Paul Mariah, also known as Paul Jones [Edit]

Paul Mariah, born Paul Jones (1937-1996) was a trailblazer of San Francisco’s gay literary scene.

Notable Gay-Related Contributions

Mariah served as a president of Council of Religion and the Homosexual, which was a San Francisco-based organization founded in 1964 for the purpose of joining homosexual activists and religious leaders.

Mariah and another Bay Area poet, Richard Taggett, founded ManRoot poetry magazine and ManRoot Press (both focused on gay men) in San Francisco in 1969. The press issued bilingual editions of the gay writers Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet, and published many gay writers of the Stonewall era and of the San Francisco Renaissance.

Mariah published two collections of poetry in his lifetime, Personae Non Gratae (1971) and This Light Will Spread: Selected Poems, 1960-1975 (1978), both of which contain gay-themed poetry.

Honors

In 2017, the art installation known as the San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley was installed; in it Paul Mariah (among others) is honored with a bronze bootprint displaying his name and a short statement about him