Kiyoshi Kuromiya, the ‘Forrest Gump of activism’ was a tireless crusader who marched with MLK, protested the Vietnam War draft and circulated vital HIV and AIDS information.

Kuromiya was born on May 9, 1943 in one of those places most Americans try to forget existed: the WWII Japanese-American concentration camp at Hart Mountain. He would come out around the age of ten, when he was arrested for having sex with an older boy in a public park. But it was after he landed in college at University of Pennsylvania in 1961 that his life as an activist took off.

From Black Power to Gay Liberation, there seemed to be no movement that Kuromiya was not intimately — often, critically — involved in. His friend, the artist, writer, and curator David Acosta, said that Kuromiya would joke that he “was like Forrest Gump,” except that he always claimed to be in just the right place by accident. “That was his humility coming through,” Acosta told me over the phone one day this fall. Two years ago, Acosta put together an exhibition devoted to Kuromiya’s life, and even a brief list of his exploits was enough to make my head spin.

In March of 1965, one of the earliest gay rights protests in America happened at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. In natty suits and mod dresses, these courageous activists returned yearly for what became known as the “Reminder Day” protests. The early years were memorialized in photos taken by Kay Tobin Lahusen. In 1966, her photos prominently featured her lover, activist Barbara Gittings, holding a sign that read “Homosexuals should be judged as individuals.” Look in the background of that photo, and there in a suit is a not-yet-twenty-three year old Kuromiya.

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