Richard Hartgrove and Gary Cooper: Witnesses to profound social progess

Had Richard Hartgrove and Gary Cooper met on the streets of New York City as young men in the 1960s, police might have arrested them.

For talking to each other.

During the 1950s and ’60s, the police routinely raided gay businesses and neighborhoods. The media published the names of those arrested, often ruining lives. Even chatting up a friend on the sidewalk could land one in jail for “soliciting” or “loitering.”

“We were treated like vermin,” Cooper says. “You couldn’t tell your company you were gay. You’d lose your job, your housing.”

As it turned out, Hartgrove, 70, and Cooper, 68, didn’t meet until 1979. Yet they vividly recall the brutal facts of social life from their younger years.

In the intervening time, the Austin couple — who will receive the Bettie Naylor Visibility Award during the Human Rights Campaign gala at the Four Seasons Hotel on Feb. 15 — have witnessed, separately and together, monumental social changes.

In 1969, for instance, the Stonewall Riots galvanized the gay community in New York City. Cooper participated in the activist meetings that followed. In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis ushered in more profound social and political shifts. Again, Cooper helped organize responses in Little Rock, Ark., and St. Louis, where the couple lived.

Hartgrove’s career as an AT&T attorney kept him from the front lines back then. But by 1995, after Hartgrove retired, the Austin duo felt open enough to register as “gay couple No. 306” at the Travis County Courthouse.

And 17 years later, in June 2012, wearing trim cream and white suits, Cooper and Hartgrove, who have become noted leaders in the philanthropic community, were married in Brooklyn, N.Y., then celebrated at their hilltop neighborhood in West Austin.

“Their personal experiences and struggles for equality, not only for themselves, but for countless others, have made them resolute and tenacious advocates for human rights,” says Austin nonprofit leader Carol Adams. “I love them both dearly and have the utmost admiration for all they do for Austin.”

Hartgrove, before Cooper

Both men are fifth-generation Texans. Hartgrove grew up in West Texas, Cooper in East Texas.

San Angelo-born Hartgrove grew up on the family ranch, 100 miles west of that Concho River city. The family moved to Big Lake, the seat of Reagan County, then Hartgrove lived with his grandmother in San Angelo for his final years of high school.

Something of an introvert who read science fiction — he’s still a voracious reader — Hartgrove also competed in sports.

Coming from a “macho cowboy culture,” tall, fair and upright Hartgrove knew to repress his attractions to his own gender.

“I didn’t allow myself a single thought about it,” he says. “I knew it was not an option.”

In fact, Hartgrove married his high school sweetheart while in law school in 1966. Years later, Hartgrove admitted to his daughter and son-in-law that he felt guilty about it.

Son-in-law: “Because you left?”

Hartgrove: “No, because I got married. I knew it was not the right thing to do.”

At one point, Hartgrove had a “mini-breakdown” and sought out a therapist to help with his “unconscious desires.” He also studied psychology at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.

“I found it fascinating,” he says. “At parties, I try to get inside somebody’s head and figure out what makes them tick. I’m also empathetic. Way too empathetic. People tell me things at cocktail parties that they’ve told nobody else.”

After Washington and Lee, law school at Southern Methodist University seemed a better option than fighting in Vietnam. He joined a law firm in San Angelo before serving six months in the Army.

A stop in Dallas to use the telephone ended in a job, then a distinguished career as a lawyer for AT&T and its offshoots.

Hartgrove was transferred to St. Louis in 1969. His family grew to include two children: Heather (now 43) and Todd (now 40). He has four grandkids.

It was not till he moved to Houston in 1973 that he honestly faced his gay feelings. Meanwhile, Hartgrove jumped between litigation, labor law and regulatory law for the phone company. When he moved to work in New York City, a mix of personal and social factors pushed him to take action in his private life.

“My fourth day there, my wife called to say my brother had died in a plane crash,” he says. “Three months into living in New York by myself, by the time my wife got there, it was over.”

Hartgrove settled down with a scholarly man who introduced him to Jane Austen, Marcel Proust and the opera.

“So many aspects of culture that I now treasure,” he says. “He used to say: ‘When I have nothing left to teach you, you are going to leave me.’ That’s pretty much what happened.”

Cooper, before Hartgrove

Alto-born Cooper was reared in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas. His family had farmed in East Texas since the 1850s, but his parents moved to bigger cities to work before they divorced. His mother married four times.

