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 Era Author & Activist Dies at 73 Wrote The Gay Insider USA First Travel Guide to Gay America Was a Lead Member of the Gay Activists Alliance of New York |
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Compiled by GayToday Joe Kennedy & Jack Nichols
Hudson had divided his later years between his Manhattan apartment and a rural retirement home in Honesdale. "When Paul Philippe could not reach him by phone for two days," explained Kennedy, "he asked a friend in John Paul's neighborhood to check on him and she discovered his body." John Paul had been an early member of the Gay Activists Alliance of New York, and was elected Delegate-at-Large early in the organization's history (a position meant to be the rank-and-file members' ombudsperson among the elected officers). Joe Kennedy recalled that it was Hudson who had "famously organized the GAA Reunions in June 1994 at Stonewall 25 and in December 1994 for the 25th anniversary of GAA's founding." Kennedy recalls: "In his activist career, John Paul began as a director and librarian/archivist at the Mattachine Society in New York City when it was located on Christopher Street near the Stonewall. During the early years of his decade-long of involvement with GAA, he held visible leadership positions at the Christopher Street Liberation Day (CSLD) Committee, in the original LGBT Pride Committee, as the group that regularly organized New York's late June Sunday marches was known. Later in the decade, in June 1977 Hudson was the male co-MC at the annual Gay & Lesbian Pride Rally on the Great Lawn of Central Park where the march culminated that year, an event, says Kennedy, "most memorable for his rousing denunciation of Anita Bryant's anti-gay crusade and the crowd-pleasing appearance of Congresswoman Bella Abzug." For several years, Hudson was Vice-president of the National Coalition of Gay Activists, an organization whose founder and president was Morty Manford. The group's goal had been to be a more militant alternative to the National Gay Task Force. A much-publicized 1975 Village Voice photo by Bettye Lane, reprinted years later in New York magazine's Stonewall 25 issue, showed Morty Manford and John Paul Hudson at the head of nearly a thousand marchers approaching St. Patrick's Cathedral with a banner reading: "Separate Church and State - Gay Activists Alliance." "As a writer," recalls Kennedy, "John Paul was a major contributor to the trail-blazing newspaper, GAY, edited by Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke in the early 1970s, and to numerous other gay publications." Under the pen-name John Francis Hunter, he authored the 1971 book The Gay Insider, a ground-breaking 300-page guide to the New York gay scene including a chapter on "the new free gays." It become an instant classic, making him one of the three best-selling authors of gay male oriented non-fiction in the early 1970s. The book was dedicated to editors Nichols and Clarke.
"Critics," recalls Kennedy, "gave the book excellent reviews." Vito Russo, writing in the short-lived newspaper Gotham Ledger (in New York City) and in The Advocate (then published in Los Angeles), said, "All about life and death backstage in Gay Manhattan, it's a THRILLER with SOUL...Superstar Murder is going to make the best 1930s movie of the 1970s, and every actoress (sic) in town will be fighting to play Mittman!" Harold Fairbanks in Newswest called it "sudsy as the collected works of Jacqueline Susann and suspenseful in the Agatha Christie tradition." James Kirkwood in Kirkwood's Reviews declared that "When John Paul Hudson steps down off his (gay liberation) soapbox, his writing is kicky, kinky, far out and entertaining." But many activists found Hudson's "soapbox" angle part of the book's appeal. The Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the UFMCC enthused:
Joe Kennedy notes: "In fact, John Paul worked closely in show business with stars including Ruth Buzzi and Lily Tomlin for many years," recalls Kennedy. "He was known as a distinguished cabaret revue director, producer, lyricist, and performer. One of his more recent noted accomplishments in the 1990s was as lyricist for a new musical work entitled, Love Is based on the 13th chapter of St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, which achieved critical praise and was often performed at commitment ceremonies and holy unions. "In his younger years John Paul was a professional actor, singer and fashion model. Even in his later years in retirement in the rural town of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, his name frequently appeared in the local papers as the director or producer of plays and concerts, and he maintained his apartment on 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan where he visited from time to time to continue his theatrical and artistic work as well as keep up his activist connections in what he called 'the Ultimate Island.' "Marc Rubin, Randy Wicker, Arnie Kantrowitz, Wayne Sunday, Joe Kennedy, GAA co-founding member Fred Orlansky, and GayToday website editor Jack Nichols were among John Paul's friends expressing shock and sadness at the news of his passing." GayToday's editor was among the last of Hudson's friends to communicate with him . "He was preparing to see the publication of his latest book," said Nichols. "We'd been in touch somewhat regularly on the Internet. I'd sent him a link to the 1977 Men's Movement purpose statement I'd drafted long ago for the Men's Center in New York but which I'd published only last week in GayToday." In a February 18 e-mail Hudson responded to Nichols: "JACK--Dear me, but I wish I'd had this Statement for inclusion in The Lost Commandment: How to Be Gay in the 21st Century (it should be available any day now!). The only thing you don't explore is my Central Premise: celibacy. I think it a necessity, you know, and realize how I have improved (though slowly) since 1984 when I adopted "active celibacy" (as opposed to reactive, deprivation celibacy, etc). I suspect the Heaven's Gate group had the only workable solution to the aggrandizements of the male human animal: voluntary castration. "Certainly, I'll concede there are a few very special males like you who have re-adapted as "Men" (which is a word I also re-define), and who I know are serious about it, and that in your heart you are liberated and can bend like the willow. I think you have become exceptionally highly evolved as you have matured, and yet also that you still embrace Eros or the memory of Eros, and celebrate sex as part of your Ideal. "I have abandoned that, though I anxiously await the response I get from Fred Orlansky-Jeffrey Vause, for instance, who have what seems to be a "perfect marriage." I also look forward to Joe Kennedy's weighing in; he is capable of great balance in his thinking. I expect to be annihilated by the Gay Press, by the "recreational sex" faction, by all Free Love advocates; in fact, if out of the handful of readers who are healthy, if I receive a dozen "Hear! Hear!"s from across the land, I'll be amazed. "Anyway, thanks for sharing the text of your Statement, which, though, didn't go far enough for this old codger! "JOHN PAUL" |
