Kepner, James

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KEPNER, James

KEPNER, James (b. 1923; d. 15 November 1997), writer, activist.

Los Angeles resident Jim Kepner was a major writer, activist, and intellectual in the gay rights movement for over four decades. Kepner's voice dominated the homophile press of the 1950s, shaping gay political identity in the McCarthy era. By the 1990s, Kepner had contributed over two thousand essays, articles, poems, and fictional stories to the gay press, which he wrote under several pseudonyms.

Born in January 1923, Kepner was discovered under an oleander bush in Galveston, Texas. Nine months later he was adopted by a strict, religious couple in an unhappy marriage. After graduating from high school near the top of his class, Kepner contemplated entering the clergy or the military but, as he became aware of his desire for other men, embraced atheism and pacifism instead. Looking for signs of gay life, Kepner worked odd jobs—as a factory worker, taxi driver, bookstore operator, soda jerk, and sand shoveler—for the next several years in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. While living in San Francisco in 1943, as Kepner prepared to enter a gay bar (The Black Cat) for the first time, a brutal police raid ensued, leaving him speechless and horrified across the street. The raid politicized Kepner, and he devoted the rest of his life to understanding and combating social injustice against gay and lesbian people.

Kepner was a prolific, skillful, and impulsive writer, but a literary focus eluded him for years. During the 1940s, Kepner wrote movie reviews for the Communist Party's Daily Worker and dabbled in science fiction. Kepner's experience with the Communist Party was mixed—it helped him conceive of gay people as an oppressed minority in the abstract, but the party expelled Kepner when his homosexuality was discovered. A similar scandal exiled Kepner from a network of science fiction discussion groups in San Francisco. Upon settling down in Los Angeles in 1951, Kepner gravitated to the homophile movement, attending his first Mattachine Foundation meeting in 1952. Although overjoyed to find a community of gay activists, Kepner found Mattachine's purge of former Communist Party members disturbing. Kepner's energy, personality, and writing talents found a warmer reception at the newly created ONE magazine, which, unlike Mattachine, required no loyalty oath denouncing past Communist Party affiliation.

ONE soon dominated Kepner's life, and Kepner's calm, analytical, yet outraged voice dominated the magazine for over a decade, as he wrote under pseudonyms such as Lyn Pedersen and Dal McIntire. His debut article, "The Importance of Being Different," appeared in March 1954 under the pseudonym Damon Pythias. Kepner's monthly roundup of gay news around the country, called "Tangents," was ONE's most popular feature during the 1950s. In addition to his work on the magazine, Kepner taught several classes at the ONE Institute, including one on homophile history and a popular seminar on Walt Whitman. Kepner also edited the ONE Institute's quarterly journal Homophile Studies. Kepner's historical writing, derived from years of tireless archival accumulation, established a framework for gay history adopted by most subsequent gay and lesbian historians, consciously or unconsciously. Although never accepted in the academic mainstream during his lifetime, Kepner deserves the distinction of being regarded as both the first U.S. gay historian and the first U.S. gay archivist.

During the 1960s, Kepner withdrew from ONE, Inc., as he was frustrated by its limitations, yet he was excited by the explosion of new gay publications. Aside from publishing several of his own newsletters, Kepner contributed regularly to the Advocate and numerous gay publications during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. A seasoned activist by the late 1960s, Kepner helped found several prominent gay liberation groups in Los Angeles, including PRIDE and the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. He also helped organize local contingents for mass marches on Washington, D.C. The soft-spoken Kepner claimed that his biggest frustration as an activist was watching groups be taken over by publicity-driven egomaniacs, resulting in his frequent resignations from groups he had helped start.

In 1972, Kepner opened the first official gay archive, the National Gay Archives (later renamed the International Lesbian and Gay Archives) in his Torrance, California, apartment and moved the collection to Hollywood shortly thereafter. Maintaining the collection and assisting scholars consumed his later years. Upon ONE colleague Dorr Legg's death in 1994, Kepner integrated his archive with the vast materials the ONE Institute accumulated over the years. When Kepner died at the age of seventy-three, his life's work was a core collection at the world's largest gay archive, the ONE Institute and Archive.