June 24, 2025
Provided image/Glenn Holsten
Director Glenn Holsten re-created Kiyoshi Kuromiya's apartment in Philadelphia for some of his documentary interviews. An image of the activist and his mother is projected on the wall in the image above.
Few Philadelphians — let alone people — led a more remarkable life than Kiyoshi Kuromiya.
Born in a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans, the lifelong activist cut his teeth in the 1960s civil rights movement. As an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, and was beaten by state troopers. Later that summer, he rallied outside Independence Hall with fellow LGBTQ activists — a demonstration that took place four years before the Stonewall riots that kicked off the modern gay rights movement.
Federal marshals would arrest Kuromiya for distributing "F--- THE DRAFT" posters through the mail. When the AIDS epidemic swept America in the 1980s, he ran a 24-hour hotline for HIV and AIDS information and wrote a newsletter that simplified the latest science for readers. He also made sure Philadelphia's notoriously homophobic police commissioner, Frank Rizzo, got a copy of the city's first queer newspaper. No wonder he called himself the "Forrest Gump of activism."
"He was a weirdo," said JD Davids, a queer health activist who organized with Kuromiya. "He was a creative, brilliant, untidy genius."
Davids shares this and other insights in "Kiyoshi," an upcoming documentary on the tireless crusader. The film will feature new interviews with people who knew him, past interviews Kuromiya gave before his death in 2000 and archival material from the William Way LGBT Community Center. Its creators hope to show the movie at film festivals and local community screenings next spring or summer. But they'll have to finish shooting and editing it first.
"I always say what I do for a living is gather and sift," said Glenn Holsten, the movie's director. "And we're still very much in the gathering phase."
Holsten has been gathering since 2023, when the film's producer Keith Brand and Chris Bartlett pitched him on the project. (Brand had previously profiled Kuromiya in an hourlong radio documentary, while Bartlett was the executive director of the William Way Center at the time.) A $360,500 grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage was the first "major push forward," Holsten said. With money in pocket, he began filming.
For the first batch of on-camera interviews, Holsten rented out a former movie theater in New Jersey and worked with a set designer to re-create four important settings from Kuromiya's life. One space became his old Philly apartment, outfitted with a now ancient desktop computer and Scrabble board strewn across the coffee table. Another was the church basement where ACT UP Philadelphia, the AIDS activist group, congregated. The final sets were a hotel room — Kuromiya stayed in many while attending AIDS conferences for his Critical Path newsletter — and a hospital room, built to resemble the Pennsylvania Hospital space where he died.
Friends and former colleagues sat for interviews in the spaces, which apparently passed muster. One subject remembered sleeping on the couch in the apartment set.
With the help of another producer, Kuromiya's biographer and Penn faculty member Che Gossett, the film also landed an interview with Kuromiya's younger brother. Holsten followed Larry Kuromiya and his wife Ann to Heart Mountain, the Wyoming site of the internment camp where Kuromiya was born in 1943. The "relocation center" was one of 10 that imprisoned roughly 112,000 Japanese Americans, nearly 70,000 of whom were U.S. citizens, during World War II.
Larry Kuromiya visits the former site of the Heart Mountain internment camp where his brother Kiyoshi was born.
"The landscape itself is unfortunately beautiful in the summer, but it's not a beautiful place," Holsten said. "We interviewed some other incarcerated survivors. So that was a very fulfilling three days. It was really intense. Larry said it was life-changing for him. I don't think he had let himself go into that place."
More recently, Holsten filmed seven contemporary activists reciting Kuromiya's words inside the William Way Center. He still hopes to shoot in California, where the activist spent his early life, but is fundraising to get there. He estimates the project is about two-thirds complete. The William Way Center recently screened clips of the movie for a Pride Month event, and Holsten plans to show "whatever phase our film is at the moment" at a symposium at Penn this fall.
After spending two years with Kuromiya, Holsten says he's come to appreciate his strength, intellect and creative, even "trickster" energy. The activist also had an uncanny knack for uniting the room, one the filmmaker has seen in his past subjects like Quaker activist George Lakey and Father Mychal Judge, the New York City Fire Department chaplain killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.
"It sounds a little hokey, but I really think our world needs what I call bridge people," Holsten said. "People who connect communities. And Kiyoshi was such an intersectional connector of so many different kinds of groups. Everyone feels comfortable with him. Everyone feels safe with him. Everyone then is connected through him."
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