Prescott Townsend was a classic Boston Brahmin. He was born into Boston’s elite in 1894, graduated from Harvard, and served in World War I. All signs pointed to a very conventional path through life, but Townsend’s trajectory would take him far from the arc followed by his contemporaries from the Cabot, Lowell, or Adams families. Instead, Prescott Townsend would be active in radical theater, experimental architecture, and, surprisingly late in his life, he would help found the American gay liberation movement and lead the first Pride parade in 1970.
Bohemian Boston’s Gay Grampa
- Townsend’s profile in Before Stonewall, by Charles Shively
- Mark Krone’s profile of Townsend for Boston Spirit
- Townsend and his Navy buddies take over Block Island
- The images below via Historic New England
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of the American Culture, by Douglass Shand-Tucci, which we’ll also reference throughout this week’s main story. Shand-Tucci grew up in Dorchester, graduated from Harvard, and went on to become a prominent historian of Boston and Boston’s architecture. His best known work might be The Art of the Scandal, a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardener, but he also wrote books on the architecture of Harvard, a multi-volume biography of architect Ralph Adams Cram, and a study of Boston’s architectural history, including a spirited defense of Boston’s trademark triple deckers.
Published in 2003, The Crimson Letter delves into Harvard University’s complex relationship with its LGBTQ students and faculty over the past 160 years. The work focuses on Harvard, but as the subtitle suggests, Harvard has an outsized influence on Boston, and especially during the last century, on American culture as a whole. The book opens with an 1860 conversation between Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson about Emerson’s misgivings about Leaves of Grass, and follows a thread that stretches from Oscar Wilde through John Singer Sargent to Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copeland.
Publishers Weekly said,
What Shand-Tucci (The Art of Scandal) attempts here is nothing less than a re-evaluation of American culture by looking at how it was shaped by Harvard-connected gay men. From Ralph Waldo Emerson (in love with fellow student Martin Gay) and Henry James (who apparently first had sex with Oliver Wendell Holmes) to poet Frank O’Hara and artist Edward Gory, who were student roommates, Shand-Tucci weaves together history, criticism and gossip to show how many of the sons of Harvard were not only gay but major culture machers.
In their review, the New York Times said,
”The Crimson Letter” begins with letter burnings, flights by night, a witch hunt: a gay scandal in 1960. Shand-Tucci presents homosexuality as Harvard’s hidden history, and he moves from the personal and precise — almost confessional — tone of his introduction to an account of the institution itself. But this institution is not only the university in Cambridge, for ”Harvard, whatever lens you look at it through, is above all an American story.” Gay Harvard, for Shand-Tucci, is the story of modern America.
After we first started learning about Prescott Townsend’s fascinating life, almost every article we came across pointed back to Shand Tucci’s book. Since the author was a lifetime resident of Boston, spending most of that time in the Back Bay, we had high hopes of interviewing him about his research on Mr Townsend. Alas, we were too late. Douglass Shand-Tucci passed away in April. His obituaries in the Globe and Dorchester Reporter.
Upcoming Event
And for our upcoming event this week, we have a free talk presented by the Massachusetts Historical Society that will actually be presented at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge. Historians, archivists, and public health professionals from Radcliffe, UMass, and Harvard Medical School will come together to speak on the topic of “transgender history and archives, an interdisciplinary conversation.”
Here’s the description from the MHS website:
This panel aims to begin an interdisciplinary conversation in transgender history. What is the state of the field of transgender studies in history, archiving, and public health? How do changes in popular usage and attitudes about terminology facilitate or hinder research? In what ways does transgender studies intersect with women’s and gender history and other feminist scholarly concerns?
Unlike most of our upcoming events, this one comes with homework. On the event listing, there are recommended readings, so attendees can come prepared to participate in the conversation. While the readings are optional, registration is required.