A Life Unscripted, On and Off the Stage — Alumni Profile, Tom McKitterick ’70

Time at Amherst

When Tom McKitterick ’70 was looking at colleges in the mid-1960s, he looked at Harvard, Penn State, University of Pennsylvania — searching for a good theater program at a “large urban university on the East Coast.” Amherst was not on his list.

“I wanted to go to an urban university, because I wanted privacy,” he said. “I knew I was gay, and I felt like [a larger university] would be much more comfortable for me.”

McKitterick ended up at Northwestern for his first year. However, he soon found himself uncomfortable with its conservative environment. And while Northwestern had a really strong theater department, according to McKitterick, “what they lacked was a stage.” By Thanksgiving, McKitterick knew he wanted to transfer. Now, passing physics and math requirements from his first year at Northwestern, he was able to include Amherst in his applications, his father’s alma-mater.

“I talked my way in. I wrote sort of a clever [application essay],” McKitterick said.

When McKitterick got to Amherst however, he nearly abandoned his passion for theater. Originally interested in set design, he studied painting with Fairfield Porter and also acted in The Dream Engine, a rock musical by Jim Steinam ’69 — who would go on to write for Meatloaf and compose Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

“You’re rapidly changing at that time in life, and I got very interested in social sciences, anthropology and then history,” McKitterick said. He credits Professor Metropolis’ history class on the French Revolution for his continued interest in intellectual history. Unlike many of his peers, he did not see a career for himself as an academic, historian, or professor. Instead, he credits Amherst with helping him “cultivate [his] imagination.”

“I still understand, to this day, life looked at from that sort of angle; people operating at a specific time in history, and how the culture affects us and how we affect the culture. That’s my unifying thing in life, one of the things that I’m grateful to Amherst for.”

Despite this gratitude, McKitterick claims he would have dropped out of Amherst had it not been for the Vietnam War — full-time college students and graduate students were able to get a legal deferment from the draft. However, Amherst’s campus, isolated from the current political climate and cultural changes, felt frustrating for McKitterick.

“I was very caught up in the rock culture and the changes that the ’60s were.” He said. “It was exhilarating. I couldn’t describe how fresh everything was and how it supported questioning where you came from and reinventing yourself.”

While McKitterick felt isolated from the cultural changes going on outside of the campus, he felt a “feeling of displacement” on the campus itself. Being gay at Amherst during the 1960s, he described a sense of paranoia and uncertainty.

“It was impossible,” he said. “You just knew in your heart that this is who you were, but you had no place to imagine how you were going to live your life. So that was a huge distraction from studying. There was this feeling of displacement — that you were different from everyone in your family, and for all you knew, you were different from all your friends … if your friends knew who you were, they might not like you.”

“There were a lot of lovely, happy, good friends [and] moments [at Amherst],” McKitterick added. “But if I have any regrets in life, it is going to college.”

Love and Theater

When McKitterick graduated from Amherst in 1970 with a major in European Contemporary Intellectual history, he was uncertain about his direction.

“I can remember [that] final year at Amherst,” he said. “It just seemed like a blank fog in front of me. I didn’t see any pathway.”

McKitterick applied and was accepted to a prestigious film school in Paris. But when he arrived in France, he got cold feet. So instead, he flew back to Amherst, now as an alum, to act in a play by his friend Dave Limmer. The play was performed one night in New York City at the Public Theater, the very stage on which McKitterick would make his professional acting debut years later.

Following the play, McKitterick moved to New York City. There, he began driving cabs, working as a stagehand at The Public Theater, and working odd jobs where he could.

“You only had to work, like three nights a week, and you had enough money to live on.” McKitterick said. “I read books, you know, I had friends. I just hung out in the city. Had long hair — I still do. I started counterculture life.”

Working as a stagehand reignited McKitterick’s interest in acting — and he began auditioning. While he began to achieve success, he described the process as strenuous:  

“If you’re lucky, you get an audition. If you’re lucky, they give you a couple of pages of script that's called a side, and you go in and read the side, and that’s that. You never have any idea what you’re auditioning for … it’s basically like you have no control over anything.”

McKitterick is probably most well known for his role as the character Cowboy in the 1979 cult classic “The Warriors.” Originally, he had been cast in the role of Vermin, but when Tony Danza, who was originally slated to be Cowboy, left to film “Taxi,” McKitterick stepped in to fill the role.

