The Closet Professor

Prescott Townsend (1894-1973) was born into an old, wealthy Boston family. His mother was both a descendant of Myles Standish through her grandmother Susannah Perkins Staples (the sister of Yale Law School founder Seth Perkins Staples) and other Mayflower passengers, and the great-granddaughter of the American founding father Roger Sherman and his wife Rebecca Minot Prescott, through their son Roger Sherman, Jr. Townsend came out as a teenager, and his parents were accepting but told him to be cautious.

He attended the Volkman School, graduated in 1918 from Harvard University, and attended Harvard Law Schoolfor one year. He spent the summer of 1914 in logging camps in Montana and Idaho, and traveled to North Africa and the Soviet Union. After serving in World War I, Prescott lived in Paris for a time, becoming immersed in the bohemian culture of the era. He then “sought to establish an outpost of that culture” in his hometown of Boston and 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.

Paul introduced Townsend to numerous avant-garde creatives, including openly gay writer André Gide. Townsend operated speakeasies, restaurants, and theaters, cultivating a bohemian neighborhood on Beacon Hill’s Joy Street. He also spent time in Provincetown, where he became friendly with playwright Eugene O’Neill and other theater artists. He pioneered the popularity of A-frame houses, building several in Provincetown. He was later a founder of the Provincetown Playhouse, where the works of Eugene O’Neill were first performed.

Prescott was very happy to be a patron of the arts, and artists were very happy to take his money, However, the Great Depression ended all that.

By the 1930s, Prescott Townsend repeatedly addressed the Massachusetts legislature as an acknowledged homosexual man advocating for the repeal of sodomy legislation, urging the lawmakers “to legalize love.” He was indulged due to his family’s wealth and Boston Brahmin status, but he was ignored by lawmakers. While working at the shipyard during World War II, Townsend was arrested in 1943, for participating in an “unnatural and lascivious act.” He did not deny it, and was sentenced to eighteen months in the Massachusetts House of Corrections.

Shortly after, Prescott was officially stricken from both the New York and Boston Social Registers. In the 1950s, he held meetings at his home/bookstore, which he described as “the first social discussion of homosexuality in Boston.” In talks in Boston and Provincetown he promoted his “Snowflake Theory” of human personality and sexuality, stating that the human mind is like a snowflake in that no two are alike, and each has six opposing sides: I/You, He/She, Hit/Submit. He embraced a more in-your-face generation of activists in the late 1960s, marked by the uprising at New York City’s Stonewall Inn in 1969 and at age 76, he attended the first Pride parade in New York on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

Toward the end of his life, his two remaining properties on the Hill were on its North Slope, traditionally the side where servants of patrician South Slope residents lived. He accommodated a motley collection of tenants, mostly young gay men, in an eight-unit building at 75 Phillips St. He always advocated for the outsider, the hippies, vagabonds, and runaway homeless queer youth his was a legacy of love, money and uplift.

Townsend died at age 78. He 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. The police reported that “when we came in to take charge of the body, Mr. Townsend was found in a kneeling prayer position at his bedside.” Of his entire family, only one sister, a nephew and a great-nephew attended his memorial service at the Arlington Street Church.