Gary Warne, Communiversity, and the Suicide Club

This article is a continuation of my American Iconoclasts and National Characters, series. These are  biographical sketches of someone who did things their own eccentric way, who lived their own iconoclastic life, and in doing so, contributed to the burgeoning National Character of the United States of America.

Joining something called The Suicide Club might give a normal person pause as they think of the probability of diminishing returns such a dwindling social group would have. On the other hand, with a name like that, it probably did a good job of weeding out people who had no business being a member in the first place. In the end, the club wasn’t about suicide anyway, but about danger, and having what some might call peak experiences, and what others might call experiences that put you in touch with reality. Started by Gary Warne in 1977 the Suicide Club was known for its anarchic practical jokes pioneering development of what is now known as urban exploration. It’s influential tendrils also left marks on people involved in the early days of Burning Man. As such Gary Warne and the Suicide Club have left crucial marks in the collective national character because he doubled down on his own eccentric individuality and shared the spirit of adventure with his fellow travelers, leaving behind a radical legacy.

Gary Warne was a native to West Virginia, born in 1948 and brought up in Florida and Kentucky. He did a stint in the army where he was stationed in Puerto Rico, followed by a westward drift to the left coast.

​In 1968 throngs of long-haired freaky people descended on the city of San Francisco to dip their toes in or totally immerse themselves in the swinging psychedelic epicenter of the hippie counterculture that was just then reaching its peak. Gary Warne was one of those freaky people. Whether he had long hair or not is another matter. He came to the city with his friend Sutton Breiding, and he ended up living in a pad at 800 Shrader Street with several others. His domicile was not far from Golden Gate Park and the bridge that spanned above it, which would leave a lasting impression on Warne’s life. Before we go further into that life, we have to take a detour into the Free University Movement and San Francisco’s Communiversity.

​A COMMUNIVERSITY OF BEDROOM SCHOLARS

The heady days of the late 1960s and early seventies saw a renewal of interest in the defense of free speech and the First Amendment. In addition to focusing on freedom of expression through words, speech, and lifestyle, the hippies endeavored to make other things free and it was inevitable the freedoms they wanted would spill over into the costly education system. An education system tied to preserving the establishment. The “Free University Movement” was one of the results of such thinking as people looked for alternatives to mainstream schooling. 

In particular the idea that spurred the Free University Movement can be traced to the New Left of the sixties and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1962 the SDS released their manifesto named the Port Huron Statement. It’s a strange name for such a political document, but it is called that because of the place it was written at, a United Auto Workers retreat outside Port Huron, Michigan, where the SDS had their first national convention.

Among the many calls for reform within the manifesto was a section on the importance of higher education and it’s “permanent position of social influence.” The SDS called out the many ways that the intellectual ability cultivated at these institutions was put into use for the service of the military-industrial complex, as opposed to their own aims for cultivating a culture of civil rights and peace. Amid the issues addressed about universities was the call to action to “wrest control from the administrative bureaucracy.” There was also the notion that an “ideal university” is a “community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.”

As the boomers came of age, more and more of them were going into the university system and getting educated. Yet the educations they were getting weren’t making the world a better place. In fact, wars continued to proliferated, people were still treated unjustly and were discriminated against, and pollution and the treatment of our ecological systems continued to worsen even as more and more of the people who wished for a more equitable society got university degrees. The intellectuals within the hippie movement took note. None of this was producing the ideal world so many of them had dreamed of. Yet they knew from psychology that there is more potential within each person than ever fully gets awakened and realized.

In opposition to this a call was made within the counterculture for citizens to make allies outside the university system. This seed of thought led to the eventual rise of the Free University Movement which flourished briefly and then faded like so many other dreams of the hippies as they sold out their ideals in exchange for a paycheck and a job at the bank.

Gary Warne wasn’t a sellout though, and during its height (or is that haight?) he was one who got involved in the Free University Movement. His entry was when San Francisco State University (SFSU) affiliated Communiversity had started to sponsor a series of free classes. In the meantime, in April of 1974 Warne decided to give his own unaffiliated class on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The other people who studied Poe with him met in the confines of his bedroom.

One of the attendees was William M. Breiding. He recalls the heady days reading America’s early master of the macabre, “Each week we piled into Gary’s romantically decorated garret to discuss a previously read Poe story or poem. The Poe group was diverse and interesting. Our range of activities went far beyond Edgar Allan to dinners and outings throughout San Francisco, including each other’s homes. Carter was a poet who organised readings. I met John Fugazzi there, fresh from Cincinnati, who was to become a lifelong friend. … John R., Gary’s old friend and roommate, was also a part of the class, and brought a vibrancy and humour to the class that might have otherwise been missing.”

