San Francisco Chronicle - February 18, 2008
Steven Winn

1960-2003

Performer

Eric Gupton was a flamboyant warrior. As a founding member of Pomo Afro Homos, the audacious black theater troupe that blazed a broad-spectrum view of homosexuality in the 1990s, he stood in a singular bright light with his stage cohorts. Gupton did it as a performer who was by turns funny, wrathful and tender and always fearless wherever he and his material went.

In "Fierce Love: Stories From Black Gay Life," the company's breakthrough first show, he left a memorable imprint in a sketch called "Good Hands," set in the erotically heated backroom of a club. In "Dark Fruit" he played a timid office temp who gets lured into a relationship with a power-wielding boss. Another sketch from that show cast Gupton as a black student who is caught in the arms of a white boy and suffers by far the harsher fate.

"As we announce so clearly in our shows," Gupton said in a 1994 interview with the Los Angeles Times, "these are just some of the stories. We merely present the mirror, the community at large with all its flaws. What it should do is empower people to say you have value in your life. It may not be reflected in a sitcom, but you should honor it."

The group, whose kicky name was a telegraphic version of Postmodern African American Homosexuals, was sparked by San Francisco Mime Troupe veteran Brian Freeman in 1990. After vowing to write a show about black gay life for Josie's Cabaret & Juice Joint, Freeman asked his friends Gupton and Djola D. Branner to brainstorm with him in a San Francisco cafe. An hour later, they had enough ideas to whirl into rehearsal.

"Fierce Love" won Pomo Afro Homos an immediate following and bookings around the country and English-speaking world. The group toured Canada and the United Kingdom, appeared twice in the Serious Fun! festival at New York's Lincoln Center and turned up on Comedy Central's "Out There" special. Broadly satiric and outlandishly over-the-top as the sketches could be, the shows carried the double-depth charge of assailing both racism and homophobia. The AIDS crisis gave their work a sharper sense of urgency.

Gupton, who was born in Boston and educated at Antioch College, moved to San Francisco in 1984 and worked in the human resources department of Mother Jones magazine.

He made his first big San Francisco splash in Ken Vega's 1989 musical "Cafe Depresso." A gifted singer and dancer, Gupton had a melodious speaking voice that served him well in his work as voice-over artist and narrator of the Kronos Quartet's "All the Rage" album.

Offstage, he devoted many hours to his work in AIDS support groups. Gupton himself succumbed to complications from AIDS and died in 2003.

"Eric was the brassy one," Freeman told The Chronicle at the time of Gupton's death. "He was so out there in his personality, it was hard to take your eyes off him when he was onstage. He loved an audience, and it loved him. He was the one people always got crushes on. They'd send him flowers backstage."

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