Keith St Clare, editor and publisher of the groundbreaking LGBTQ+ magazine Vanguard, has died at age 79.
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He died March 25 in Richmond, Texas, where he was in an assisted living facility, according to The Bay Area Reporter. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease several years ago, his family said.
Vanguard, based in San Francisco, was originally published by an organization of the same name, beginning in 1965. The Vanguard group assisted young people, LGBTQ+ and otherwise, in the city’s Tenderloin district. St Clare took over the magazine in 1966, and the organization ceased operations the following year.
St Clare published Vanguard for 12 years. The magazine was notable for its inclusivity, friends and activists said.
“Keith St Clare was a pioneer and force on the cutting edge of the gay liberation rebellion,” August Bernadicou, executive director of the LGBTQ History Project, told The Advocate via email. “By giving a platform to the downtrodden and persecuted, Keith helped kick-start a blooming movement. No one was talking about hair faeries, transgender [people], drug dealers, bisexuals, and the like when Keith was publishing Vanguard. He gave a face to the faceless and a voice to the mute.”
St Clare called himself the “high scribbler” of the magazine and said it was “a media outlet for social change,” the Reporter notes.
In an article on the LGBTQ History Project’s website, Bernadicou wrote, “What made Keith’s work remarkable was the subject matter and his courage in publishing it under his current name and address. Keith was gay liberation pre gay liberation.”
Born in San Antonio, St Clare went into the Air Force at age 17, was stationed in Japan for four years, and he made San Francisco his home when he returned to the U.S. in 1966.
“He changed his name in California,” his sister Lauralee Roark told the Reporter. “His father and mother didn’t ‘get him’ at all. He grew up a young gay man in San Antonio and was bullied for ‘being different.’ He was thin, neat, dramatic.”
After Vanguard ceased publication, St Clare was still involved in numerous community projects. “He went on to work in community theater, produce 186 episodes of the nationally distributed, youth-run TV show Young Ideas, and raise over 600 foster children,” Bernadicou wrote in his online article, which also includes an extensive interview with St Clare.
As a foster parent, “he took kids who were throwaways, runaways, and made that into his career,” Roark said in the Reporter article.
Phyllis Fisher, a lesbian who was having problems with her parents when she was a teenager, recalled being “the only female” at the time she went into foster care with St Clare. “He took me in when nobody else would,” she told the Reporter, adding, “He put his heart into the community.”
In addition, St Clare worked for the American Red Cross in Berkeley, California, in the 1980s, Roark said, and assisted survivors of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. She believes he made a film of that work.
St Clare also had a biological son, Michael Miller, whom he met in 2019 and with whom he remained in touch. “Keith kind of believed in his own reality and was against convention,” Miller noted to the Reporter. Speaking of St Clare’s time as a foster parent, Miller said, “There were a lot of doubters that a gay man could do that. He certainly didn’t believe in convention.”
Roark added that her brother was a citizen “like everybody else — that was his whole thing. It was so beautiful that he had that.” She plans to donate his tapes of Young Ideas to the University of California, Los Angeles, Film and Television Archive.
Besides Roark and Miller, survivors include another sister, Melanie Sills; Miller’s wife, Crystal, and their daughter; and many friends.
