Partner
Chuck Rowland,
Dale Jennings, Paul Benard
Queer Places:
University of Minnesota, 231 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 and 1117 University Dr, Duluth, MN 55812
Chapel of the Pines Crematory, 1605 S Catalina St, Los Angeles, CA 90006
Robert
Booth “Bob” Hull (May 31, 1918 - May 1, 1962) was a founding member of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles with
Harry Hay,
Chuck Rowland,
Dale Jennings, and
Rudi Gernreich. The Mattachine set the stage for the gay liberation activism of the 1960s and 1970s, but because of his suicide in 1962, Hull wouldn’t see the movements, marches, and militancy that would soon follow.
Despite earlier efforts, the Mattachine Society, established in Los Angeles in
1951, was the first homosexual rights organization to achieve a national
following and make substantive strides in challenging the widespread
assumption that homosexuals deserved the discrimination they received.
Although Harry Hay is generally credited as the founder of Mattachine, C. Todd
White has meticulously detailed the early history of the organization and
argues that it was a substantial group effort between Harry Hay, Rudi
Gernreich, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, Dale Jennings, and (joining the group
slightly later) Konrad
Stevens and James Gruber. Hull
was portrayed last spring Off-Broadway in Jon
Marans’s critically acclaimed play about the
Mattachine founders, The Temperamentals.
Bob Hull, born May 31, 1918, descends from the
Richard Hull (1599–1662), immigrant, line. His Hull
line can be traced back ten generations in this
country. Bob’s grandfather was
Charles Edgar Hull (1850–1937), born in Jefferson
County, New York. Bob’s father, George Eliott
Hull, a construction engineer born in Beadle County,
South Dakota (1886–1937), outlived his own father
by only four months.
Bob’s mother was Elsie Mae Booth (1888–1985),
born in Minnesota. Bob’s sister, the author Elizabeth
“Betty” Hull Froman (1920–1975), contributed to
Saturday Review and Atlantic Monthly. She married
the writer Robert Winslow Froman. Betty wrote two
children’s books, Eba, the Absent-Minded Witch
(1965), and Mr. Drackle and His Dragons (1971).
The only surviving photograph of the Mattachine founders (asterisked), Christmas 1951. Pictured are Harry Hay (upper left), then (l–r) Konrad Stevens, Dale Jennings, Rudi Gernreich, Stan Witt, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland (in glasses), Paul Bernard. Photo by James Gruber. The photographer, James Gruber, with Stevens,
became the sixth and seventh to be admitted. Considered for, but denied membership, Benard is said to have drowned in 1954 after
moving to Mexico. Hull's friend Witt sometimes socialized with members, as on this occasion. (Photo courtesy James Gruber)
Bob Hull grew up in St. Louis Park, Hennepin
County, Minnesota (the setting of Joel and Ethan
Coen’s 2009 film A Serious Man). His classmates’
memories of him vary. Hull was different from other
boys, engaging with girls without pursuing them. He
had a sensitive side, but also a fun, even “wild” side,
like painting the title of their school oratorio on the
water tower, a local landmark, with his sister, their
friend David Jenkins, and others. He avoided sports
in high school, but played tennis with Jenkins in
college. Memories also vary regarding the reason for
their teacher’s suicide—in the school lunchroom—
the first weekend after the start of school in 1931.
Hull may have taken part in a student strike,
precipitated by the resignation of a favored principal,
two months before high school graduation in 1936.
He was third in his class of 67 and was a talented
pianist and organist, performing a challenging
Chopin Ballade at commencement. Following the
death of his father, Hull’s education was bankrolled
by another prominent Park resident, Maurice H.
Graham, an inventor for Toastmaster.
While Graham had hoped Hull would major in science, Hull’s friend David Jenkins, who as David
Lloyd had a career as an operatic tenor, urged Hull
towards music. Hull began college in June 1937, but
after three terms at the Minneapolis College of
Music, 1938–39, and a spurned offer of marriage to
a coed (provoking an attempted suicide by Hull,
according to Jenkins), Hull abruptly transferred in
January 1940 to the University of Minnesota’s
chemistry program.
Before long, a friend of Hull’s
who taught music in Gary, South Dakota, visited
Minneapolis with a fellow teacher, Charles “Chuck”
Rowland, who four decades later
founded L.A.’s gay-oriented Celebration Theatre.
Rowland was born and raised in Gary, Deuel
County, South Dakota. By 1941 he was a boarder in
Hull’s house; they had a brief romantic relationship,
remaining friends until Hull’s death. While Hull was
exempted from military service by admitting his
homosexuality, Rowland eagerly entered the army.
Upon discharge, Rowland organized full-time from
his parents’ home in South Dakota for the American
Veterans Committee, and later for the Communist
Party in Minneapolis. Hull also joined the CP,
contributing his musicianship to party functions.
After his CP job was defunded, Rowland left the
party, and moved to Los Angeles in early 1949. Hull
followed that summer, retaining his membership,
and performing in July at a CP front group’s concert
of the work of George Antheil, accompanying
soprano Betty Jaynes, the actress who at 15 had been
known as the youngest opera singer in the world.
Hull also taught at the Neighborhood Music School,
a Boyle Heights settlement house. Early on he met
and bonded with Stan Witt, himself a brilliant,
Julliard-trained pianist (and later music editor of
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now). As early
as that fall Hull began taking music history classes
taught by Harry Hay at the CP’s California Labor
School. The next summer saw Hull being appointed
organizational secretary of his party club in June,
only to be expelled by August for his homosexuality.
