Assunta Femia, a gay male San Francisco poet, actor, and political activist who admired nuns, died at a friend's home in Oregon on Saturday, November 4, from liver cancer, secondary to hepatitis B. He would have been 59 next month.
Assunta was born Francis Thomas Femia in December 1947, the son of an Italian-American father and a West Virginia mother. After growing up in modest circumstances in West Virginia and Philadelphia, and later serving time in federal prison for an anti-war protest, he arrived in San Francisco in 1975.
Assunta started walking about the city dressed as a nun, which was a novel sight at the time, and began using the female pronoun for self-reference. Eventually, she changed her name to Assunta, which means "Taken Up," a title referring to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Assunta loved the nuns and the Catholic liturgy that she knew from childhood. However, she rejected the church's male-focused theology and scorned priests and the pope. She created her own special spirituality based on a sense of service to the divine feminine, traditional Catholic veneration of the Blessed Virgin, and fierce independence of spirit.
Assunta's eye-popping spirituality struck a responsive chord in San Francisco's gay community in the 1970s and 1980s. She helped inspire the founding of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group that continues to this day. However, she was too independent-minded to spend much time with the Sisters, and she never adopted a mocking posture toward nuns.
Assunta had made waves before coming to San Francisco. In 1968, at age 21, she was arrested, along with two other Catholic peace activists, for pouring black paint on draft files in Boston, to protest the war in Vietnam.
As a consequence, she spent two years in federal prison in Kentucky, where she came out as gay. She said she preferred prison life in Kentucky to parochial high school in south Philadelphia: "Prison was a lot less brutal than high school. I never got beat up in prison."
Starting in the 1980s, Assunta spent much time in southern Oregon, going back and forth between there and San Francisco. When in Oregon, she rented a small house in a wooded area outside the town of Wolf Creek, whose owner lived in San Francisco. A local homophobe firebombed the house, but luckily Femia was absent at the time.
She became the butt of taunts and threats from redneck men in rural Oregon because of her feminine appearance. But her tormentors always backed off, sensing on some level that she was not someone to mess with. They were right. Tucked away in her colorfully knitted Guatemalan handbag, next to her favorite rosary, she carried a big handgun.
During Assunta's tenancy, the Wolf Creek property was often visited by gay men seeking alternatives to urban life, and the land gradually took on the nature of a country refuge. Eventually, a collective of Radical Faeries from San Francisco, including followers of the late Harry Hay, came into possession of the property and turned it into a faerie sanctuary.
A bitter conflict soon developed between the swarm of new faery landlords and the longstanding tenant. Things got off to a rocky start when Hay rebuked Assunta for including Catholic elements in her spirituality. The turning point came when one of the new faery occupants erected some stone phalluses on the land. Assunta regarded the phalluses as glorifications of male power in a place sacred to the divine feminine. She destroyed them all with a hammer, celebrating the feat with an triumphant poem, "i smashed the phalloi."
Assunta proved to be too radical for the Radical Faeries, and a parting of the ways followed. She abandoned the land she had made safe for the new dwellers and the home that she and some friends had built to replace the one that was firebombed. "It was easier with one landlord than 200," she later quipped.
Assunta performed in plays and musicals in both Oregon in San Francisco. In 1984, at the former Valencia Rose cabaret in the Mission, she played the lead role of the god Dionysos in The God of Ecstasy , a rendition of Euripides's play Bakkhai . When asked at a rehearsal by other members of the cast how she landed the lead role, she announced to all, "I slept with the director" (which was true).
She was active in Bay Area Gay Liberation and also the Butterfly Brigade, a civilian foot patrol organized to combat anti-gay violence in the Castro. When the AIDS epidemic hit, she spent much time caring for the dying, both in Oregon and San Francisco, drawing on skills she had learned from a stint in nursing school.
Although appearing to be in the peak of health, Assunta was unexpectedly diagnosed in the winter of 2005 with advanced liver cancer. The cancer grew rapidly, despite surgery performed at UCSF Medical Center in February, in a last-ditch effort to save her life.
Her initial disbelief and anger eventually gave way to acceptance. "I'm ready for the transition," she said shortly before her death.
At press time, memorial plans had not been announced.