Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Illustration by Lane Rick.
It was 1967—the height of the Vietnam War. On that day, August 28, over 100,000 anti-war activists swarmed the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. with the aim of trying to make it levitate.1 Yes, levitate. With their minds. Many had taken acid and/or MDMA, but in reality most of them were sober.
The goal of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam that day was to make the world’s second-largest office building, an edifice weighing millions of metric tons, literally disappear by telepathically sending it to outer space and thus bring about an abrupt end to US imperialism in Southeast Asia by default. It was during this interesting moment in history, now known as the March on the Pentagon, that a group of activists, including Noam Chomsky, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and others, mobilized against the US Department of Defense.2
A twenty-four-year-old Kiyoshi Kuromiya was among the demonstrators at the event in Washington that day. He had just left the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture program to become a full-time activist. “Our idea was that we were going to join hands around the Pentagon building and get it to levitate,” Kuromiya explained some years later. “If it levitated even one inch off the ground, this would signal the beginning of the Aquarian Age. But we couldn’t get all the way around ‘cause you have Fort Hood on the back side of the Pentagon building. So instead we took all the police barricades and made big bonfires all around the Pentagon building.”3
Just one inch off the ground!
Illustration by Lane Rick.
Before leaving Penn, Kuromiya had been a star student. He tried to fit in at the Ivy League school by wearing a suit and tie and sporting a respectable haircut. During his first year at Penn in 1961, he was quickly cherry-picked as a research partner by none other than Buckminster Fuller.
Six students from Penn’s 1965 graduating class were awarded full scholarships as Benjamin Franklin Scholars, and Kuromiya was one of them.4 But Kuromiya wasn’t an armchair academic. Far from it, in fact.
Kuromiya was born in suburban Los Angeles on May 9, 1943, at a time when Japanese Americans like himself were experiencing terrible persecution in the United States.5 While he was still a toddler, Kuromiya, his sister, mother, and father were arrested and forced to leave their California home before being sent to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, a place that in modern parlance could best be described as a concentration camp6—one of several built throughout the country for Japanese Americans on the orders of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.7 A third generation Japanese American, Kuromiya would later say that this childhood experience, along with his arrest at age ten for an episode of “sexual deviance” with another boy in a Los Angeles park, is where his radical, antiestablishment politics came from.8
Illustration by Lane Rick.
As a teenager, Kuromiya subscribed to The Village Voice and read about New York City’s queer culture in articles penned by luminaries such as Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag. He also (secretly) read periodicals published by the League for Civil Education News, a San Francisco-based outlet that had a “war chest” it used to provide legal counsel for people arrested in raids on gay bars. This countercultural education and mutual aid strategy would later inform much of Kuromiya’s thinking.
Kuromiya left Los Angeles in 1961 to study architecture in Philadelphia. Unlike his peers, he used his architectural training to design solidarity networks instead of buildings and employed his graphic sensibilities to create anti-war agitprop. Kuromiya quickly met militants from groups operating in and around Philadelphia’s Center City, including the Revolutionary Youth Movement, the local chapters of Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party, and a number of prisoners’ rights groups. Kuromiya soon became well known for his hopping around between meetings and inserting intersectional discourse about LGBTQ+ issues into discussions of liberation.
Torn between a career in architecture and political activism, Kuromiya later credited his mentor Buckminster Fuller with encouraging him to take up architecture, as it was a field in which he could harness his varied interests. Recalling his discussions with the architect, Kuromiya recalled how Fuller told him that architecture is “an area for comprehensivists [emphasis added], people that are interested in the arts and technology and history and humanities.” Kuromiya continued: “So I was interested in architecture, but my view of architecture had this kind of mystical cast. Almost Masonic. The idea that encoded into the architecture was more than just a place to dwell or a place to hold meetings. It was more the culture itself was encoded into the proportions and into the decor, the decorations.”9
Kuromiya was undoubtedly an architect—just a different kind of architect. His designs brought people together and saved thousands of lives, and they continue to challenge how we think about shelter. He also had a keen sensitivity to space and how people come together to use it. At university, Kuromiya organized the Free School out of Penn’s student union building, where free courses on politics, culture, and other topics for 3,000 Philadelphians were held in the otherwise unused rooms.10 Kuromiya explained that at that time the Free School was the “second oldest and second largest free university in the country.” It was there that the young activist was developing his unique ability to build mutual aid systems from scratch.
