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HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Local & State

June 9, 2005, 11:44PM

City's leading gay activist will let others take reins

PROFILE

By ALLAN TURNER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

IN HIS HONOR

• What: The Well Deserved Roast of Ray Hill
• When: Today, 7:30 p.m.
• Where: 1415 Grill at 1415 California
• Sponsor: Stonewall Law Association of Greater Houston and the Houston GLBT Community Center
• Proceeds: To benefit the center's programs for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people

With a verbal zing honed as a teenage evangelist, a craftiness born of a successful but truncated career as a jewel thief and a feline-quick ability to read human nature gained from years in prison, Ray Hill has been a shaper of Houston's campaign for gay and lesbian rights for more than four decades.

He has seen the movement emerge from the closet to establish a network of social, health and educational services, put an openly homosexual candidate in city office and gain a coveted seat in public policy debates.

Now, with the approach of Gay Pride Week — it starts June 18 with a gay rights strategy session and ends June 25 with a festival and parade — Hill has vowed to relinquish his role as the movement's most visible spokesman.

Hill's extended activist career irreverently will be celebrated today at "The Well Deserved Roast of Ray Hill," set for 7:30 p.m. at the 1415 Grill, 1415 California. Sponsored by the Stonewall Law Association of Greater Houston and the Houston GLBT Community Center, proceeds will benefit the center's programs for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people.

"I'm just going to leave it to another generation to take on those responsibilities," said Hill, 64. "I've spent 40 years in the movement, first as the first openly gay political activist in Houston, then for years as someone who exercised more influence on decisions than anyone should."

Hill cited health concerns and a desire to develop his career as a monologuist and prison activist as reasons for stepping aside.

"I meant to do this a long time ago," he said earlier this week. "I raised a generation to take my place and they all died of AIDS. Now there's another generation ready to step in. Most of them are women. They are every color of the rainbow — black, brown, Christian, Jew, Muslim, nonbelievers, and they speak a cacophony of languages. They are better able to represent this diversity than I."

The son of a small-time local politician and a union organizer mother, Hill began his career as a teenage evangelist, exhorting the faithful on an East Texas circuit of primitive Baptist churches. By the time he graduated from a Galena Park high school, he had acknowledged his homosexuality.

After graduation, Hill attended a series of colleges but never obtained a degree. Supporting himself as a car and shoe salesman, in the late 1960s Hill turned to high-ticket burglaries to support a lavish lifestyle. In 1970, he was arrested in San Diego and extradited to Texas. He was sentenced to 160 years in prison for eight burglaries.

Hill was released in 1975, returning to Houston, where he again became involved in gay and lesbian activism. A founder of what is now the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, Hill said the watershed event in the movement's infancy was a mass protest of an appearance by stridently anti-homosexual singer Anita Bryant in June 1977.

Hill was assigned to maintain communication with police as approximately 12,000 protesters converged on the downtown hotel at which Bryant was appearing.

"We were angry," Hill said. "For the first time in our lives we were out of the closet.

"It was a spiritual moment," he said. "but we didn't have any institutions to sustain the community. All we had were bars, and those bars were different from the taverns of American independence. They were very, very different bars — dark, and made for cruising, not discourse. We needed institutions desperately, and in 1978 we called Town Meeting I."

Out of that forum, of which Hill was an organizer, came groups such as the Montrose Counseling Center, the Montrose Activity Center, the Montrose Clinic, the Gay and Lesbian Switchboard and the Gay Hispanic Caucus. Hill was a founding member of many of those organizations.

The community center's Christopher Bown described Hill as a leader who maintained his activist edge while cultivating contacts with community leaders.

"Ray is someone you would call at 3 o'clock in the morning when someone was dying on the sidewalk and the ambulance wouldn't pick him up because he had AIDS," Bown said. "Ray has the respect of the GLBT. He would call the police chief or the mayor, and they would know this wasn't some lunatic. They'd know he had a legitimate problem that needed to be solved.

"That's what Ray is — he's the person who solved those problems. He stepped on toes, but he didn't stomp. He just nudged them along."

Longtime transgender activist Phyllis Fry described Hill as one of five people she implicitly could trust.

"He and I have been marching side by side for 30 years," Fry said. "I recognize that he's said he'll retire, but that's just a phrase. I see him more in an emeritus role. He'll always be there as a resource, keeping his touch on the pulse of the community."

Hill now is an organizer of the June 18 Conference for the Futures of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersexed, Questioning and Allied Residents of the Houston Metropolitan Area at the George R. Brown Convention Center, an event that is billed as a second GLBT town meeting to draft the movement's 21st-century strategies.

In tandem with his GLBT activism, Hill was involved in the founding of Pacifica's KPFT-FM and became a leading Texas spokesman for prison reform. For 25 years, he has hosted the weekly Prison Show on KPFT.

In recent years, Hill has launched a career as a monologuist, writing several one-man productions dealing with his years in prison, his work as a First Amendment champion for adult bookstores and other aspects of his life.

Hill recently returned from Philadelphia, where he performed his initial work, Ray Hill: The Prison Years.

"I certainly have all these stories that come out — the fascinating grail of my life," Hill said. "In The Prison Years, I ultimately go to the mirror. I see what I have become in my compromises to succeed in prison. We all do that. We build our prisons. Everyone makes compromises, and the viewers need to come with me to the mirror to see what that has made of them."