk about three things. He’d remind her that she was going to do that eulogy. He’d tell her he was proud of her. And he’d tell her that he loved her.
The first few times he told her he loved her, Parker says, she rolled her eyes. That wasn’t who they were to each other.
But he kept saying it: That he loved her. For a few years, when he’d say it, she’d pretend she hadn’t heard him.
He kept saying it anyway. She began to mumble, “Yeah, love you too.”
Finally, she said, she got to the right answer: “I love you too.”
“Ray wore me down,” she explained. “That was a lot of how he accomplished things in life: He wore you down.”
In September, as he was nearing death, Hill expanded his request: Not just to do his eulogy, but to organize the entire memorial. He didn’t mention to her that he wanted it to be on the steps of City Hall. She found that out, she said, by reading it in an article in the Chronicle: One last time, Hill was using the media to pressure a politician.
Of course she was exasperated. And of course she made the phone calls, used her pull with City Hall. And there, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, was Ray Hill’s last victory: He was being remembered as he wanted, on the steps of the City Hall he’d so often fought, by the woman he’d worn down until she didn’t just make the arrangements, but loved him. And laughed about it.