While “The Warriors” holds cultural weight as a cult-classic, the film held a different kind of significance for McKitterick, as it was where he met his now-husband Michael Chandler, a production assistant on set:

“One day, I got in the van and I sat opposite this guy I didn’t know, [he had] long, dark hair to his shoulders, big mustache, wonderful blue eyes … I didn’t get his number … I didn’t want to show my cards. I just felt like my heart was racing. I thought, well, some other day. But it was two years later when we met by accident [at a YMCA] in New York.”

Now, Chandler and McKitterick have been together for over forty years, living in New York City with their two cats Ugo and Wally.

After “The Warriors” finished shooting, McKitterick went directly into rehearsals for “Fathers and Sons,” a play written by Thomas Babe and directed by Bob Ackerman. Originally performed at The Public Theater, two years later, McKitterick repeated the role in Los Angeles with his castmates Richard Chamberlain and Dixie Carter.

But McKitterick eventually quit acting — “[In my head], I couldn’t be out and be an actor at the time,” he shared. So he picked up odd jobs where he could: “I worked in kitchens, dishwashing, [and] composing.” McKitterick also began to experiment with photography — “then AIDS a came around.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, The AIDS/HIV crisis spread across the U.S, primarily affecting men who had sex with other men. New York City was an epicenter for the epidemic and had the highest rates of HIV in the country.

McKitterick began to attend protests against the homophobia and lack of action in response to AIDs — bringing his camera with him. At a demonstration outside a hospital in New Jersey, McKitterick met another photographer who gave him a card to contact his agency. McKitterick called up the agency, submitted a portfolio, and was hired by Impact Visuals — beginning his career as a photojournalist.  

Photojournalism and Theater Production

“I knew that these images could be historical,” McKitterick said “I wanted to create images about what was happening, and protect [myself] from the fear that I was feeling —  it was incredibly hair-raising, and it didn’t go away after four years like a war — it just went on and on and on.”

For the first few years of his career, McKitterick documented the activist group ACT-UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power). He followed other issues including incarceration and homelessness, taking photographs for the next decade that would end up published in magazines and books in the U.S. and internationally. McKitterick was also hired by Tennis Magazine for a period to cover tournaments as a sports photographer.

To make a living in photojournalism, McKitterick had to take up jobs where he could, often photographing parties and weddings. But with the innovation of digital photography, his agency closed and he quickly had to find work elsewhere.

McKitterick hoped to pick a new and “more logical” career. Recognizing that he had an “intuitive knowledge about theater” and “a couple of friends who were well known actors,” he decided to focus on theater production, the industry he still works in to this day.

McKitterick would produce many plays in the decades to follow — including Tennessee Williams’ “Period of Adjustment” starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

“I would select the play, get the rights, and find a producer who saw what I saw in the play and felt [the play] could happen,” he said.

The production McKitterick is most proud of, of Terence Rattigan’s “Flare Path,” took six years to complete. A tribute to Royal Air Force pilots, “Flare Path” was put on at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London and was “not only financially successful, [it] was critically successful,” receiving two Olivier nominations — the highest recognition for British theater — in 2012.

While McKitterick is professionally involved in the production side of entertainment, he has also written six screenplays and a play for his own creative practice. Currently, McKitterick is working on translating a play from French.

Lifelong Learning

While McKitterick did not end up using his degree in his professional life, he credits Amherst’s liberal arts education with teaching him that “education is a lifelong process.” The introductory anthropology and history courses taught him that “when you need the information, you’ll find it.”

“All I had to do in college was to fertilize my curiosity a little bit,” he said.

McKitterick’s current pursuits of lifelong learning are the two things that bring him the most joy in life: French and tennis.

Five years ago, McKitterick spontaneously decided to sign up for an intermediate French class recommended by a friend. Although he learned some French in high school, he had forgotten it over the years. “[It was like] little doors were opening my brain, little synapses that were formed when I was 16 or 17 years old. There’s a sense of recognition or rejuvenation,” he said.

But soon McKitterick got sick of the classroom and chose to learn French his own way. “I’m just going to read in French for the rest of my life,” he decided and kept his promise, having read over 230 books since the day he made the decision.

As McKitterick learned French, he also took up tennis which he describes as “the love of [his] life.” McKitterick plays multiple times a week.

“[It’s] exciting to me that a geezer like myself can actually really improve,” he said. “It's something apart from the rest of your life. And you can get better — practice makes perfect.”

When I asked McKitterick for any wisdom he might be able to impart on us current Amherst students — he stressed detachment. “You have to be able to stand apart from yourself and be amused by your behavior and … not be so inside yourself,” he said.

“I think it’s hard being young,” McKitterick said “You may try to make up for what you don’t know. But when you’re old, if you’re lucky, you realize there is nothing to know …  we don’t know anything.”