Mazer Archives April 2022 Newsletter | Out of the Archives: Ruth Reid and Kent Hyde

Kent Hyde and Ruth Reid first met in 1939. They both were working at the University of California at Berkeley. Kent was working as a lab technician and Ruth was reading texts to blind students. They had met before, with friends, but hadn’t had much opportunity to chat until their first time out alone, at a coffee shop at the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft in Oakland.

Once situated in the privacy of a booth, their conversation grew personal. At one point Ruth asked Kent if she was happy, asking if her unhappiness came from being a lesbian. Ruth later reflects on this moment in her autobiography, wondering why she did not tell Kent that she, too, had loved women. She writes “later when we did talk about it, Kent said she had sensed it that day in the booth.”

Later, as Kent walked Ruth to the bus, she began to tell Kent about a play she was directing at her church that was “startlingly modern” and wondered if Kent if she would want to come shake tin backstage to make thunder sounds. Before Kent could consider, the bus arrived, and she looked at Ruth and said “I’ll phone about it,” as Ruth boarded. The whole interaction gave Ruth great anxiety, and she sat through her session, reading a law book to a blind law student, wondering if she had somehow offended Kent.

At the end of the appointment, she hurried out the stairs to find Kent in her car, waiting for her. Moments later, Ruth mentioned having read Kent’s poetry, remarking “I think it had some beautiful lines but that it was on the whole derivative,” feedback Kent seemed to dislike and like all at once. She agreed to shake the tin for the play.

On the night of the dress rehearsal, the crew needed more black crepe paper to cover a stand at the back of the stage. Kent and Ruth offered, and they drove to the shop open later than the others, got the paper, and headed back to the church. As Ruth opened her door to get out, Kent caught her arm and pulled her back, kissing her. “This is it, isn’t it?” She said to Ruth, who, startled, replied, “I guess it is.”

Ruth and Kent for together for 29 years, until Kent’s death in 1968, from rheumatoid arthritis. Both writers, their collection is filled with unpublished manuscripts, letters and correspondence, diary entries, drawings, and interviews. Their lives together spanned from before World War II to the Vietnam war, survived through Kent’s debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, Ruth’s affair, and living with Kent’s ailing mother—a person who disliked Ruth and from who Kent kept her sexuality a secret.

Ruth stayed in the Bay Area and continued writing, joining women’s and lesbian’s writing groups in the 1970s. Ruth and Kent had not been a big part of an LGBTQ+ community and Ruth found a sense of belonging at having discovered it. She was involved in activism and writing until her death in 1981.

I’m definitely not as confident as Kent—who didn’t hesitate to kiss a girl in a car in front of a church in 1939, but I still see a lot of myself in her. Just inside the entrance to the archives, along the top of a shelf, are four cardboard cutouts of various women. I had noticed Kent’s face—next to Frida Kahlo— because we looked alike: dark hair parted to the side, and round, black frame glasses. A classic masculine/butch look, if you will. She even hailed from Portland, Oregon, where I had lived for nearly 20 years. Except that Kent Hyde was born in 1904, nearly 80 years before me. Something about seeing Kent Hyde be so butch in the early 1900s really struck a chord with me.

Growing up, it’s not uncommon for LGBTQ+ youth to feel alone in their sexual or gender identities. Direct of Communications Angela Brinksele often asks those unfamiliar with the archives: “Do you feel alone in who you are? Or as though you’re the only one who is experiencing what you are? Well, it’s not true! There are all kinds of people just like you, and here at the Mazer, we can prove it!”

This collection is part of an outreach and collection-building partnership between the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) and the UCLA Library and is housed at UCLA Special Collections, as well as the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives.

Read more about Kent and Ruth here on the Online Archive of California, and read Ruth Reid’s memoir Wife of a Lesbian.