12 Facts About Prescott Townsend

Prescott Townsend was an American cultural leader and gay rights activist, from the 1930s through the early 1970s.

Prescott Townsend attended the Volkman School, graduated in 1918 from Harvard University, and attended Harvard Law School for one year.

Prescott Townsend spent the summer of 1914 in logging camps in Montana and Idaho, and traveled to North Africa and the Soviet Union.

Prescott Townsend returned to Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, where he began a relationship with theater producer Elliot Paul, with whom he founded the experimental Barn Theatre in 1922.

Prescott Townsend operated speakeasies, restaurants, and theaters, cultivating a bohemian neighborhood on Beacon Hill's Joy Street.

Prescott Townsend pioneered the popularity of A-frame houses, building several in Provincetown.

Prescott Townsend was later a founder of the Provincetown Playhouse, where the works of Eugene O'Neill were first performed.

Prescott Townsend was indulged due to his Boston Brahmin status, but ignored.

Prescott Townsend did not deny it, and was sentenced to eighteen months in the Massachusetts House of Corrections on Deer Island.

Prescott Townsend founded a Boston chapter of the Mattachine Society, an early "homophile" organization; after the group grew and he was forced out, he founded the Boston Demophile Society.

Prescott Townsend accommodated a motley collection of tenants, mostly young gay men, in an eight-unit building at 75 Phillips St; Prescott himself inhabited an old brick townhouse at the end of Lindall Pl, a cul-de-sac that terminated just behind the Philips Street apartments.

Prescott Townsend had, for years, been suffering from failing health brought on by Parkinson's disease, and on May 23,1973, his body was found in the Beacon Hill apartment of John Murray, who had been caring for him during the final years of his life.