The Suicide Club

The Suicide Club was a secret society in San Francisco that was founded by Gary Warne and three friends - Adrienne Burk, David Warren, and Nancy Prussia. It began in Spring 1977 as a course that Warne taught at the Communiversity in San Francisco, part of the Free School Movement, and it lasted until shortly before Warne's death in 1983. Events generally started and ended in Warne's used paperback bookstore, Circus of the Soul.

The name of the Suicide Club was inspired by three stories written by Robert Louis Stevenson, where men who want to die belong to a club, where each evening one of them is randomly selected for death. The name belied the gentle albeit zany nature of its members, who had a predilection towards light-hearted practical jokes.

Membership in the San Francisco Suicide Club was attained by attending an "initiation" ceremony that took place sporadically. Any member could propose any type of event, and it would be listed along with a writeup in the Club's monthly mailer, sardonically named the "Nooseletter." There were five or so general categories that most events fell into:

• Street theater, Pranks (30 members riding the San Francisco cable cars naked and making post cards commemorating the event was perhaps the best known)
• Elaborate games in odd locales (cemeteries, sewer tunnels, the financial district late at night are a few of the places used)
• Explorations—Urban and otherwise (abandoned industrial buildings, sewer and other tunnels, waterways, bridges, etc.)
• Infiltrations (the Unification Church and the American Nazi Party were the two most daring and involved)
• Sometimes, types of events were conjoined, such as the "infiltration" of the National Speleological Society undertaken in 1979. Club members converged on the NSS monthly confab at the Palo Alto Grotto, wanting to join. NSS members soon determined something was a bit odd about the new recruits. The two groups ended up working together on several extreme expedition caving trips, the most prominent being a two week trip to Sótano de las Golondrinas in Central Mexico, the deepest free pit cave in the world.

The Suicide Club was probably best known at the time for its daring bridge climbing exploits. The Club, though very secretive during its brief five year lifespan, influenced many future cultural and artistic endeavors. The Billboard Liberation Front began as a Suicide Club event hosted by Gary Warne in 1977. Author Don Herron's Dashiell Hammett Walking Tour, the longest lived literary tour in America began in the Suicide Club in 1977. The Chinese New Years Treasure Hunt was created by Gary Warne in 1977 and continues (albeit in a very different form) to this day. John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was a Suicide Club member. The Cacophony Society was founded by ex Suicide Clubbers in 1986. There are now Cacophony Societies throughout the world. The Burning Man Festival was influenced by Cacophony and many former Suicide Club members were crucial organizers in the early days of the desert event. The "leave no trace" mantra of Burning Man was borrowed from the Suicide Club and the philosophy of Gary Warne.

Flash Gordon and My Father

My late father, God rest him, absolutely ADORED the Flash Gordon serials.

The original ones, from the 1930s. When he was a kid, even though those serials were already a good 10-15 years old, they were still playing in local cinemas as matinees and he could also hear them on radio. Being that "old" as a media product wasn't the unforgiveable sin back then that it is today.

My father's love for them encapsulated his whole red-blooded value system, which is the value system I inherited from him, as all good fathers pass to their sons.

He loved the stories, he loved the science fiction speculation, he loved the swashbuckling optimism and the heroic adventures. Although he never seemed to show it in other ways he was a great fan of pulp fiction (as long as it wasn't gratuitously obscene or too luridly violent) and his massive fancrush on science fiction led me to follow in his footsteps. One of the heartbreaks of his declining years for both of us was the death of the sort of science fiction types we'd read through our lives, to be replaced by pablum and "franchise" books, barely worthy of the name of book itself.

But in Flash Gordon, in all media, Dad found the apogee of his delight, and for many years so did I. Dan Dare had his moments, as did many other sub-Flash heroes and heroines... But Flash was truly Emperor of the Universe.

Dad loved the women in Flash Gordon too- and he was quite correct in his judgment. There have been stunning women portraying the characters over the decades- from the original ingenues to the smoldering Ornella Muti and beyond.

I never got to find out what Dad thought of the Rocketeer, but I imagine its basic type of story would have appealed to him and I know the incredible art of Dave Stevens would have amused and captivated him too.

For my father- my somewhat respectful and hopefully humorous parody-adventure of Flash Gordon is respectfully dedicated to you, Dad. I love you. And I still miss you so much.