Kiyoshi Kuromiya: Intersectional Identity of a Sansei Gay Rights Activist

This article originally appeared in the Pacific Citizen 2024 Holiday Issue.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya (1943-2000) was a Sansei activist born at the Heart Mountain concentration camp during World War II. As a follow-up to the recent article offering a behind-the-scenes look at the new biopic documentary being produced on his life, this article will offer a brief summary of Kuromiya’s many accomplishments as an activist who devoted his life to multiple causes including civil rights, gay rights, and the antiwar movement.

Born as Steven Kiyoshi Kuromiya to Nisei parents Hiroshi and Amiko, Kuromiya was the eldest of three and first of two children born in the hospital complex at Heart Mountain. There he spent the first two-and-a-half years of his life in a 20x20 foot apartment that housed a total of seven family members until the war ended.

Upon their release the Kuromiya first resettled in Ohio before making their way back to Monrovia, California in 1946 where Kiyoshi and his siblings were raised. Now a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, Monrovia was a mix of rural farm country and suburban housing complexes that were built during Kuromiya’s adolescence in the postwar years.

Kuromiya realized that he was gay early in life, as he detailed in a 1983 interview with Gay Liberation Front member Tommi Mecca. Kuromiya shared, “I guess I first came out when I was about eight or nine years old in California, at least came out in terms of my parents. I realized I was attracted to boys and men. I was curious because there was absolutely nothing written down about it and it certainly wasn't something that I could talk about. I would hear the usual pejorative kinds of stuff. And that would shake me up a little, but I didn't really identify with it necessarily. Easily identified with the racial stuff, being Japanese and having rocks thrown at you on your way to grade school, that kind of thing.”

From this early age Kuromiya knew that being gay was an important part of his identity, even if he did not have the words to describe it. In 1955 Kuromiya was arrested for consorting with another boy in a public park in Monrovia, and was sent to juvenile detention for three days as punishment. Kuromiya recalled in a 1997 interview, “They said, "Well gee, we've never seen a Japanese American here.” The judge told Kuromiya and his parents that he was in danger of leading a lewd and immoral life. Kuromiya continued reminiscing, “I kept looking up the word lewd in the dictionary and not knowing how to spell it, I could never find it. So I didn’t know what kind of life I had in store for me.”

After graduating from high school, Kuromiya decided to try his luck on the other side of the country in the city of Philadelphia, in part because it was known as the “city of brotherly love.” There he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and began studying architecture at a time when both Louis Kahn and Buckminster Fuller were members of the teaching faculty. Kuromiya elaborates, “I came to Philadelphia because in 1961 there was a movement happening that, at that time, they referred to as the biggest movement in architecture since the Chicago School in the 1890s. And they were mostly students of Louis Kahn, who was at the University of Pennsylvania. So I decided to go to Penn. I was one of six people in the entering class that were designated Benjamin Franklin National Scholars. So I had virtually everything paid for. I had food and entertainment allowances, two round trips to California, housing, and tuition. So it was a very large scholarship that virtually covered everything. And I felt really lucky, 'cause only six of us in the entering class of 1500 got it.”

In addition to exploring the metropolitan culture that Philadelphia offered in great contrast to his native Monrovia, Kuromiya came into contact with large numbers of Black Americans for the first time, which greatly expanded his racial consciousness. By 1962 he had joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and began participating in restaurant sit-ins and other non-violent direct actions. Kuromiya recalls one incident that was captured by a New York Times reporter, “I had been in the sit-ins in November of 1962 on Route 40 in Maryland. We had been chased out of restaurants and bars there. And played God Bless America endlessly on the jukebox while they were refusing to serve us… we played it over and over. They finally unplugged the jukebox. The New York Times reporter gave me half of his grilled cheese sandwich. I broke it into little pieces and passed it down. And we were all eating these grilled cheese sandwiches. That's when the management got really angry. They were giving out free beer to all the townspeople. And it looked like it might get seriously dangerous so we left. The roads were icy. They chased us down the roads and cars were sliding all over the highway.”

