Ron Wyatt and Stan Thomson papers

Title: Ron Wyatt and Stan Thomson papers

Dates: 1946-2011

Collection Number: 2022-13

Creator/Collector: Wyatt, Ron Thomson, Stan

Extent: 1.25 linear feet (two manuscript boxes)

Repository: GLBT Historical Society

Abstract: 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.

Language of Material: English

Collection is open for research.

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.

[Identification of item]. Ron Wyatt and Stan Thomson papers. Collection Number: 2022-13. GLBT Historical Society

The collection was donated to the GLBT Historical Society by Michael Brown in October 2021.

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.

The collection contains extensive correspondence with family and friends, as well as real estate and legal documents, photographs, and Thomson’s high school and college yearbooks. The correspondence is the most extensive part of the collection, and reveals that both men were in touch with their families, who were aware of their relationship. Other correspondence comes from both gay and straight friends, all of whom seem to have known and been comfortable with Wyatt and Thomson as a couple. Of particular note are Wyatt’s correspondence with G.M. White at Psychiatric Quarterly, his letters from Margo Layne Brown, letters from the Bahamanian doctor and memoirist Dr. Evans Cottman, and his World War II-era correspondence with a gay serviceman friend, who signed himself “Nicolai III” and maintained the conceit that he and Wyatt were Russian noblemen in exile. A small amount of the correspondence is addressed to a gay couple, referred to as “the Davids,” whose relationship to Wyatt and Thomson is unknown. Other documents in the collection include leases, material on Thomson’s service in the U.S. Marines, business correspondence, auction receipts for the couple’s elaborate Victorian furnishings, and evidence that the two men owned their property together. The collection’s photographs consist of personal snapshots, largely from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as physique photographs and other images of men.