Tom Ellis Q&A
Tom Ellis has worn a variety of hats in his lifetime from big city rockstar to Kansas artist (his autobiographical one-man exhibit opened 3 years ago in Chanute). After growing up on a Kansas farm, Tom went to the Kansas City Art Institute to study his first love, visual arts, and then went to Pittsburg State college to major in voice and minor in art. Post college, Tom headed to New York with three introductions in his pocket: Picnic author Thomas Inge, the secretary to poet Allen Grossman, and actor Dean Dittman. Tom went on to develop relations with Stephen Schwartz, the creator of ‘Wicked’, and Tom’s band, ‘Molimo’, hired Ace Frehley as their lead guitarist – who would later go on to form KISS.
Little did Tom know that he would take part in one of our nation’s most historic events, simply by visiting his local bar. For the next year or two, Tom visited Stonewall as a "young, gay man on the prowl," and reveled in the hedonistic aura of New York City in the late 1960's. On the anniversary of Stonewall, we sat down with this unique Kansan who was there.
Tom: “I was there the night before. And I saw the police outside and knew something was up so I stayed outside. Saw the commotion...”
June 28th, 1969 was just the beginning of a series of events we know today as the Stonewall Riots. But before the riots, there was just Stonewall.
Q: “Can you speak a little bit more on the culture that was Stonewall. A lot of people just know about [the Stonewall riots,] they don’t know [about the] community [engagement].”
Tom: “The Stonewall was the local bar for me, I used to live in the Village. It used to be a great dance place, along with being a pick-up bar and a bar bar… [Stonewall] was on a little street called Christopher St. Doesn’t get an awful lot of traffic. It’s a little narrow street. I think it’s a one-way, pretty sure. So, when you see a couple of trucks pull up to Stonewall… paddy wagons, you know something’s up. It was a habit for police to come often to bars like Stonewall, where gay men congregated, and harass the customers if the bar didn't pay protection money. This was very serious because when arrests were made, your name was published in the paper. You could lose your job, your marriage, your family, your life. It was bad times for gays at that point.”
Tom's husband Bob, New York's Commissioner of Human Rights at the time, was one such victim of anti-gay sentiment. After being outed in an interview with the New York Times, being rejected by his mother as a result, and learning of his husband's experiences at Stonewall, Bob was activated to mobilize. "He agreed it was time for the 2% of Americans who were gay, to have equal rights, and that it was not gonna be easy," said Tom. Together, Bob and Tom founded the National Gay Taskforce (now National LGBTQ Task Force) along with Dr. Howard Brown, New York City’s openly gay Surgeon General. Kansan involvement in historical precedents is not unique, (Bleeding Kansas, the Free State, and our recent historical decision to protect abortion), but Tom Ellis is.
Q: “There’s this idea behind Stonewall that it was just one person throwing a brick, and that was it… do you want to do any clarifying on what that scene was?”
Tom: “Well there was no community at that point. It was a bunch of young guys who were having sex, ya know. First of all, this was the time of free love, before AIDS, and it was unbelievably exciting. Just unimaginably hedonistic. And the dancing was great, the music was fabulous… everything just came together to make a beautiful era, unique in American history. And I had nothing, I was poor. I had a job at Bloomingdales, working the display department. Not making much money, but feeling happy and free, and paying $65 a month for 6 floor walkup.”
The thriving LGBTQ community we know today wasn’t always that way. In fact, for Tom at the time, it was just him, his guitar, and the guys he met at bars and on the streets.
Tom: “The next day after the riots, I took my guitar down to the Stonewall and I sat on the steps and I started playing folk music and civil rights songs. And I had gathered about maybe 10 people, and we were just listening to me sing. Because the sidewalk was so small some of them were spilling out onto the street. And the police drove by and very courteously said, ‘move on, please, this is not a place to congregate.’ So we all just moved on and I must say the police seemed very polite at that point. The day after that, I don’t know how it happened, but someone spread word there was a gathering in Washington square beneath the arc de triumph. About 40 guys set and listened to various guys talk about our rights to be free from harassment by the police. We talked for about half an hour and someone said 'let's march up 5th avenue and talk to the mayor,' people thought, 'well it's a long ways but he should hear about this,' 'let's confront the police,' and all that so we start at fifth avenue. We didn’t have any, you know, passes or permits or anything like that, we just started marching up fifth avenue which is a one-way street going down. We stopped traffic all the way. I don’t know how far we got… I’m thinking like 20 to 25 blocks. You know, we kind of had an interesting movement going there for a while. And I don’t know if any one of us had placards or signs, and the people in cars were pretty mystified as to who these people were and what they were angry about. I don’t even know if it made the papers.”
Today, our country remembers America’s first gay pride parade as the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day where thousands of protestors marched from Stonewall Inn to Central Park. Little do many know of the smaller parade the year before, that started with some songs played on a guitar by Kansan Tom Ellis.
While our history books may not acknowledge the smaller events that culminate into massive movements, this individual Kansan was absolutely integral in the larger puzzle of progress and our story for liberation.
Today, Tom lives in Iola, on the land he grew up on, creating art, occasionally singing, and working on an autobiography of his life story. Tom exemplifies that LGBTQ Kansans are not just living in Kansas, they are thriving and still making history.