Description
Stan Thomson and Ron Wyatt were a gay couple who lived together for many years in San Francisco. Their relationship appears
to have begun in the Bahamas, where they both lived in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, they moved to San Francisco and bought
a Victorian house at 12 Eugenia Street, which they furnished elaborately in period style. The collection contains extensive
correspondence with family and friends, as well as real estate documents, legal documents, and photographs.
Background
Stan Thomson and Ron Wyatt were a gay couple who lived together for many years in San Francisco. Their relationship appears
to have begun in the Bahamas, where they both lived in the 1950s and worked as freelance astrologers. In the early 1960s,
they moved to San Francisco and bought a Victorian house at 12 Eugenia Street. The house was extravagantly decorated, with
ornate furniture, hardbound books, and musical instruments, including a pipe organ built into the living room wall. After
Wyatt’s death in the 1980s, Thomson was unable to maintain the house, and it fell into dereliction. The materials in this
collection were salvaged after Thomson’s death by his neighbor, Darril Hudson, whose papers are at the Historical Society
as collection #2021-17.
Most of the papers in this collection pertain to Wyatt, who had a Ph.D. and literary aspirations (some of his poetry was published
in the 1950s; his only known novel, Egypt Jones, Esq., was never published and is presumed lost). Some of his voluminous correspondence
alludes to his fiction, on which he often sought the advice of G.M. White, an assistant editor at Psychiatric Quarterly. It
appears that Wyatt was interested in translating psychiatric concepts into his writing, in keeping with the midcentury vogue
for psychiatry as a way of understanding the world; he also approached writing about homosexuality through this lens. Wyatt
appears to have been born out of wedlock and adopted. Although he carried on a campy correspondence with screenwriter and
Air Force reservist Margo Layne Brown, who signs herself as his mother, he also kept letters about his unsuccessful search
for his birth mother. An “Ode to Bastardy,” attributed to Wyatt’s pseudonym “Baron Pupsick,” is among his papers; it provides
a glimpse of Wyatt’s personality and literary style.