Eventually Gary was on the roster at the SFSU Communiversity and given a teaching stipend. Part of the university experience in America has been the tradition of the practical joke and the Communiversity was not immune from the impulse. Far from it, Warne and his circle had the bright idea to not just do practical jokes, but give a class on practical jokes.  

“This event was to signal a new era for Communiversity, the Free University Movement and many of us individually. As soon as it hit the streets we were told [by the SFSU that the class] was ‘not educational, in poor taste and probably illegal from the sound of it.’ Preliminary discussions went on among the top brass at State about withdrawing our pay checks until threats and coercion failed. At the end of the year we withdrew the school from State forming a non-profit. A hundred people signed up for the practical jokes class, making it the most popular class in the history of the school….”

With Communiversity out of the control of SFSU, the people involved were free to go their own way and do their own thing.

​A Communiversity catalog from 1982, celebrating their tenth anniversary noted that, “Communiversity has been doing it for a long time. In 1971 Gary Warne took Communiversity out of San Francisco State University; Communiversity has been trading junk for free classes and events ever since. This has added, in a real way, to the exchange of information from one person to another. This exercise has been enlightening to the thousands of students, teachers, and volunteers who have participated.”

CIRCUS OF THE SOUL

As the seventies continued on, Warne ended up with a new hobby. He had become a book hound and had amassed a library of some 16,000 volumes through his scouring of second-hand stores, garage sales, flea markets. On these excursions he also picked up weird stuff, material for costumes, any items with a whiff of the recherche.

All of this material went into his next project: Circus of the Soul, a used bookstore and community center that became a focal point for the further burgeoning of freakdom between 1975 and 1980. It was a happening place. From hosting the Fantasy Film Festival to musical meetups, and a bizarre range of other events, it became the locus operandi out of which the Suicide Club evolved.

On the dark and stormy night of January 2, 1977 Warne and three friends ventured to Fort Point, the Castillo de San Joaquín, a brick fortification built on a spur at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay in 1861. The Golden Gate bridge towers above this point. When the weather turns stormy waves will crash over the wall near the point where there is a large chain just before the large rocks that go down to the water. Adrienne Burk, Nancy Prussia, Warne, and David Warren each took turns holding that chain and letting the waves of the ocean violently crash onto them. Those waves, if they didn’t hold tight, would have been powerful enough to pull them into the bay where the risk of drowning was quite real. In this moment of dangerous living, with cold water exhilaration and close calls with death, the Suicide Club was born.

The name came from the title of a collection of three linked stories by Robert Louis Stevenson where Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his sidekick Colonel Geraldine look for adventure and thrills, starting by infiltrating a secret society where the goal of its members is losing their lives, each member selected one by one on the night of their meetings to die.

Warne and the others who had held onto the chain wanted to repeat this experience of survival, and later in the year opened it up to other people, starting by offering a class in the Communiversity from February through May. 

The announcement for the Charter Member Meeting of the SF Suicide Club read as thus, “Meeting regularly but at odd times.  Members must agree to set their worldly affairs in order, to enter into the REAL world of chaos, cacaphony and dark saturnalia, and they must further agree to live each day as though it were their last, for it may BE.  The club will explore untravelled, exotic, dismal and exhilarating experiences of life:  deserted cemeteries, storms, caving, haunted houses, Nazi bars, fanatical movements, hot air ballooning, stunts, expose, impersonation.  The Club will be ongoing for the rest of our lives.” The charter was signed, “Nancy Prussia, Gary Warne, Adrienne Burk, David Warren, R.J. Mololepozy, The Phantom, The Crimson Pirate, Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys.”

This penchant for probing the underbelly of the city led the Suicide Club to becoming the first group dedicated to urban exploration, often in extremis. Expeditions generally began an ended at Circus of the Soul, leading it to become the birthplace for a genuine American psychogeography. 

To this end they planned escapades into the sewers beneath the streets, other tunnels they weren’t supposed to be in, abandoned industrial buildings, and climbed onto the terrifying heights of the Golden Gate Bridge. Doing these stunts helped the members face their fears and start living life beyond their fears. They also liked to play games inside of the cemeteries and inside the financial district. One of their most-daring do’s as far as physicality, was when they got thirty people on top of the cable cars in San Francisco, and did so while naked. Commemorative post cards were made for that expedition.

