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Ron Wyatt and Stan Thomson papers
2022-13  
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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.
Extent
1.25 linear feet (two manuscript boxes)
Restrictions
Copyright to material has been transferred to the GLBT Historical Society. All requests for reproductions and/or permission to publish or quote from material must be submitted in writing to the GLBT Historical Society Archivist.
Availability
Collection is open for research.