Touchstone
Touchstone was an intentional community of radical faeries. The kitchen was the heart of the place.
— Cass Brayton
(L-R) calligrapher Sandy Diamond, Paul Brown, James Broughton, calligrapher Kathy McNicholas, and Janaia. Surely Joel Singer took the photo, since he’s on the menu for a special dessert. Each of us, of course, had our own individual menu with a name in brush script… Oh, William.
In fall of 1982 William and friend Mica Kindman rented a Victorian house at 981 Haight Street which they named “Touchstone.” Besides being an intentional gay community, Touchstone was the center of many gatherings of radical faeries; Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence; the founding of Nomenus, an organization that created the Wolf Creek Sanctuary in Oregon; and William’s lavish tea parties and dinners, bringing together friends from his personal, graphics and gay communities.
James and I were close to Mark Thompson. William and Mark were lovers when Mark invited us to dinner at his Buena Vista apartment where we met William for the first time. Must've been 1980.
We visited Touchstone many times and shared in some of William's delightful culinary adventures. He turned me on to things quince. He made a great Pastilla (Moroccan pigeon dish) and created a terrific luncheon, A LITERARY LUNCHEON for special guests Samuel (Sam) Steward (aka Phil Andros) and James Broughton. William loved special occasions and excelled at creating them.
Like most of us living in the Bay Area during the AIDS pandemic he lost very close friends. Being a deeply compassionate person with his caregiving skills, volunteering at Shanti seemed a natural fit.
— Joel Singer
An example of a William menu.
On Touchstone
by Harry Kelley
Mica, William’s adopted brother and fellow traveler through the queer space/time continuum, and James, my husband with the incomparable baritone, were setting off to work. William and I had the day off, which means that I had the day off; William was born to wealth, a curse and blessing. He, like so many friends of mine who were rich—the word seems almost a shaming word when used to qualify a friend—was often trapped between the worlds of action and dream, almost despairing over the passing time of any given Thursday.
Still, if you had the day off, you knew you might have a couple hours with him. William didn’t have to punch a time clock, which is not to say he didn’t have a vocation that demanded time and application, for he would exert mad effort to his calligraphy, and taffy-stretched time to his writing, but rather—the defining vector of his journey through the cosmos, though always no further than peripheral vision, where it shimmered, illuminating the essential vagaries of tea and philosophy, largesse and self-doubt, cast upon him a dim but beautiful light that we saw and could not describe to him.
We walked Mica and James to the front door amused by how much it seemed like a 50’s sit-com as we played our best versions of Betty Crocker and Donna Reed to the men going out to bring home the bacon, or perhaps tofu.
There, on the third step of seven that led down from the magic house to the no-longer-giddy solidness of Haight Street, lay the cat, a leg hanging one step, a peculiar suspension of time that started out as a small breath of grace, but quickly grew into the awful moment of a death recognized. You see, that’s what it meant to go outside in those days. If you could find an interlude of friendliness, even happiness, you made the best you could of it, for you never knew what opening the next door might show, what the next answered phone call might tell.
William looked at me, a weary panic settling on his brow, pulling his substantial eyebrows up in an unpracticed expression of two parts world-weariness and three parts compassion.
I told Mica and James to go on, that we’d take care of it, and they left, the insubstantial air heavy on their shoulders.
“We can’t throw it in the trash,” William said. He went into the house. He went to the basement and I went to James’ and my bedroom. He returned with a shovel and burlap sack. I carried the 1982 Episcopal Hymnal. He held the bag while I gently laid the cat inside. We stood still for a minute, perhaps wondering if the cat had a name, and then we set off for Buena Vista Park, almost a floating island, its only secret mountain, a block away from us in the middle of the Haight, and a place where gay men found comfort and fire with each other all day and all night.
We climbed silently to the top. William dug a grave for the dispirited, nameless and unequaled feline, cow-colored, white with black spots. From the hymnal I sang “All Things Wise and Wonderful, All Creatures Great and Small", and we both cried the gut-tearing outpouring of a world where you made good your grief when you could, when you had a day off, when you knew that for two hours your vocation was clearer or harder to see when every step forward meant, carrying a heavier load of the beloved dead on your shoulders.
William and I would survive the plague. Mica and James would enter Elysium.
* * *
My mother died suddenly when I was 28. On my way home from work—as a legal secretary at Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro—I suddenly felt I should not enter the elevator but go back to my desk and call her. I was shocked when she told me she had been on a Buddhist retreat where they practiced walking meditation.
“I saw flowers the way I saw them when I was a child,” she said.
She talked about meditation, Buddhism, the Unitarian Church she had recently joined. My mother, at age 12, had announced to all of Princeton, West Virginia, that she was an atheist, and in that conviction she had remained constant. I had been consistently Catholic. How would I have known about the Heart Sutra if not for Touchstone? How would she briefly know?
