Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1894: Prescott Townsend

Boston has its Brahmins. Prescott Townsend’s Brahman credentials would make other Brahmins jealous, except a true Brahmin would never cop to envy. He was related to at least 23 Mayflower passengers, and his third great-great grandfather, Roger Sherman, was the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Townsend’s father made a fortune in the coal industry, and his family lived in Roxbury and attended the very high Anglican Church of the Advent.

Prescott himself was a considerably more eccentric Brahmin than proper Bostonians were accustomed to. At first it seemed everything was set: prep school, Harvard, military service. Then he struck out on his own in a most un-Brahman way, spending the summer of 1914 in logging camps in Montana and Idaho, traveling to Paris, North Africa and the Soviet Union. On one trip to the Rio Blanco Canyon in Mexico, he co-discovered some Toltec stone heads and got a new species of salamanders named after him: Salamdra oedipustownsendentis, which he named in an indirect homage to his father.

On returning to Beacon Hill, he began a relationship with theater producer Elliot Paul. Paul was hipster a hundred years before today’s hipsters came up with the idea, sporting a Van Dyke beard and broad-brimmed hats. Townsend was more of his day, wearing “a raccoon skin overcoat that was the envy of Cedar Street,” and who could easily “talk informatively on any given subject in the space it required his auditor to consume precisely a quart of gin.” Gin was as illegal in prohibition Boston as everywhere else, but Townsend’s Brahmin connections somehow shielded his establishments from police scrutiny.

Townsend and Paul founded the Barn Experimental Theater in 1922, thanks to Townsend’s modest trust fund income. He spent what remained of his trust money buying up properties on Beacon Hill, transforming the area into the epicenter of bohemian Boston. He operated speakeasies, restaurants, theaters, a gallery and a bookstore, the latter in his home. Townsend became good friends with the openly-gay novelist André Gide, who himself had come out in print in 1926. Townsend also had a keen interest in experimental architecture, both in Beacon Hill and in Provincetown, where he built five A-frame houses. Unfortunately, it never occurred to him to patent the A-frame.

Townsend became one of America’s first public gay activist in the 1930s when, owing to his Brahmin status, Massachusetts lawmakers indulged him as he testified for the repeal of the state’s sodomy law. Lawmakers politely dismissed him. He came back again the following year, and the year after that, each time he was met with the same polite indifference.

On January 29, 1943, he was working at the Fall River shipyard when he was arrested for participating in an “unnatural and lascivious act.” The tabloid Mid-Town Journal ran a particularly cutting headline: “Beacon Hill ‘Twilight’ Man Member of Queer Love Cult Seduced Young Man.” Twilight indeed! He was sentenced to 18 months at hard labor, and was released on V-E Day. He later said that when he saw the celebrations in town, he thought they were for him. His family and Boston’s upper crust saw no reason to celebrate him though. Most of his family cut off all contact with him, and he was officially dropped from both the Boston and New York Social Registers, which delighted him. “I was thrown out of the Social Register the same year as Barbara Hutton,” he bragged, “and for the same reason!”

In the 1957, he held meetings at his home/bookstore, which he described as “the first social discussion of homosexuality in Boston.” Those discussions grew into the Boston chapter of the Mattachine Society. When his own activities proved too embarrassing for the buttoned-down Mattachines — one member called “the Professor” complained that Townsend was constantly “defending his creamy-meamy bubble-headed faggy types” — they kicked him out in 1962. Townsend then established a competing organization  he called the Boston Demophile Society, which outlasted the Boston Mattachine Society by several years. Townsend also developed what he called his “Snowflake Theory,” in which he argued that each person’s sexuality was as unique as a snowflake.

Prescott Townsend, 1963

Townsend had a way of moving along with the cutting edge of the times. In the 1960s, Townsend welcomed hippies and runaways to his buildings in Boston and his home made of driftwood, plastics and other cast-off material in Provincetown, which he named Provincetownsend. Future luminaries at Provincetownsend included Mink Stole and John Waters, who described the house as “like living with a lunatic Swiss Family Robinsons”:

Part of the apartment [in Townsend’s house] was made out of a submarine, and trees grew right up through the living room. There was no runing water, but it was an incredibly beautiful place. The only real problem was that when it rained, it was like being outside. …There was no rent. You just had to be liked by the incredibly eccentric landlord, Prescott Townsden [sic], a notorious seventy-year-old gay liberationist who drove around on a motor scooter and ate nothing but hot dogs.

The west coast activist and journalist Jim Kepner (Feb 14) described Townsend as an eccentric’s eccentric:

Charming. Kooky. He and I wandered around town a few times during different conventions, window-shopping and such. He was a kind and—I didn’t understand it at the time—the kind of person from an old aristocratic background who could brag about the fact that he got the seersucker suit he was wearing for 50 cents at a Goodwill store. And he was just so comfortable that he didn’t have to put on the dog, and would do almost the opposite, where at the meetings, other people were, those who were the social climbers, were just scandalized by this kind of tacky, old, rumpled-suit.

…He was ahead of his time and behind his time. He was like an 1890 radical.

Photo: John C. Mitzel / The Advocate (May 24, 1972).

In 1965, at the age of seventy-one, Townsend became active in the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) and participated in the 1965 demonstrations in New York (Apr 18). In 1967 — he’s seventy-three years old now — Townsend showed up in Boston Common at a camp of young hippies. With his mimeograph machine in tow, he turned out flyers for the Boston Common Be-In. In 1970 — now he’s seventy-six — he took those ideas to the Boston Gay Liberation Front for it’s Be-In that summer. Meanwhile, a new generation of hustlers and drug addicts were taking advantage of his generosity. Provincetownsend burned, under suspicious circumstances, as did several of his Beacon Hill properties including his original home/bookstore. He moved to a friend’s apartment. There, he stopped eating, and three days later was found dead. Townsend’s funeral was very, very far away, in temperament at least, from us parents’ high Anglican church. It took place in the Unitarian Arlington Street Church, which hosted gay youth groups, anti-war rallies and other progressive causes.

[Sources: John C. Mitzel. “Who’s that old fart? Prescott Townsend, Granddaddy of Gay Lib, believes in fun, too.” The Advocate no. 86 (May 24, 1972): 21, 24.

Charles Shively. “Prescott Townsend (1894-1973): Bohemian Blueblood — A Different Kind of Pioneer.” In Vern L. Bullough (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2002): 41-47.

John Waters. Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1981): 48.]