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Title: Ron Wyatt and Stan Thomson papers
Dates: 1946-2011
Collection Number: 2022-13
Creator/Collector:
Wyatt, Ron
Thomson, Stan
Extent: 1.25 linear feet (two manuscript boxes)
Repository:
GLBT Historical Society
San Francisco, California 94103
Abstract: Stan Thomson and Ron Wyatt were a gay couple who lived together for many years in San Francisco. Their relationship appears
to have begun in the Bahamas, where they both lived in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, they moved to San Francisco and bought
a Victorian house at 12 Eugenia Street, which they furnished elaborately in period style. The collection contains extensive
correspondence with family and friends, as well as real estate documents, legal documents, and photographs.
Language of Material: English
Collection is open for research.
Copyright to material has been transferred to the GLBT Historical Society. All requests for reproductions and/or permission
to publish or quote from material must be submitted in writing to the GLBT Historical Society Archivist.
[Identification of item]. Ron Wyatt and Stan Thomson papers. Collection Number: 2022-13. GLBT Historical Society
The collection was donated to the GLBT Historical Society by Michael Brown in October 2021.
Biography/Administrative History
Stan Thomson and Ron Wyatt were a gay couple who lived together for many years in San Francisco. Their relationship appears
to have begun in the Bahamas, where they both lived in the 1950s and worked as freelance astrologers. In the early 1960s,
they moved to San Francisco and bought a Victorian house at 12 Eugenia Street. The house was extravagantly decorated, with
ornate furniture, hardbound books, and musical instruments, including a pipe organ built into the living room wall. After
Wyatt’s death in the 1980s, Thomson was unable to maintain the house, and it fell into dereliction. The materials in this
collection were salvaged after Thomson’s death by his neighbor, Darril Hudson, whose papers are at the Historical Society
as collection #2021-17.
Most of the papers in this collection pertain to Wyatt, who had a Ph.D. and literary aspirations (some of his poetry was published
in the 1950s; his only known novel, Egypt Jones, Esq., was never published and is presumed lost). Some of his voluminous correspondence
alludes to his fiction, on which he often sought the advice of G.M. White, an assistant editor at Psychiatric Quarterly. It
appears that Wyatt was interested in translating psychiatric concepts into his writing, in keeping with the midcentury vogue
for psychiatry as a way of understanding the world; he also approached writing about homosexuality through this lens. Wyatt
appears to have been born out of wedlock and adopted. Although he carried on a campy correspondence with screenwriter and
Air Force reservist Margo Layne Brown, who signs herself as his mother, he also kept letters about his unsuccessful search
for his birth mother. An “Ode to Bastardy,” attributed to Wyatt’s pseudonym “Baron Pupsick,” is among his papers; it provides
a glimpse of Wyatt’s personality and literary style.
Scope and Content of Collection
The collection contains extensive correspondence with family and friends, as well as real estate and legal documents, photographs,
and Thomson’s high school and college yearbooks. The correspondence is the most extensive part of the collection, and reveals
that both men were in touch with their families, who were aware of their relationship. Other correspondence comes from both
gay and straight friends, all of whom seem to have known and been comfortable with Wyatt and Thomson as a couple. Of particular
note are Wyatt’s correspondence with G.M. White at Psychiatric Quarterly, his letters from Margo Layne Brown, letters from
the Bahamanian doctor and memoirist Dr. Evans Cottman, and his World War II-era correspondence with a gay serviceman friend,
who signed himself “Nicolai III” and maintained the conceit that he and Wyatt were Russian noblemen in exile. A small amount
of the correspondence is addressed to a gay couple, referred to as “the Davids,” whose relationship to Wyatt and Thomson is
unknown. Other documents in the collection include leases, material on Thomson’s service in the U.S. Marines, business correspondence,
auction receipts for the couple’s elaborate Victorian furnishings, and evidence that the two men owned their property together.
The collection’s photographs consist of personal snapshots, largely from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as physique photographs
and other images of men.
Historic preservation
Literature
Long-term relationships
Non-monogamous relationships
Veterans