Spouse Edith Sinclair | Role Inventor Name John Burnside | |
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Full Name John Lyon Burnside III Occupation Gay rights activist, Inventor Movies Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives Similar People Harry Hay, Rudi Gernreich, Peter Adair, Rob Epstein | ||
John Lyon Burnside III (November 2, 1916 – September 14, 2008) was the inventor of the teleidoscope, the darkfield kaleidoscope and the Symmetricon. Because he rediscovered the math behind kaleidoscope optics, for decades, every maker of optically correct kaleidoscopes sold in the United States paid him royalties. Harry Hay was his life partner from 1962 until Hay's death in 2002. He was living in San Francisco, California, at the time of his death on September 14, 2008 from complications of brain cancer.
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Early life
An only child born in Seattle, he was raised by his mother after his father abandoned the family; being poor, she periodically placed her son in the care of orphanages.
He served briefly in the United States Navy, and settled in Los Angeles in the 1940s.
Gay rights activism
Burnside and Hay formed a group in the early 1960s called the Circle of Loving Companions that promoted gay rights and gay love. In 1966 they were major planners of one of the first gay parades, a protest against exclusion of homosexuals from the military, held in Los Angeles. In 1967, they appeared as a gay couple on the Joe Pyne television show.
In the late 1970s, they founded, with Don Kilhefner and Mitch Walker, the Radical Faeries.
Personal life
Burnside married Edith Sinclair in Los Angeles. The pair had no children. Burnside later met Harry Hay in 1962 at ONE Incorporated; the two fell in love and became life partners. Burnside died Sunday, September 14, 2008 at the age of 91. [1] His ashes, mingled with those of his partner Harry Hay, were scattered in Nomenus Faerie Sanctuary, Wolf Creek, Oregon.