Pink Umbrellas Blog: Punks and Poets
Punks and Poets Blog: Wilum Pugmire, Weird Hero of Pink Umbrellas Love Rainydaze….
During the ‘90s, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire was a music writer for The Rocket, a fearless advocate for human rights, a performance artist, a leading expert on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and a prolific, published author of his own weird fiction. Today, Wilum lives on in a youtube vlog.
In November 1992, Wilum wrote this cover story.
I don’t own many of these screenshots. The Rocket magazine is mine and I took the photo.
I’m posting everything to help others find Wilum’s weird fiction book catalog or vlog where he gives Lovecraftian readings like a goth-drag librarian.
Sadly, Wilum passed away in 2019, leaving this world a wealth of Youtube vlogs to remember him by. I find a thimbleful of comfort thinking Wilum has projected himself into the surreal ether-world of The Cloud, and is living on a weird astral plane of his own design.
The few times I met Wilum during the 90s, he was a busy doing performance art, writing for The Rocket, weird fiction, or giving readings/lectures on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. He wore pink vinyl mini skirts and fishnet stockings to work (at the Cyclops Cafe), and could wreck (disrupt) a Seattle Metro bus in a matter of seconds by doing nothing more than entering or exiting. We took the same bus route when I lived in Belltown, and sometimes I’d get lucky and we’d ride together.
In May of 1991, I wrote an article for Wire magazine (below) about the state of trans and human rights. Lisa, my roommate at that time, was having difficulties completing the Benjamin Standards of care, which was a series of international laws that used to make it nearly impossible for trans people to “self-actualize” as we called it then.
The clip of the article below is mine. It has a cartoon of a bearded lady, and a photo of Lisa that I later pasted over it. I submitted this photo with the article, but Wire editors chose to run it with this cartoon. The (young) male editors at the UW newspaper also changed the title and context of my article, but it was a good start toward opening conversations on (trans/sexual) human rights. These kinds of human rights stories were just beginning to be published.
Wilum wrote a letter to the editors of Wire in support of the article. This is how we later met. I introduced myself one afternoon on the bus when he sat next to me and thanked him for his response.
My family and a few of my friends just didn’t get why I would be publicly involved. More than one straight “friend” stopped calling. I don’t think Wilum knew how much I admired his wildly brave fashion sense and civic pride.
Pink Umbrellas Love Rainydaze Out Now on Amazon.com