In Philadelphia, Kuromiya became increasingly involved with CORE, and was invited to attend the 1963 March on Washington. Kuromiya remembered, “In '63, I flew with Hollywood entertainers in a chartered plane from Burbank Airport to Washington for the March on Washington. I sat next to Mark Crawford, who was foreign editor of Ebony magazine. All the bars were closed in Washington that day and so we went to all the Black clubs. So I was in all the Black clubs, hearing the talk on the day of the March on Washington. I stood maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty feet in front of King when he made the "I Have a Dream" speech.” Following the rally, Kuromiya would accompany Mark Crawford to the Willard Hotel where they met James Baldwin for drinks and a chat. There in the lobby of the hotel he also met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Reverend Ralph Abernathy.

Recognizing aspects of his own struggle in the civil rights movement, Kuromiya recalls, “I felt a common bond with the people who were struggling for what seemed to be an inalienable right.” Kuromiya devoted himself to increasingly public displays of civil disobedience including a sit-in at the foot of the liberty bell later in 1963 and a full takeover of Independence Hall in March 1965. The Independence Hall action was done in support of the people injured at Pettus Bridge during the Bloody Sunday incident that took place at the first failed march to Selma.

Following his leadership in this action, Kuromiya was invited to join a group of protestors organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to help protect local high school students who were doing voter registration work in Alabama. With unlikely help from Duke Ellington, they were able to charter a plane that brought them there. Kuromiya recalls, “there was a jazz concert at Academy of Music. Duke Ellington… He gave us a hundred dollars that started it off. Sloppy White put us on stage, they passed the hat, we got seventeen hundred dollars and within two hours we were at Coatesville Airport, chartering a six-passenger plane and the pilot. We went down in this little plane. I sat in the co-pilot seat… And a couple days later, I was leading a group of Black high school students on the state capital building in Montgomery.”

This led to one of the more notable stories in Kuromiya’s civil rights movement career, when he was separated from the group and badly beaten by white supremacists riding on horseback. “I was surrounded by the sheriff's volunteer posse. They were specifically going after me. They cornered me against the wall and clubbed me on the head. I had twenty stitches down my head. They carted me off. The last thing people saw was me with a blood-soaked shirt down to my waist.”

Kuromiya was taken to St. Margaret’s Hospital in Montgomery where they kept him under police guard and refused to share any information on his condition with the public. Kuromiya recalls, “In the hospital, the doctors wanted to throw me out, but there was a male nurse there from Long Beach, California. I don't know his name, but he was gay and he held my hand. And when the doctors weren't looking, he gave me a list of media that were trying to call me. And he wheeled me on a gurney out to the hallway, and I made all these media calls, told my parents I'm alive. They had a camera crew in the living room at the time.” Larry Kuromiya, Kiyoshi’s surviving brother separately confirmed this part of the anecdote, sharing how alarmed his parents were when local news crew showed up at their house and began asking questions about his condition.

In another interview recorded in 1994, Kuromiya reflects, “When you get treated this way, you suddenly know what it is like to be a Black in Mississippi or a peasant in Vietnam.” More incredible still was that upon hearing how this young Japanese American put his body on the line for Black voting rights, MLK Jr. and Reverend Abernathy came to the hospital to represent Kuromiya. He recounts, “the next day we confronted Sheriff Butler in Montgomery… he accused me of going after him with a knife and brought a pair of pants with a slice down it and said we have videotapes. That's not true. Then he apologized and we got a statement out of him which was drafted by King and myself. And King said, "This is the very first time a southern sheriff had apologized for injuring a civil rights worker." Well anyway, the following day, President Johnson federalized the Alabama State National Guard to protect the Selma to Montgomery March.” In a fourth attempt resulting in the final successful march, Kuromiya joined the color guard, marching one row behind Dr. King.

Later that year, Kuromiya’s activist focus would undergo a major shift as he began publicly demonstrating with Philadelphia’s first gay rights organization called the East Coast Homophile Organizations. “I knew what it felt like to be arrested, I knew what it felt like to be beaten, so I wasn’t afraid to challenge authority when the issues were gay, rather than race.” On July 4, 1965, Kuromiya attended a demonstration that would later become known as the first Independence Hall Annual Reminder, Kuromiya inadvertently outed himself to many of his antiwar comrades who happened to be demonstrating on the same day. He recalled, “there was a large antiwar march, 250 people. I knew every single person in that march. And I was in the march with twelve of us.”