“I was pretty much raised by my grandmother,” Cooper says. “A woman who was born in 1882 on the Texas frontier, a Methodist Sunday school teacher. She was the stabilizing factor in my life. She instilled in me the Golden Rule and taught me gardening.”

Independent and resourceful as a child, Cooper lied about his age to get jobs selling magazine subscriptions, ushering at a movie theater or working at a drive-through restaurant to help support his family. He played the “obligatory” football in middle and high school.

“I wanted to play football in grade school,” he recalls. “But when I asked my mother for the money to buy the uniform, she told me I couldn’t be on the team because I was a ‘sissy.’ Before she died a few years ago, she brought that up and apologized, explaining that she didn’t have the money and was ashamed to say so.”

Studious and complicated, he loved reading novels and always made good grades, “although I was really sleep-deprived.”

Cooper knew he was gay from an early age. He also was struck by the social inequality portrayed in the movie “A Raisin in the Sun” and volunteered at the downtown Dallas office for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

“In a working-class environment, there seemed to be no future,” he says. “I wanted out and wanted opportunity.”

After his junior year in high school, he left home to work and attend school in Los Angeles. From that exhausting and lonely experience, he took away self-reliance.

“I knew I could survive,” he says. “And that I wanted a stable home life with a companion.”

Back home, he was thrown out of the house for bringing a Latina friend to his stepfather’s Christmas party. While working for a beer distributor, he lucked into the sponsorship of businessman Arthur Hughes, who paid for two years at St. Edward’s University.

There, an appearance by social activist Dorothy Day convinced Cooper that life was about direct service to those in need.

He spent the summer of 1966 shoveling iron ore at a Cleveland, Ohio, steel plant to cover studying English back at the University of Texas. There, he was arrested in 1968 for civil disobedience during a protest of the violent bullying of a black student.

Just before graduation, though, he met his first boyfriend at the Chuck Wagon in the Student Union.

“Our eyes met across the room,” Cooper recalls. “Very ‘West Side Story.’”

Romance did not stand in the way of volunteering for VISTA, the home-grown version of the Peace Corps. He worked with migrant farmworkers in California.

After that, it was time for a career, so Cooper sent letters to all the college textbook publishers.

“Every publishing house I wrote to took me out to lunch and offered me jobs,” he says. “How times have changed!”

He chose the esteemed W.W. Norton & Co., moved to New York, and joined the gay life in the West Village. Cooper didn’t participate in the Stonewall Riots, but he got involved in the follow-up political meetings.

“We had all this pent-up turmoil because of the way we were treated,” he says. “For me, it was a complete epiphany. My own rights were what I needed to fight for.”

Norton gave Cooper the job of handling textbook acquisition, editing and development in the Mountain West. Yet constant travel nearly burned him out.

On a break in Austin, he joined the Yellow Rose Tribe, a gay hippie commune that lived in a small old house downtown. He tried to settle down in Seattle to oversee the Northwest region for Norton. A promising relationship there broke up in part because of Cooper’s constant traveling.

Another leave of absence in Hawaii introduced Cooper to Roger Rose, then curator at the Bishop Museum, his first domestic partner. A stable job at the University of Hawaii Press helped. He became an expert in exporting textbooks for various publishers to Asia. That led to more travel.

“In the pre-Internet age, you had to meet face-to-face,” Cooper says. “My business trips would last three to four months.”

Cooper and Rose worked out a non-exclusive “agreement,” not uncommon among gay men in the pre-AIDS era.

In fact, both Cooper and Hartgrove were with other partners when they met and fell for each other in Dallas in 1979.

“That’s the danger of an open relationship,” Cooper jokes, but with a serious look in his eye. “Back then, you see, we thought we were redefining what relationships meant.”

The couple before Austin

Cooper and Hartgrove shuttled between Dallas, New York, St. Louis, Little Rock and Austin during their first years together. During the early 1980s, they couldn’t betray their attachment for reasonable fear of scuttling Hartgrove’s job.

“Every time we went out, we’d see somebody from work,” Hartgrove says. “Once we were in an airport waiting for a plane and had to pretend to be strangers when colleagues from work showed up.”

The fear was not ill-founded. Hartgrove was transferred from a high-level job in Little Rock to more urbane St. Louis “for having a homosexual lifestyle.”

While traveling abroad, they were able to be a little more open, even with straight couples.

“We we were sometimes the only gay people they had met,” Hartgrove says. “Some told us: ‘You know, we actually enjoyed meeting you.’”

