A Clippings Scrapbook: Reed Erickson, and the Perils of Miracles, Ket, and Coke

Oct 2

In 1992, a millionaire playboy died in Mexico in the ruins of his Love Joy Palace Ashram. Almost thirty years prior, he handed Dr. Harry Benjamin a blank check and set the stage for trans healthcare as we know it today.

by Piper Bly

(Alt text: A balding man stares shocked at a leopard looking at him curiously through a glass enclosure window.) On a hot summer afternoon in 1964, Dorr Legg, a representative from ONE Incorporated, a gay rights activism group from California, land

(Alt text: A handshake.) The lover, it turns out, was the man's pet leopard, and that man was transgender man Reed Erickson. Despite Dorr's fellow staffers claiming he must have been "touched by the heat", Reed Erickson's mansion deep in the Loui

(Alt text: A portrait of Reed Erickson, a masculine, clean-shaven man in a business suit, smiling at the camera.) Reed Erickson was born in El Paso, grew up in Philadelphia, and spent his collegiate years in Baton Rouge, LA. The heir to the Erickso

(Alt text: A stack of books on various new age and trans topics by authors that Reed Erickson helped fund to some degree.) Trans healthcare was, without question, squarely in that category at the time, and after seeking the support of one Dr. Harry

(Alt text: A drawing of Erickson's Mexico estate, the Love Joy Palace Ashram. It is a simple building in a fusion of Latin American stucco and Indian temple monastery styles.) Psychedelics and drugs weren't just a therapeutic research topic for Eri

It's not an understatement to say that Erickson's support of ONE, Inc was instrumental in preserving queer history and supporting the gay community at the time. ONE did everything from running support hotlines and queer archives to printing informat

Sources:

ONE INC. AND REED ERICKSON: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964–2003. Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte. https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/ahdevor/wp-content/uploads/sites/2247/2020/05/ONE-Inc.pdf

Bad Gays podcast: Reed Erickson

https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/erickson/essay

Concerning The Erickson Educational Foundation, pamphlet. https://archive.org/details/concerningericks0000eric/page/n1/mode/2up

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Erickson

https://www.autostraddle.com/reed-erickson-history/

https://www.uvic.ca/transgenderarchives/collections/reed-erickson/index.php

Piper Bly is a professional illustrator and underground cartoonist. When she’s not busy plowing away at her drawing board, singing dirges in the moonlight, or wandering throughout the United States, she can often be found tending to her ivies, frying up some biscuits, spending unreasonable hours in the gym, or floating above the Mississippi River at midnight, waiting for the tide to wrap her in its loving embrace and take her away. Her whereabouts are currently undisclosed. You, however, can find her at piperbly.com.

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A Clippings Scrapbook: Reed Erickson, and the Perils of Miracles, Ket, and Coke

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