Over the next few years Kuromiya continued to participate in a myriad of civil rights, gay rights, and antiwar protests. Another of his famed anecdotes came from the latter when Kuromiya staged a major antiwar protest at the University of Pennsylvania in April 1968. To achieve this feat, Kuromiya first spread disinformation flyers stating that in protest of the horrors of using napalm on humans, there was going to be a demonstration in front of the Van Pelt Library where a dog would be napalmed. Kuromiya explains, “So, of course, the mayor, the police chief, everybody said whoever was perpetrating this would spend a long time in jail... The day showed up and at noontime there were four ambulances from four different veterinary schools there... There were 2000 people.” When the appointed time came, Kuromiya and his collaborators distributed a second flyer that read, “Congratulations, you've saved the life of an innocent dog. How about the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese that have been burned alive? What are you going to do about it?”

Later that year Kuromiya was arrested and charged with “inciting a crime with lewd and indecent materials” for publishing a poster that showed a man burning his draft card and read, “F*ck the Draft.” Despite this setback, Kuromiya distributed several thousand posters to demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago.

Another turning point in Kuromiya’s activist journey occurred with the Stonewall Riots in June 1969. Following decades of violent police raids on gay bars in New York City’s Greenwich Village, the community fought back over several nights for their right to openly congregate. In the aftermath several prominent New York gay rights groups were established, including the Gay Liberation Front. Kuromiya would become a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front Philadelphia and had an increasingly public presence within the gay rights movement.

Up until this point, Kuromiya’s association with the gay rights movement had been largely separate from his race consciousness work. The militant nature of the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front brought new intersections into the movement, as Kuromiya remembers, “I don't think I saw any people of color in the early days at all. I'm trying to think. There may have been at the East Coast Homophile Organizations conferences, but they certainly weren't in a prominent place there… And that's why when Gay Liberation Front was formed in 1969, we were particularly proud because we had a significant proportion of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians.”

Kuromiya’s GLF work continued to blur the lines between gay rights and racial justice as he was invited to attend the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in 1970 when it was held at Temple University in Philadelphia. There he spoke as the official spokesperson to the Gay Liberation Front, where he organized a session titled the Male Homosexual Workshop. Kuromiya remembers, “we were at a national meeting for the first time as openly gay men presenting an agenda of demands to the country at large. People looked around, they had never seen a group of organized homosexuals before, and we were marching and chanting, “Ho-ho-homosexuals, right on!” They looked around and said, “what is happening?” I felt a sense of pride.”

While his activist work continued, Kuromiya’s life took a significant detour when he was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer in 1974. Miraculously he survived, and by 1977 was declared cancer free. This near-death experienced segued into one of the most prolific periods of Kuromiya’s work life, when he began a writing partnership with techno-utopian Buckminster Fuller. Kuromiya biographer Che Gossett elaborates on the origins of their partnership. “In 1977, while hospitalized with metastatic cancer, Kuromiya met Buckminster Fuller. This meeting began a collaboration that lasted the rest of Fuller’s life, but also initiated a critical intimacy that extended beyond Fuller’s death, through the posthumous editing, care and publication of his work, as well as his relationship with the extended family.” Indeed, Kuromiya would spend the rest of Fuller’s life until he passed in 1983 in his employ. Together they traveled worldwide as Kuromiya worked on several of Fuller’s books during his last six years of life, one of which was published close to a decade after his death in 1992. The nature of their creative partnership has been the subject of much debate, further complicated by the title of “adjuvant” given to describe Kuromiya’s role.

In the foreword to Fuller’s 1992 book, Cosmography, Kuromiya provides the following description of his role in a short section titled “Note from the adjuvant.” Kuromiya writes, “All of the vocabulary and concepts originate in Fuller’s mind, and the way they are phrased is his. I have served as adjuvant, a term Fuller borrowed from medicine (specifically immunology) in 1980 to designate my role in the writing of Critical path — that of a “helper” in transcribing and editorially refining for publication his ideas, words, and extemporaneous ‘thinking out loud.’ In Cosmography, as in Critical path, I have served in this Fuller-designated role to preserve the idiosyncratic concepts, tone, syntax, and phraseology of Fuller in preparing the manuscript for publication. If it has strayed at all from his original conception, the blame is mine. If it is a faithful representation of his methodology and thought, the credit goes to him.”