Apart from Hartgrove, Cooper was able to be more active in the gay community, even in Little Rock. While working for a Third World charity, he tested positive for HIV in 1985. In 1987, he started taking AZT when the drug was still in the experimental stages.

Cooper helped organize the first responses to AIDS in Little Rock. In St. Louis, he helped found St. Louis Effort for AIDS.

“It was like the gay rights movement in a way,” he says. “We were all scared to death. I was the one who would go on TV whenever there was an AIDS story and they needed a local angle.”

While the St. Louis Effort was enormously successful as a volunteer group, it, like other pioneer AIDS groups, faced deep divisions when it professionalized and when the disease moved into other communities.

“I was once picketed by Act Up for betraying the gay community because I arranged for our group to join the United Way,” he says. “That’s how silly things could get because emotions were running high.”

Cooper’s health began to fail seriously, and he was encouraged to go on disability and get his affairs in order. Then protease inhibitors — the second big drug game-changer — arrived.

“I didn’t die after all,” Cooper says. “When you get that close and you’ve lost most of your friends, it changes everything. My natural response was to redouble my commitment to honor the people we lost and bear witness to who we are as gay people publicly.”

Social, giving and active in Austin

Hartgrove finally retired in 1994. The couple moved here in 1995.

They first lived in a townhouse on 35th Street before moving to their striking hilltop home in 2003. The long, narrow house is clad in vulcanized aluminum on the outside, lined with hidden-mortar limestone bricks on the inside. It was designed essentially as an art gallery for the previous owner.

One reason for buying the house was to entertain, socialize and raise money for worthy causes. Lively, curious and sometimes wickedly funny, the couple seems capable of bringing together all sorts of unlikely people to their table.

“Richard and Gary are the quintessential models of hospitality,” says friend Bob Dailey, who works at AT&T Laboratories. “I have lost count of the number of fundraisers, talent showcases and meet-and-greet events that I have attended in their beautiful home during the past 10-plus years.”

The couple stick by a strenuous health regime and hike frequently. They also take at least one big adventurous trip a year and continue to read everything they can put their hands on.

Hartgrove has invested time in Zach Theatre, Austin Lyric Opera, Conspirare, UT College of Fine Arts, Armstrong Community Music School and other arts groups. Following a lifelong interest in social justice, Cooper became deeply involved in AIDS Services of Austin, Out Youth and, more recently, Workers Defense Project, which helps with immigrant causes.

“We didn’t want to become retired recluses,” Cooper says. “We wanted to get involved in the community, to have a circle of friends and have a life. That was our original motive.”

Nonprofit leaders find their volunteer lives complement each other.

“It is the core strength of their work that they both act on true passion for their causes,” says Margaret Perry, director of the Armstrong School. “And it is obvious they have different missions that speak to their hearts. They are respected because they have carefully chosen what truly matters to them.”

When possible, Hartgrove and Cooper have served in leadership positions for the groups they support.

“In the words of Marianne Williamson: ‘May I bring your love and goodness with me, to give unto others wherever I go,’” says public relations specialist Karen Frost. “Whether it’s conscious or not, Gary and Richard do this every day.”

Thanks in part to their close, incredibly generous friend Bill Dickson, they’ve also been associated with raising major charitable dollars, too.

“They believe in what they are doing and are able to convey their views in a forthright manner,” Dickson says. “It takes some adept personality traits to move around the various social circles in this town.”

The couple also acted as unofficial ambassadors for the gay community.

“Once we retired, we no longer had to hide who we were,” Cooper says. “I’m a strong believer in the belief that’s why we’ve come so far.”

They see charitable work as going hand in hand with their larger social goals.

“I would like to see more people, and especially more young gay people, get out of their gay silos and the bars and get involved and engaged in improving Austin as a place to live for everyone,” Hartgrove says. “The more visible that gay people are in doing good work for society, the more likely it is that we will be seen as an integral part of the community, and the less successful the homophobes will be in marginalizing us.”

Ever the activist, Cooper emphasizes the need for enduring vigilance.

“The world isn’t simply changing because we deserve it,” Cooper says. “It is responding to our efforts to create this change. We would not be winning in the courts and statehouses if we had not built the political will to make it possible. That work is far from finished, and probably never will be. Most of all, we have the opportunity to contribute every day as gay, tax-paying citizens raising families, enjoying life, and helping create a better world for everyone.”

Michael Barnes writes about Austin’s people, places, culture and history