Club member John Law touches on how Warne wanted the experiences of doing an activity with the club to be a kind of initiation into super-reality. “The Suicide Club could create an other-worldly, surreal environment. Getting naked on the cable cars was a surreal experience. He wanted a disconnect with 'reality' and a connection with 'super-reality.' 'Cuz knowing you could fall off the bridge and die is a super-real feeling.”

Like their namesakes in the Robert Louis Stevenson story, they also engaged in daring infiltrations of strange groups. They penetrated the Unification Church, aka the Moonies and the American Nazi Party, exposing themselves to the literal danger of being exposed as infiltrators (and potentially brainwashed).

Another form of infiltration was when they started going to meetings for the National Speleological Society (NSS) at the local Paolo Alto Grotto. The NSS is a group dedicated to exploring and gaining knowledge about caves. The NSS members were a bit skeptical about the strangeness of all the sudden new members from the Suicide Club, but they ended up joining forces and working together to explore the Cave of the Swallows, or Sótano de las Golondrinas, the largest known cave shaft in the world and a favorite of vertical cave spelunkers who have to rappel down into its depths.

Being in San Francisco the spirit of the Diggers certainly lived on. One of the activities listed on a flyer for Suicide Club events listed “Ringolevio IV.” I don’t know if that was a reading of Emmet Grogan’s book Ringolevio, or a meet up for playing the game the book was named after. Warne liked games and I could see the suicide club playing ringolevio all around the city. Grogan had written about this old game of expanded tag, played on the streets of New York and other cities in America for well over a century, that “It's a game. A game played on the streets of New York, for as long as anyone can remember. It is called Ringolevio, and the rules are simple. There are two sides, each with the same number of players. There are no time limits, no intermissions, no substitutes and no weapons allowed. There are two jails. There is one objective.”

​Here in the Midwest it was played as a version of “Hunters and Hunted” when I was a kid. And it was the best outdoor game of all. Seeing adults play this game in cities across America again would certainly be welcome.

BURNING WITH INTERCONNECTIONS

One of the things Warne liked to do was connect people. Ideas only went so far. They had to be put into action. One way of putting them into action and connecting people was his ‘zine the Answer Man Newsletter. For just a bit of money, people could write to Warne and ask him a question. He would then get back in touch with them, sending them resources, contacts to experts in the area they were asking about, and other information.

His extensive book collection and knowledge found other uses too, because in between everything else he did, Warne somehow found time to write fiction and poetry. Some of this was collected after his death into The Lord of Sensation and Other Fragments and Dreams. His articles meanwhile turned up in places like the Surrealist Exchange, SF Free and Easy, and the Bystander. Another project he was working on was the creation of a multi-media piece exploring the history of the San Francisco earthquake.

Warne’s burning energies continued to expand, and his next project was the Gorilla Grotto. It started at the very end of the 1979, and continued on for most of 1980. Located at 775 Frederick Street, it had something of the idea of the happening, and it was happening on a daily basis with just one day off to recuperate. On six out of seven nights a week the seeker of dissident revelry could go to the Grotto for a heady combination of lectures, of movies, of storytelling, readings and live music. If that wasn’t enough, a playpen had been provided that was big enough for adults, made for adults. Revelers often ended the night with a pillow fight. Warne also curated a series of social events that he called the “Museum of the Inconsequential” for the Grotto.

He even found the time for traditional volunteer work. His efforts took him into the hospital to hang out with the elderly in his capacity as a volunteer pet therapist. He buddied up to the police and begin working as a trainee officer with the S.F.P.D. towards the end of his life, when he wasn’t busy slinging books with the Friends of the S.F. Public Library.
Warne didn’t stop until death stopped him. A heart attack ended his life on Thanksgiving Day, 1983. His friends took his cremains up on one last daring climb of the Golden Gate Bridge and dropped his ashes into the bay. His friend John Law even painted some of those ashes onto the bridge. Warne would remain part of that vast golden expanse that had so inspired him. Some remaining ashes were given in small vials to his friends.
​
John Law, who had been a member of the Suicide Club, would go on to start the Cacophony Society and co-found Burning Man.

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FIND THE OTHERS: READ THE REST OF THE AMERICAN ICONOCLASTS & NATIONAL CHARACTERS SERIES:

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams
Fakir Musafar, Richard Simonton, and Jim Ward
Going Native In America
David Wills: The Weatherman
Jim Tully: Writer, Circus Man, Boxer, Hobo
Harlan Hubbard: The Man Who Lived on the Fringe
Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song
Raymond Thundersky: The Construction Clown
Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood
Peace Pilgrim
The Long Memory of Utah Phillips
Anti-Art and Hillbilly Tape Music with Henry Flynt

Remember, think for yourself, question authority, and let it rip!