Longtime friend and fellow gay rights activist David Acosta has suggested that Kuromiya was being overly modest in this note, offering the following praise, “the only reason why any of us could understand Fuller is because Kiyoshi was the one who wrote it.” While the exact nature of their working relationship may never be known, it is clear that this time working with Fuller was of great importance to Kuromiya, helping to further hone his approach to strategic thinking within the context of activism. Che Gossett offers further analysis on the impact of Fuller’s thinking within Kuromiya’s last stage of activism. “Rather than merely recycle Fuller’s grand technocratic and utopian visions of planetary scale, Kuromiya democratized Fuller’s ideas through a scientific and technological praxis rooted in AIDS activism.”

Borrowing the title from a book that he collaborated on with Fuller, Kuromiya began publishing the Critical Path Newsletter in 1987. By this time the AIDS crisis had been in full swing for the better part of a decade since the early 1980s. Kuromiya suspected that he had contracted HIV as early as 1984, although he was not diagnosed with AIDS until 1989. Kuromiya was deeply involved in AIDS activism in a period when even some medical professionals refused to treat HIV-positive patients. A founding member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) Philadelphia, Kuromiya dedicated the remaining years of his life to learning as much as he could about HIV/AIDS treatment and sharing that information with anyone who could benefit from it.

Published monthly, the Critical Path Newsletter included up-to-date treatment plans that in many cases were recorded by Kuromiya himself, who began attending medical conferences around the world. What began as a newsletter would grow into a free medical journal and eventually evolved into a 24-hour hotline, computer bulletin board, and website that provided the latest information about HIV/AIDS and experimental treatment plans. Perhaps because of the time he spent working with Fuller, Kuromiya had an incredible knack for interpreting medical jargon into common language that anyone could understand. While traveling to conferences, Kuromiya would share updates from his hotel bedroom, where he frequently traveled with a computer, modem, and fax machine. His work in the HIV/AIDS space led to two landmark Supreme Court cases initiated by Kuromiya in the last decade of his life.  

In 1997 Kuromiya’s Critical Path AIDS Project was the lead plaintiff in a class action suit Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, which succeeded in striking down parts of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that had banned sex education as indecent speech, such as the guide to safe sex on Critical Path’s website. By successfully overturning parts of the legislation, Kuromiya and his fellow plaintiffs helped to safeguard freedom of speech on the internet. Two years later in 1999 Kuromiya led a second, unsuccessful, class action suit titled Kuromiya v. United States. Kuromiya and over 150 other plaintiffs attempted to sue the federal government over access to medical marijuana in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. While this effort was ultimately unsuccessful, it did open the conversation on a national scale about the effectiveness of medical marijuana in stimulating appetite and other medical benefits as part of a comprehensive treatment plan.

Speaking about his own relationship to medical marijuana, Kuromiya shared in a 1997 interview, “I operate a cannabis buyer's club here. I have maybe forty clients, including not only persons with AIDS wasting syndrome, but three clients with multiple sclerosis, two with reflex ampithetic dystrophy. No available medications help them with their conditions and the marijuana helps very well. One person with recent brain surgery that has constant headaches can't sleep and this helps him also… Of course I don't charge anything for marijuana so I'm very different from any of the cannabis buyer's clubs in California, where they did pass the law. I can't afford marijuana at their prices, but it was harder and harder to get it, so we had to go to European sources for ours, which is donated. And we've been operating for three and a half years.”

In the last decade of his life, Kuromiya’s South Philadelphia apartment became a safe haven for many people suffering the end stages of AIDS. ACT UP Philadelphia member Jane Shull recalls, “Kiyoshi often had people living with him who were sick. Sometimes some unlikely and unlikable human beings would land in Kiyoshi’s space. Kiyoshi would care for them so that those individuals would not end up dying alone someplace. He also had a cabinet with AIDS drugs of people who had died. People would give him the leftover drugs and you could go and get them if you couldn’t afford them.”

Alas, even a larger-than-life figure like Kuromiya was not immune to the terminal prognosis of his illness. After a more than decade-long battle with AIDS, Kuromiya succumbed to complications of cancer on May 10, 2000, just one day after his 57th birthday. In his last weeks of life, Kuromiya received round-the-clock care from a core group of his closest friends and activist comrades. Shortly after he was declared dead, a lightning bolt lit up the sky followed by a momentous thunderclap, taken as a final sign of his electrifying presence by all those who knew him.

