William (Bill) Colvig (March 13, 1917 – March 1, 2000) was an electrician and amateur musician who was the partner for 33 years of composer Lou Harrison, whom he met in San Francisco in 1967. Colvig helped construct the American gamelan used in works such as the puppet opera Young Caeser [sic] (1971), La Koro Sutro (1972), and the Suite for Violin and American Gamelan (1974).
Lee Roy Pettit (October 29, 1916 – July 31, 1994), known professionally as Ramblin' Jimmie Dolan, was a Western swing musician born in Gardena, California. He is best remembered for his hit single, "Hot Rod Race" on Capitol Records, which reached No. 7 on the Billboard country chart in February 1951. Dolan himself wanted to be remembered for his contributions in entertaining troops in the Pacific Theatre, especially the Philippines during World War II. He reached the rank of Chief Petty Officer filling the function of a radioman. He returned from the war with a ready built fan base and his charisma soon had him in demand at dance halls throughout the west. During the 1940s he hosted and played on numerous radio stations. In the early 1950s he was a pioneer of television in the Seattle area where he was the general manager of its first television station as well as one of its stars. He had a television show for children as well as an adult variety show, for which he won the award for Best Western TV show of 1951. He then had a long running radio show in San Francisco. On an airline flight he met United Airlines Stewardess Charline Bales, a graduate of the University of Idaho. They were married for 13 years. He is survived by a daughter, Patricia and a granddaughter Aria. During the late 1980s he was contacted by the former president of his fan club, recently widowed. They met again, both being free and lived happily together until his death.
Joseph Madison LeSueur (September 15, 1924 – May 14, 2001) was an American poet and screenwriter. He is known as a lover of Frank O'Hara and the author of Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara: A Memoir.
Jess Collins (August 6, 1923 – January 2, 2004), simply known today as Jess, was an American visual artist.
Dorothy Louise Taliaferro "Del" Martin (May 5, 1921 – August 27, 2008) and Phyllis Ann Lyon (November 10, 1924 – April 9, 2020) were an American lesbian couple based in San Francisco who were known as feminist and gay-rights activists.Martin and Lyon met in 1950, became lovers in 1952, and moved in together on Valentine's Day 1953 in an apartment on Castro Street in San Francisco. They had been together for three years when they cofounded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in San Francisco in 1955. This became the first social and political organization for lesbians in the United States and soon had a national reach. They both acted as president and until 1963 successively as editor of The Ladder magazine, which they also founded. They were involved in the DOB until they joined the National Organization for Women (NOW), the first known lesbian couple to do so.
Both women worked to form the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) at Glide Memorial Methodist Church in northern California to persuade ministers to accept homosexuals into churches. The couple used their influence to decriminalize homosexuality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They became politically active in San Francisco's first gay political organization, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club. This group influenced then-mayor Dianne Feinstein to sponsor a citywide bill to outlaw employment discrimination for gays and lesbians. Both women remained politically active, later serving in the White House Conference on Aging in 1995.
They were married on February 12, 2004, in the first same-sex wedding to take place in San Francisco after Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered the city clerk to begin providing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. That marriage was voided by the California Supreme Court on August 12, 2004.After the California Supreme Court's decision in In re Marriage Cases legalized same-sex marriage in California, the couple married again on June 16, 2008. Theirs was the first same-sex wedding to take place in San Francisco . Two months later on August 27, 2008, Martin died in San Francisco from complications of an arm bone fracture. Lyon died years later on April 9, 2020.
Lari George Pittman (born 1952 in Glendale, California) is a Colombian-American contemporary artist and painter. Pittman is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Painting and Drawing at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.
Paul Bern (born Paul Levy; December 3, 1889 – September 5, 1932) was a German-born American film director, screenwriter, and producer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he became the assistant to Irving Thalberg. He helped launch the career of Jean Harlow, whom he married in July 1932; two months later, he was found dead of a gunshot wound, leaving what appeared to be a suicide note. Various alternative theories of his death have been proposed. MGM writer and film producer Samuel Marx believed that he was killed by his ex-common-law wife Dorothy Millette, who jumped to her death from a ferry days afterward.
