by Robert "Cove" Croonquist

John Lyon Burnside III was born November 2, 1916, in Seattle and died peacefully on September 14, 2008, at home in San Francisco surrounded by the Circle of Loving Companions. He was recently diagnosed with glioblastoma brain cancer.

Our Candide is dead. John Burnside lived in “the best of all possible worlds” which he viewed through the lens of a deep and abiding faerie spirit.

John joined the Navy at 16, studied physics and mathematics at UCLA and graduated in 1945. He was an aeronautical engineer and a staff scientist at Lockheed. He resigned from that position and invented a kaleidoscope he called the Teleidoscope. It differed from previous kaleidoscopes because it created its mandala images from whatever was placed in front of it. John started California Kaleidoscopes and was able to run a modestly lucrative business that garnered public enthusiasm and press coverage.

He had a liberal and aesthetic personality and a wide range of interests and knowledge. He studied modern dance with Bella Lewtizky. He was, according to Hay biographer Stuart Timmons, “inquisitive and precise” and an “attentive listener” who was as discursive as Harry.

John was raised in Seattle by a mother who, out of economic necessity, left him in an orphanage for periods of his early childhood. In his ever-cheery nature, which was mischievously called “pathologically optimistic” by his loving companions, John said it was a wonderful childhood full of loving people who did their best for a little boy they hardly knew. He had an unhappy early homosexual encounter that made him suppress his nature, and married Edith Sinclair, a German immigrant. He described their childless marriage as “not unhappy” but his inner life “cursed” until he visited ONE Institute which he had heard about from some gay employees in his factory. It was then, October 6, 1963, he met Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society. John was four years younger than Harry.

Together John and Harry were involved in many of the gay movement’s key moments. In May of 1966 the two were part of a 15-car motorcade through downtown Los Angeles protesting the military’s exclusion of homosexuals. The event is considered one of the country’s first gay protest marches.

John and Harry appeared as a gay couple on the Joe Pyne television show in Los Angeles in 1967, two years before the Stonewall riots in New York. In 1969 they participated in the founding meetings of the Southern California Gay Liberation Front, which met in John’s teleidoscope factory.

Drawn by Harry’s lifelong interest in Native American culture and a shared involvement with the Indian Land and Life Committee, in May of 1970 they moved to San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, where they lived, got to know every Indian dance and festival and supported themselves with Cal Kal until they lost the business and the flag Harry’s great-uncle carried at Wounded Knee in a fire. John picked himself up and invented a new kaleidoscopic device that could project images onto a screen and called it a Symmetricon. In New Mexico they involved themselves in a water rights issue in which Harry was the chief strategist. The Rio Grande was kept from being dammed by the federal government.

In 1978 Harry and John moved to Los Angeles to create the Radical Faeries with Jungian psychotherapist Mitch Walker and Don Kilhefner, who served in the Peace Corps, worked for SNCC and who was a leader of the Gay Liberation Front. In the fall of 1988 Betty Barzan invited Hay, Walker and Kilhefner give a workshop at the Gay Academic Union annual conference. In the workshop, “New Breakthroughs in the Nature of How We Perceive Gay Consciousness” they passed a talisman and invited people to share personal, subjective concerns. Such consciousness was arising in many places, but the conference and the subsequent “call to gay brothers” to “A Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries” at the Sri Ram Ashram in the White Mountains of Arizona, was a watershed and the Radical Faeries were born.

John published a short essay in 1989 titled Who are the Gay People, that helped explain his views of Gay people’s role in the world. John writes, “The crown of Gay being is a way of loving, of reaching to love in a way that far transcends the common mode.”

John lived with Harry in Los Angeles from 1978 until 1999, when it became apparent that they needed the support of a community to continue to live independently. They moved to San Francisco where Harry lived fully until his death in 2002 at the age of 90 and where John continued to live, in the loving world of the faeries and the Circle of Loving Companions that had formed with and around them. When I would call he was “off to tea” or having some lovely faerie play the guitar at a small salon in his home.

I became aware of John long before I ever knew his name. In 1965 Harry and John formed a group called The Circle of Loving Companions. People wondered that they could make a circle since more often than not it was a circle of two, but that never bothered these visionaries, and their foresight was proven prescient as numerous Circles of Loving Companions now exist as a result. In 1966-1970, as the Vietnam War escalated and Flower Power came into full bloom, I was a college undergraduate in the Bay Area. In the free news weeklies like The Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Oracle were advertisements for draft counseling for 4-F homosexual exemptions from military service by a group in New Mexico called the Circle of Loving Companions. Although I never needed their services, I put it in my mind to make a pilgrimage to meet the Circle. 30 years later, after I had participated in many heart circles with Harry and John and had become part of a loving circle of faeries with them, I found out that they were the Circle of Loving Companions I had dreamed one day of meeting.