Kuromiya’s contributions are far more numerous than the brief summary presented here in this article, and thus it is shocking that more Japanese Americans are not aware of his vast legacy. His story is not well-known in the Japanese American community outside of Philadelphia. Kuromiya was a complicated person with a nuanced and intersectional identity made up of many components, as we all are. While he was anecdotally known among the small Japanese American population in Philadelphia, Kuromiya did not seem to involve himself with the JACL Philadelphia Chapter or other Japanese American community organizations. Perhaps this is because he spent most of his activist career in coalition spaces whose membership did not include a majority of Japanese or other Asian Americans.

It is also important to note that until the 1980s, Asian Americans made up less than 1% of the total population in Philadelphia. That number increased to just over 4% at the time of Kuromiya’s death in 2000, so there were less Asian Americans to organize with in his home city compared to the West Coast, and fewer still who were openly queer and organizing in non-Asian majority coalition spaces. Perhaps compounded by the homophobia that was present during much of his life, particularly in Japanese American community spaces, Kuromiya did not seem to associate himself with the Asian American movement that was taking place in Philadelphia at that time. For these myriad reasons, Kuromiya is not well-known in Asian American civil rights history despite his outsized presence in many pivotal moments.

Although this may explain why his story is not known among a national Japanese American audience, it is evident that Kuromiya attributed to his Japanese American ethnicity within his intersectional identity that informed his activism. This can be stated with confidence thanks to a few key discoveries during the production process of the new documentary film about his life.

While conducting research for Kuromiya’s biography, Che Gossett discovered a collection of unused video interviews featuring Kuromiya in the NY Public Library collection that were recorded in the early 1990s about the history of ACT UP. These interviews alongside additional footage taken in the years before his death will be central to the film’s narrative, enabling Kuromiya to tell his story in his own words. It was in this ACT UP footage that Kuromiya says, “I was a born felon. I was born in a U.S. concentration camp in Heart Mountain Wyoming, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans. And not because of any crime, but because of race.” Kuromiya goes on to explain how he felt his origins in Heart Mountain set him on the path toward activism.

The significance of Kuromiya’s Japanese American identity was also confirmed by longtime friend and movement comrade David Acosta, who shared during his interview that, “after two drinks Kiyoshi would always bring up Heart Mountain. It was very important to him that he never forgot where he came from.”

The last piece of evidence, which might be considered the “smoking gun” was a discovery that took place during our first day of shooting at the William Way LGBT Center on what would have been Kuromiya’s 80th birthday on May 9, 2023. After commemorating his birthday with a City Council proclamation and birthday cake, William Way archivist John Anderies pulled a selection of artifacts from the Kuromiya collection for our perusal. Among these were a photo album showing the 1983 trip that Kuromiya took with his mother to one of the very first Heart Mountain Pilgrimages. 

In one of his responses during the 1997 interview with Mark Stein for Philadelphia LGBT History Project that was extensively quoted throughout this article, Kuromiya opens up about the impact that camp had on Japanese Americans and his own activism. “Well I don't remember a thing about Heart Mountain, although in 1983 my mother and I visited the site of this concentration camp, which the government called a relocation center for Japanese Americans during World War Two, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. I am fascinated with that part of history and I'm sure it affected my own activism and my own attitudes toward our government, war, racial issues.”

Remarking on how his parents spoke about their wartime ideal, Kuromiya continues, “They call it the camp days. And generally it's treated sort of like, "Let's not dwell on the ugly side of it." It's sort of like, "Well that's something we accepted and it was our own little thing and we don't make a big deal out of it," although a few people did and consequently reparations were paid to survivors, about two-thirds of the people who were still alive in 1992. We were given twenty thousand dollars. I got my twenty thousand dollars grant in 1992.”

Shortly after receiving his Redress check, Kuromiya would begin the last stage of his activist career, devoting his remaining years to the Critical Path AIDS Project. Kuromiya even invested some of his own Redress compensation into the Critical Path project. In this way, Kuromiya’s story and legacy of activism is bookended by the important milestones of camp, pilgrimage, and Redress – like so many Sansei of his generation.

Let us remember Kiyoshi Kuromiya among the cadre of Japanese American civil rights pioneers. The work he did extended far beyond the typical definition of a Japanese American activist, and yet his pathway to activism and views on racial justice are rooted in the same shared experiences of the community. Although Kuromiya was not celebrated as such during his life, it is high time that we reclaim him as one of our own.

To learn more about Kiyoshi Kuromiya and support the crowdfunding campaign for the upcoming documentary feature film about his life, please visit: https://gofund.me/4ef0a8fe