In 1962, just one year into his studies at Penn at a time when superstars like Fuller and Louis Kahn were packing lecture halls, Kuromiya dropped what he was doing in the studio to join the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE) at a series of sit-ins focused on desegregating restaurants in Maryland. The demonstrators went around various segregated watering holes on Route 40 that refused service to people of color. Kuromiya was known for drawing the townies’ ire by operating the jukebox at each of the restaurants during the sit-ins and playing “God Bless America” at an incredibly high volume on an endless loop.
The sit-ins in Maryland signaled a new, more peripatetic epoch in the young activist’s life. That same year, Kuromiya helped organize for Grinnell Support Against the Resumption of Nuclear Testing, an anti-war group. The group sat alongside Artists Against the Bomb, another anti-war outfit made up of artists like Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd, Arata Isozaki, and Barnett Newman.11
In 1963, Kuromiya, then only twenty years old, flew with Ebony magazine editor Mark Crawford to Washington, D.C., ahead of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The night after listening to this famous address, Kuromiya, on his way to meet James Baldwin, met King at the Willard Hotel.12 Kuromiya went on to organize with Bayard Rustin, another queer leader in the Civil Rights Movement and a friend of King’s. Five years later, after marching in Selma, Alabama, Kuromiya, and King developed a close friendship. So much so that after King’s assassination in Memphis, Coretta Scott King telephoned Kuromiya to ask him if he could babysit their children, Dexter and Marty Junior, while she prepared for her husband’s funeral.13
In 1965 Kuromiya joined members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in storming Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. The SNCC coup was in solidarity with Black high school students in Alabama marching for civil rights. Shortly after, Kuromiya would join those students on the picket line, facing down Bull Connor, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Alabama State Police. In Selma, Kuromiya was nearly beaten to death by the sheriff’s men. “They cornered me against the wall and clubbed me on the head,” Kuromiya later said.14 Kuromiya received a total of twenty stitches, but the young militant was undeterred. It pushed him to carry on.
While a grad student years later, Kuromiya helped organize what has been called “the largest anti-war demonstration in the history of the University of Pennsylvania.” For weeks, Kuromiya and his comrades distributed faux leaflets addressed from a fictional group dubbed the“Americong.” (They called themselves “comrades,” but a better word today might be “trolls.”) The agitprop was aimed at all Philadelphia residents. In big bold type, the leaflets claimed that an innocent dog would be burnt alive with napalm on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Over 2,000 Philadelphians showed up to counter-protest, including Mayor Frank Rizzo and the Philadelphia Police Department. It was all a ploy. Kuromiya addressed the crowd and thanked them for coming out that day. “Congratulations, you’ve saved the life of an innocent dog,” Kuromiya said over the microphone. “How about the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese that have been burned alive? What are you going to do about it?”15 The peanut gallery jeered. Rizzo wanted to kill him.
Arguably, Kuromiya’s most powerful organizing came later when he helped build the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a militant LGBTQ+ advocacy group that emerged in the wake of the Stonewall Riots in New York.16 The GLF differed significantly from the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), another gay rights group, in that GAA was notoriously patriarchal, racist, transphobic, and misogynist.17 With the establishment of the GLF, Kuromiya ensured that members who identified as women and trans were treated equally and that large numbers of the GLF membership came from racially and gender diverse backgrounds. A nationally ranked Scrabble player,“18 Kuromiya remarkably found the time in between political organizing for the GLF to run a newspaper, the Gay Dealer, a publication that focused on LGBTQ+ issues in Philadelphia. (This publication, Kuromiya said later, was financed by the editorial staff’s dealing in MDMA.)
In 1968, Kuromiya turned up in Chicago with millions of other protesters outside the Democratic National Convention. Kuromiya had designed posters critical of US imperialism in Vietnam. Kuromiya’s poster featured a draft dodger from Detroit burning his draft card with words reading “FUCK THE DRAFT” in large print. The poster quickly became a powerful symbol of the anti-war movement and spread like a meme at marches around the country. That year, Kuromiya also raised funds to circulate the poster in time for Mother’s Day in a popular housekeeping magazine in an attempt to discourage families from sending their children to Vietnam.
Illustration by Lane Rick.
