Ronald Johnson

A Kansas native, Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1954, and attended Columbia University through the G.I. Bill. Romantically involved with the poet and publisher Jonathan Williams throughout the 1960s, the two walked the Appalachian trail and wandered throughout England before Johnson set off alone to find his own version of Oz in San Francisco. There, Johnson managed a famous gay leather bar, wrote a number of cookbooks, and became a founder of the Rainbow Motorcycle Club, a gay social club described by Johnson as a "band of lusty roistering men, often partying till dawn." His other books of poems include A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (1964), The Book of the Green Man (1967), Songs of the Earth (1970), Eyes & Objects (1976), Radi os (1977), The Shrubberies (2001), and ARK (1996, 2013).