My last words to her were “"Gate Gate Pāragate Pārasamgate Bodhi Svāhā." It’s a mantra that appears at the end of the Heart Sutra. It is translated—who knows how accurately?—as “Gone. Gone. Gone beyond. Gone way beyond. Oh, what bliss.” A few hours later I got the call that she had died.
When I came home from the funeral in Virginia, William, calligrapher nonpareil, had written out the last words I said to my mother: on a piece of white butcher paper, three feet high and at least 12 feet long, the last words of The Heart Sutra. He’d hung it in the stairwell leading up to my dreadfully chaotic, uninviting bedroom.
Mica and William had put up bookshelves in my room, arranged all the books with mindful care, picked up from the floor my rumbled clothes, washed them and put them away, and swept and dusted. What housemates transform your squalid living space into a warm and welcoming home while you’re away tracking dragons?
A month later they would have a talk with me about my slovenliness. They would wait, of course, until I healed a bit after my mother’s death.
* * *
As the earth’s roundness is set upon crust, mantle, and core, so Touchstone’s stability was rooted in incense, tea, and the aroma of vegetables simmering in olive oil. The trinitarian genii loci of our intentional, ritual-rife life together were brought to the house by William, and manifesting these minor/major deities, making them available to us in their subtle immensity, was WIlliam’s work, William sharing with us not his worldly worth, which in coin was substantial, but his vitality: his heart, his humor, and his belief that as we faced the death of our tribe by AIDS, or of our world by wrath and greed and the destruction of all that sings and sustains; that even so the essential spirit of teeming life was still here, waiting for tenderness and affection; for affection for the nasturtiums which bloomed in the back garden, for tender admiration of anything done well, done properly, but also the comforting cheer of the queer chaos that enjoined us to raise a glass to our local gods on their feast days.
How should Touchstone come back to me from smells, not from the look of the curtains in the sitting room, the colors of book spines, and light racing from the garden through the kitchen door window pains to settle on the surface of the kitchen table saying that here, yet, on this plane of breakfasts and heart-to-hearts was still another cosmic world where a propped-up elbow might convene a meeting of eccentric men and women who gathered for two purposes: to prevent the apocalypse and to decide once and for all whether we should buy 60- or 80-watt light bulbs and for which lamps. How should aroma be the ghost and the recalled-to-life incarnation of that place existing once but no more, that place that guarded us during the great reforming of the tribe that defined itself but was also refined by the fire of plague, and us not only of gay men but of all who passed through the front door and into the frank cheer and the giddy intellect of the house? Dreams are, or are remembered as, confronting gargoyles and puttis, or if needed, revelatory cyclops and racing world-fire, all demanding that we look through the fears and delights not only to what is, but to what is to come, open our hearts to the mystery of the unfolding present. Smells have no need to make us work. They are the reassurance of the past, the insistence that spirits do dwell and do abide: grandmother’s lavender water, Aunt Dee’s kitchen cleaner, Mr. Lee’s ginger bread.
* * *
Turning Japanese
The Incense was brought out on rare occasions. In winter we might have lit a fire instead—yes, there was a working fireplace—but in warmer seasons, evenings when we wanted to be quieter—yes William, whom we tend to think of as a man who talked loudly and a lot—William might set the wee fire of meditative floe on the miniature reed catwillow and sit in the dim listening to Music from the Hearts of Space and inviting all who cared to to sit in the mystery with him.
* * *
Russian Exuberance
“Well, that’s not Russian at all.”
William was staring at a little refrigerator magnet and wondering who might have put the sentiment before all our eyes. (It was me, but I didn’t feel like telling him so.)
“It’s Japanese, then?”
“It’s more Japanese than Japanese. It’s Zen. But we can’t have Zen for the opening of Tea Season at Touchstone. Come!”
He waved me from the kitchen into the drawing room.
I am comfortable painting with words. However, I can’t see with them. That’s why, during the endless conversations I’d had with William in this very room, me trying to impress him with my knowledge of some obscure figure of Gregorian Chant, him trying to impress me with his knowledge of the surreal autobiographies of eccentric women royalty of the 19th and early 20th century: Mary of Romania, for example, but also Sylvia Brooke, Queen of the Headhunters. (Unintentionally hilarious/horrifying wife of the merely horrifying Rupert Brooke who, as with so many mad queens, rebuked William and me with the accusation that no matter how pure our intentions, we were just a centimeter away from getting Art Nouveau all wrong and ending up the worst of Art Deco.)
A Russian Evening
Hand-lettered and illustrated flier from a Touchstone event by William.