James Baldwin and Dr. Martin Luther King: These were just two of the iconic Black revolutionaries Kuromiya had befriended. Another was Oakland’s own Dr. Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party. In 1969, Dr. Newton personally invited Kuromiya to serve as a delegate to the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. There, Kuromiya spoke about intersectionality and convinced the Panthers to include LGBTQ+ liberation in their platform. Dr. Newton later credited Kuromiya with transforming the Black Panther Party’s political program.19
After Vietnam, Kuromiya dedicated much of his life to fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The People with AIDS Coalition was a mutual aid network for low-income sexual minorities of color Kuromiya cofounded in 1985. It was a support network partially based on the mutual aid strategy employed by San Francisco’s League for Civil Education News.“20
Kuromiya founded the coalition together with eight other people that had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. In their manifesto, the group explained how it was inspired by the “Denver Principles,” a treatise that emerged from the National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference held in Denver, Colorado, in 1983. The People with AIDS Coalition was headquartered at a townhouse owned by St. John’s in the Village located at 222 West 11th Street in New York City. Its modus operandi was self-reliance, as in: “If the fascist Reagan administration won’t lift a finger to help people living with HIV/AIDS, then we’ll have to do it ourselves.” Morris Kight, the legendary chapter head of GLF in Los Angeles, was a friend of Kuromiya. Both Kight and Kuromiya are credited with saving the lives of thousands of LGBTQ+ people who were either living on the street or had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.21 Kight also moved in the same circles as Gregory Ain, a communist architect who designed the Hay House, which served as headquarters for the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights organization in the country.22
Throughout the 1980s, Kuromiya helped build ACT UP, another mutual aid group with chapters throughout the United States that offered support networks for LGBTQ+ individuals violently condemned to disease and illness due to the US government’s sheer negligence. Between 1980 and 1991, Kuromiya, then in his late forties, ponytailed, and noticeably more bohemian than during his Penn years, was arrested several times at various ACT UP rallies. A card-carrying member of the Society of American Magicians, Kuromiya was known for easily breaking himself and his comrades free of their handcuffs when they found themselves in the back of police vans—an antifascist Houdini, so to speak.
In 1981, Kuromiya and Buckminster Fuller authored Critical Path. While the New York Times Book Review critic James Traub described the work as “a bizarre and often revelatory volume,” he applauded Critical Path’s view that technological advances could end war. Fuller’s Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity was released a decade later.“23 The Black non-binary scholar Dr. Che Gossett explains how Kuromiya “radicalized and democratized his collaborator Buckminster Fuller's techno-futurism with the use of technology and the internet for HIV/AIDS activism—including incarcerated activism and how he simultaneously extends Fuller’s legacy as well by posthumously editing and publishing his books as his ‘adjuvant.’”24
By the late 1980s, Kuromiya himself was living with HIV/AIDS and struggling with metastatic lung cancer. These diagnoses inspired him to create Critical Path, a twenty-four-hour hotline and website for people living with HIV/AIDS in greater Philadelphia that was named after the book he penned with Fuller in 1981. (Critical Path is still in operation today and connects thousands of people to care and services.) “It is our conviction,” Kuromiya wrote in 1989, “that a heroic endeavor is now needed both to provide for the continuing health maintenance of Persons with AIDS the world over, and, by the year 2001 to find a cure for the ravages of AIDS for all time.”25 Working for Critical Path, Kuromiya spent hours behind his computer connecting patients to free drugs. He also sent his newsletters to hundreds of incarcerated individuals to ensure they had up-to-date information about HIV/AIDS treatment while in prison. Later, ACT UP would describe the project as “one of the earliest and most comprehensive sources of HIV treatment information.”26
After his own cancer and AIDS diagnoses, Kuromiya explained how he began working within the system “for life and death reasons.”27 Earlier he had refused to cooperate with the Philadelphia City Council and the US federal government, given his own past persecution by the legal authorities. One of Kuromiya’s most important legal battles came when he encouraged the FDA to approve Prixovan, a drug for HIV/AIDS patients that quickly saved thousands of lives.
Before his death, Kuromiya told Marc Stein, co-author of City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972, that it was his sheer commitment to social justice and activism that got him through both the cancer and the AIDS that would eventually lead to his death. “I really believe that activism is therapeutic,” he claimed, just before he passed away in 2001.28 After his death at age fifty-seven, his obituary remembered him as a “Fighter For the Rights of AIDS Patients.”29 His death notice described how Kuromiya “sat for hours at his computer in his tiny apartment making connections with patients, advocates, researchers, and policy makers around the world.”30 Kuromiya’s memorial service was held on May 23, 2000, at the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany in Center City, Philadelphia.31 The service brought together hundreds of people who had loved him and even owed their lives to him.
“If you want to honor Kiyoshi, we urge you to make a donation to the activist organization of your choice,” ACT UP’s death notice for Kuromiya stated. “And sometime soon, today, or tomorrow, or next week, take the opportunity to speak truth to power, join a picket line you might have passed by, or help plan a demonstration against global injustice that you thought you were too busy to be involved with. He would have liked that.”32
Today, Kuromiya is a Stonewall National Monument Inductee at the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor in New York. His name now stands alongside those of honorees such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and other revolutionaries.
Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Illustration by Lane Rick.