One of the first films to attempt to portray the diverse lives of gay people beyond the stereotype of the bitchy queens of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band and Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness was Peter Adair’s 1977 Word Is Out. Tede Matthews of our commune at 529 Castro was featured as was an “older” couple in New Mexico. One was a stern yet gentle intellectual named Harry. In the other I saw, for the first time, a mirror image of my idealized self. Here was this sweet, fey, endearing sprite of a man who saw magic and love all about him and who had the grace and the optimism of a true naif. Years later at the second Spiritual Gathering of Radical Faeries in the Colorado Rockies, I met the two men in the movie. They weren’t just any sweet couple, they were giants—Harry and John.

Hosting Harry and John (nJohn as he liked to be called) in New York for the 30th anniversary of Stonewall and sharing a room with them at a subsequent March on Washington, I witnessed the depth of love Harry had for John. John would always wander off, and Harry would fret and whimper and worry about John’s safety. In Washington John had gone off with the Faeries to a Great Circle on the Mall and had “a wonderful time with a group of beautiful faerie spirits” while we were wandering through Goldwater’s Department Store asking every sales clerk and security guard if they had seen an 80-year old man with a grey ponytail, a pair of large eyeglasses, a pink t-shirt, sneakers and a camouflage-patterned miniskirt with lavender trim over a pair of dungarees. “No, sir,” was the polite response.

Throughout their eighties, Harry and John sponsored annual eight-day retreats at the Radical Faerie Sanctuary they co-founded in Wolf Creek, Oregon. At the retreats, meant by Harry and John to be their final gift to the faeries, a small group of men would build, through the circle process as it was taught to them in the Hopi fashion, a safe community of trust in which we could explore sexual rituals of healing and discover just what is that magic we as gay people bring to the larger community. Harry reasoned we wouldn’t have survived this long if we didn’t have something special to offer to the survival of the species. Harry and John felt that assimilation was counter-intuitive, that it would lead us to just become “second class them.” Rather we will only have our place at the table when we show the larger community that they cannot get along without the special gifts we have to offer.

The retreats were deep, divine, delicious and difficult, to say the least. Many of us were emerging from terrible psychic wounds, and as we shed the “ugly frogskin of hetero-imitation” as Harry would say, all hell could, and often did, break loose. Harry was capable of rages that showered fusillades of shame on every one. His rages would make stomachs quake. John “softened” Harry. He would sit with the victims of Harry’s wrath and say, “It is only because Harry cares so much, because he is so filled with love and vision...” And he was right. On the few occasions John would blow up, instead of fear and shame, we would feel compassion and try to suppress our smiles. It was so endearing seeing such a gentle man blow it.

Clyde Hall, a Shoshone-Metis from the Great Basin and a ceremonial leader of the Dance of All Nations, a dance of renewal for people of all races and religions to come together to dance under the Tree of Life, was invited to participate in one of the retreats. He and Harry had wanted to meet for quite some time. At the age of thirteen, Harry was sent by his father to work the summer in the hay fields on his cousin’s ranch in Western Nevada. As Stuart Timmons writes in The Trouble With Harry Hay, there Harry met a middle-aged Washoe Indian named Tom who invited him to a “fandango.” Harry noticed a frail old man, sitting on a raised platform of woven willow who appeared sightless. Harry was told the old man would like to speak with him. The old man told young Harry, “We are to treat you well. We are to feed you well because someday you will be a friend. ” The old man was a medicine man named Jack Wilson, a famous Paiute Indian better known as Wovoka.

Wovoka is recorded in most Indian histories as the greatest mystic and prophet of his people. The Ghost Dance religion, as the new faith envisioned by Wovoka became known, quickly spread to most Indian nations and proved to be a watershed in Indian history. The new nonviolent religion was interpreted as a “disturbance,” and directly led to the massacre at Wounded Knee two years after Wovoka’s vision. Especially in view of the Indian-slaughtering activity of Captain Francis Hardie, Harry’s great-uncle, who had carried the flag at Wounded Knee itself, Harry felt astonished at having been blessed by such a noted spiritual Indian as Wovoka.

The week Clyde Hall spent with Harry, John and the Circle of Loving Companions was auspicious. At the retreat an abiding respect developed between Clyde and the Radical Faeries and David Stewart, a 35 year-old mystic from Arcata, California, known as Light Eagle. Light Eagle brought the Dance of All Nations to Wolf Creek where Clyde invited Harry and John to be the honored guests. An enduring friendship between the Faeries and the Dance of All Nations flourishes to this day.

John Burnside was the fairest of the Faeries. Dancing naked in the morning with the faeries, rhapsodizing with song, sonnets and theories of aeronautical engineering and the gay people, our Candide smiled on the world with the same love he had for those sweet people at the orphanage. From the cojones it took to be on the front lines of the modern gay liberation movement to the struggles of living on the economic margins, to being the “better half” of a fierce giant of a warrior, John Burnside has a large and deserved place in our history. He will be remembered. His legacy will grow.

May his faerie wings flutter about us, dusting us with enchantment for ever and ever.

by Robert Croonquist with thanks to Stuart Timmons and Joey Cain
New York City, September 16, 2008

Donations in John’s honor may be made to the Harry Hay Fund, to continue the activist work of John Burnside and Harry Hay. Donations may be sent to,