On July 8 Hay met future fashion icon Rudi
Gernreich,
and after comparing notes about the
need for a gay civil rights organization the two
canvassed gay beaches to test the waters under the
guise of collecting signatures for the Stockholm
Peace Appeal, which called for a nuclear weapons
ban. That appeal, begun in March, took on new
meaning with the June 25 start of the Korean War,
causing Hull and Rowland to relocate to Mexico in
July to avoid any wartime roundup of subversives.
They quickly returned to Los Angeles, however, and
were approached by Hay, who had crafted a
prospectus for a “service and welfare organization
devoted to the protection and improvement of
Society’s Androgynous Minority.” It was well
received. Hull, Rowland, and Hull’s current beau
and future novelist Dale Jennings, met with Hay and
Gernreich on Saturday, November 11, 1950,
Armistice Day. The Mattachine Society was formed.
Hay’s prospectus called for self-help discussion
groups, some of which were led by Hull, who Hay
remembered as being able to distill heady political
talk into practical language, for which Hull was
dubbed “Viceroy of the Mattachine.” Archivist Jim
Kepner recalled Hull coming to his discussion group
“from upstairs,” but having a conversational style.
“[H]e was liked by most of the people, even though
nearly everyone in our Guild was suspicious with
the kind of total paranoia about the Foundation” (the
leaders’ elite organizational arm, which was separate
from the Society and rumored to be Red.) “They sort
of made an exception with Bob.”
Hay’s prospectus also characterized homosexuals
as a minority along the lines of African Americans
and Jews. Jennings, and others who followed,
including the actor Paul Benard with whom Hull
lived for a time, questioned the minority model
because it assumed that people from disparate
backgrounds would be united by their private
proclivity. Nevertheless, Jennings accepted the
organization’s support for his (successful) acquittal
on a vice squad arrest. (Hull, like many gay men of
his time and place, was himself a registered sex
offender due to “vagrant lewd” charges.)
The acquittal campaign and victory caused growth
in the organization. Members began to question the
need for the cell-like structure that had kept the
ranks protected, yet isolated. Alert to such
rumblings, in the spring of 1953 the founders held
two constitutional conventions, where transparency
was advocated, the minority model debated, and the
founders Red-baited. At the second convention, the
founders abdicated—at Hull’s suggestion—and the
Mattachine elected new, right-leaning leadership that
led the group into the 1960s as a force for change,
the merits of which remain the subject of study.
After the conventions, Hull occupied himself with
allied, low-key pursuits. He was organist at the First
Universalist Church, whose pastor (and future anticensorship crusader)
Wallace de Ortega Maxey,
remained a Mattachine member.
Jim Kepner recalled
that “Chuck, Bob and I tried to start a gay group in
Mexico City” in 1954. In 1956, Hull and Stan Witt
assisted Rowland in the establishment of his gayfriendly Church of One Brotherhood, which he saw
as a First Amendment refuge, mindful of J. Edgar
Hoover’s 1951 threat that 14,000 Reds could be
rounded up “on a moment’s notice.” But pivotal for
Hull, post-Mattachine (in late 1954), was meeting
his romantic partner of the next seven years, who has
requested anonymity. Hull and his lover enjoyed
outdoor camping, performing chamber music, and
spending holidays with Hull’s relatives and with his
mother, Elsie, who was accepting and, in fact,
considered Hull’s partner to be a second son.
Bob Hull is described by this lover, who is a
psychologist, as being a depressed type. During
years in therapy, Hull’s psychiatrist actually used an
amphetamine-type stimulant in their sessions to
overcome Hull’s reluctance to open up. After these
sessions, Hull drank alcohol to come down—an
emotional and psychological seesawing routine that,
undertaken on a regular basis, surely took a toll.
When his partner separated from Hull for personal
reasons in early 1962, Hull faced either living alone,
which he couldn’t abide, or seeking out a new mate,
which he found daunting as he approached middle
age. Although his friend Stan Witt stood by him,
Hull allowed a crippling introversion, and an
aversion to confrontation—nurtured in childhood by
his excessively pacific mother—to prevail. Not long
after finding himself single, Bob Hull killed himself.
It was May 1, 1962—International Workers’ Day.
No memorial was held, nor obituary published.
Elsie’s “second son” assisted her with cremation
arrangements, and Bob’s cremains were placed at
the historic Chapel of the Pines columbarium, in Los
Angeles (next to Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery), in a
crypt from which the public and even family
members are barred. Harry Hay wrote the only
known tribute to Bob Hull in ONE Magazine.
To The Memory Of Robert Hull
Skilled organic chemist, indefatigable musician and
musicologist, a charter organizer and executive
committee member of the original Mattachine Society.
DEAD BY HIS OWN HAND
Here was a man whose inspired response to the initial
“Mattachine-idea Prospectus” brought together the
dedicated Five who, expanded to Seven, pioneered
and carried through the original Mattachine Society.
Bob, it was your stubborn search for logical function
a decade ago, coupled with the passion and intensity
of your belief in the first Mattachine Idea, that helped
create within the living and working relationship of the
pioneers a bond even closer and more precious than
brotherhood. Somewhere, in the years that followed,
we—who now so sadly scribble these pedestrian
sentiments—failed you. Forgive us!
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