|
|
 Was President of SIR, The Society for Individual Rights Passed Away in Presence of His Long-time Companion |
|
Compiled by GayToday
"I remember him as a kindly and a decent man," said Jack Nichols, GayToday's editor who had been hired in 1981 by Beardemphl as a News Editor for the Sentinel. "My earliest memories of him go back to September, 1965 when I stood next to him in Manhattan while we were photographed at a meeting of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO)." "I next saw him in February, 1966," recalls Nichols, "at the very first meeting of the nation's homophile groups in Kansas City. As President of what was then the nation's largest gay group, SIR, or the Society for Individual Rights, he was an assertive speaker whose general views, nevertheless, were regarded as 'conservative' by pioneering activists on the East Coast. "Both the Mattachine Societies of Washington and of Florida had hoped to see certain policies adopted by the nation's gay organizations, including the approval of the East Coast's outright criticism of the anti-gay psychiatric establishment. "On the floor of the Kansas City meeting, Beardemphl opposed movement picketing and argued vigorously with the more militant Dr. Franklin E. Kameny, thus helping to prevent the adoption at that historic meeting of the East Coast's 'anti-sickness' policies." During this 1966 meeting, Kay Tobin Lahusen observed in a conversation with Nichols that "the East Coast is ideological and the West Coast is methodological." SIR, Beardemphl's 1,000-member group, while providing space for some of San Francisco's largest mid-60's social gatherings, was essentially devoted-in those years-- to research into homosexuality and to an ideal of social service. Beardemphl did not feel comfortable with the East Coast's penchant for direct action and held to the views of certain other gay movement leaders of the 1960s that 'more research' would be required before it could be considered proper to critique the psychiatric establishment.
September, 1965: Bill Beardemphl (top row, immediately right of center, next to Jack Nichols) among the leaders of America's gay movement at an East Coast Homophile Movement (ECHO) conference. Born in Tacoma, Washington, Beardemphl became a life-long chef. He met his long-time companion, a dancer, while working as such in New York's Pierre Hotel. The two men moved in 1962 to San Francisco. In the late 1970s, writes Anastasia Hendrix of the San Francisco Chronicle, Beardemphl was regarded "as a member of the early generation of gay activists," and he "found himself increasingly at odds with the younger, more political leaders of the movement."
John DeLeon is requesting that donations in Bill Beardemphl's memory be made to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, 973 Market St., Suite 400, San Francisco California, 94103. |
