Over fifty people convened on Saturday afternoon, November 22, 2025, under windy skies at Hollywood Forever Cemetery's Gower Mausoleum rooftop chapel. Floating above the city, the chapel is an airy space. On that day, wind wafted through it, blowing across L.A.—and murmured a few attendees, Morris Kight himself. How apropos to celebrate the life of someone who spent decades working toward visibility, toward building community, and toward showing up.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Portrait by Henning Von Berg, 2002
Hosted by AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the reception brought together longtime friends, fellow activists, and younger generations shaped by Kight’s legacy. More than two decades after his death, his name still summoned stories, laughter, tears, and an unmistakable sense that his work was not finished—it had simply been passed on.
Morris Kight was born in Comanche County, Texas in 1919. Settling in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, Kight brought with him a lifelong dedication to social justice work that he developed through labor organizing and civil rights activism. During a period when gay men and lesbians were supposed to hide in fear, Morris Kight walked right through that ethos. Kight’s small house near West Fourth Street served as an unofficial community center – a place for dialogue, mentoring, and organizing well before “community center” was integrated into queer vernacular. Activism for Morris was personal, urgent, and founded on love.
That philosophy would help lay the groundwork for the modern LGBTQ+ movement in Los Angeles. After Stonewall, Kight helped found the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, ushering protest into the streets with a confrontational new flair that rattled the mainstream.
He helped found Christopher Street West, producer of the world's first official Pride parade, and in 1971 co-founded what would become the Los Angeles LGBT Center — the largest institution of its kind globally. Kight understood liberation meant visibility and infrastructure: protest and policy, celebration and services.
Those lessons rang true again that weekend at the Gower Mausoleum memorial. Reflecting the audience, Maxine Waters boiled her remarks down to a punchline that got knowing laughs and applause from the crowd: “You have to be a hell of somebody to be memorialized 22 years after.” She wasn’t exaggerating. Kight, who died in 2003, had a legacy that lasted beyond his death because he’d put it so squarely in others.
That truth was voiced most poignantly by his longtime friend and fellow activist Miki Jackson, who reminded the crowd that Kight never sought personal glory. “We were his payment. We were his reward,” she said. Kight, she explained, cared deeply about visibility—not as an end in itself, but as a lifeline. He wanted queer people to be “loud enough, out enough, visible enough” so that a child growing up frightened and isolated somewhere in Kansas might know they were not alone. He understood instinctively where people were wounded the most, and he aimed his activism there.
Terry DeCrescenzo spoke at Morris Kight’s inurnment and remembrance. (Photo Credit: Los Angeles Blade / Kristie Song)
Kight's gift had profound impact on Terry DeCrescenzo, one of the founders of the Gay Academic Union. She recalled protesting alongside him at Sunset and Larrabee, sitting in the street and singing “We Shall Overcome.” Raised in Catholic schools, she initially marveled at how improbable that moment felt. Yet it was precisely Kight’s influence—his fearless insistence on moral clarity—that revealed new possibilities. “He showed me a way of doing things, of approaching life, that I didn’t dream I was capable of,” she said. “So I thank you, Morris. I love you. I miss you.”
Morris Kight spent his life crafting sanctuaries. Now, in death, he rests at sanctuary: his ashes interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery (Gower Mausoleum, First Floor, Niche 105, E1). There, he joins countless others who helped map the story of Los Angeles. The cemetery grounds make up another addition to Kight's own personal archives of places nurtured by his life's work: houses that became shelters, streets that became rallies, clubs that became family. But most alive in our memories are the ways Morris Kight lived: with kindness and conviction, stories and an undying willingness to be by and fight for the side of the people he loved.
The memorial also looked forward. “We’re what we have left,” Jackson murmured, speaking both to those present who had marched with Kight during his own youth in the movement’s infancy, as well as the idea of legacy itself — elders and their successors. Echoed by other leaders like Congressman Mark Takano who have shouldered the fight long after their careers began, Jackson spoke of strength in numbers and the power of carrying his torch onward. “This week let’s celebrate his life by taking his fire with us,” Takano, chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said, “and continuing to fight until all LGBTQ+ people in this country can live their lives out loud without fear of persecution.”
As the afternoon light softened over Hollywood Forever and the wind moved once more across the rooftop chapel, Morris Kight felt less like a figure of the past than a continuing presence. He remains, even now, part of the city he helped change—walking its streets in memory, urging it, always, toward greater courage.
I’d love to hear your memories, reflections, or thoughts on Morris Kight’s legacy—please share them in the comments below and help keep his story alive.
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