26 Facts About Kiyoshi Kuromiya

One of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front Philadelphia, Kiyoshi Kuromiya founded the Critical Path Project and its newsletter.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was born on May 9,1943, in Wyoming at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp, where his family had been relocated to from Monrovia, California, where Kuromiya grew up.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was a third-generation Japanese American and grew up primarily attending white schools in the Los Angeles suburbs, he says in an interview with Marc Stein in 1997.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was arrested in a public park with a 16-year-old boy when he was only 9 or 10 for lewdness and was put in juvenile hall for three days as punishment.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya started attending college at the University of Pennsylvania in September 1961 as one of six Benjamin Franklin National Scholars; he was a part of a large scholarship that covered almost all of the associated costs of attending.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya decided to study architecture, feeling it was a field that encompassed a variety of humanistic fields and was inspired by Louis Kahn who too attended Penn and was a professor of architecture at the School of Design.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya continued his activism in earnest during his first year at Penn in 1962 by participating in the Congress of Racial Equality Maryland diner sit-ins.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya was in attendance not far from Martin Luther King Jr.

The next day, while hospitalized and police-cordoned, Kiyoshi Kuromiya confronted the county's presiding officer about the incident, receiving an apology which King referred to as the first time a southern officer had apologized for injuring a civil rights worker.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya became so close to the King family that, after King's assassination in 1968, he helped care for the King children in Atlanta during the week of the funeral.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya printed and put up leaflets from a fictional group called the Americong that said there would be an innocent dog burned with napalm in front of the Van Pelt Library at Penn in protest of the use of napalm in the Vietnam War.

On October 20 and 21,1967, Kiyoshi Kuromiya joined a large demonstration organized by Abbie Hoffman that attempted to levitate the Pentagon building by joining hands around it in a performance art protest.

Later that year, Kiyoshi Kuromiya was arrested by federal marshals and Secret Service for using the US mail system for his crime-inciting and indecent poster.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya co-founded the Gay Liberation Front in 1969 following the Stonewall riots in 1969 with Basil O'Brien, who he met later while attending a Homophile Action League meeting in Philadelphia.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya even received support for the gay liberation struggle when he represented the GLF as an openly gay delegate to the 1970 Black Panther Party Convention at Temple University.

In 1972, Kiyoshi Kuromiya created the first gay organization on the University of Pennsylvania campus, Gay Coffee Hour, which met every week on campus and was open to non-students and served as an alternative space to gay bars for gay people of all ages.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya began working earnestly on the AIDS movement once the AIDS epidemic began in America in the early 1980s.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya approached his work with the motto "Information is power" and educated himself on the AIDS issues to the point he was invited to participate in National Institutes of Health alternative therapy panels.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya created the ACT UP Standards of Care, which was the first of its kind for people with HIV produced by people with AIDS.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya founded the Critical Path newsletter, which he mailed out to thousands of people worldwide as well as to hundreds of incarcerated individuals who didn't have access to AIDS information.

In 1999 Kiyoshi Kuromiya was involved in the class-action suit, Kiyoshi Kuromiya vs The United States of America, in which he presented his case for the legalization of marijuana for medical use for people with AIDS.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya ran a marijuana buyer's club as a medical marijuana activist and served a few dozen clients with AIDS in the Philadelphia-area with free marijuana.

In 1983, Kiyoshi Kuromiya visited with his mother at the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp for Japanese Americans, where he was born, which he recalls as being a formative experience for him as an activist.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya survived a battle with lung cancer in the mid-1970s.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya collaborated on Fuller's last six books and published Fuller's last book posthumously in 1992.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya died of complications from cancer on May 10,2000, a day after his 57th birthday, though his death was initially reported as due to complications from AIDS.