Hotel Wicker

A new documentary.

A street queen & a gay activist bring all their friends inside to live the gay life together.

Hotel Wicker is the story of an 85-year-old eccentric gay activist inviting a young archivist into his home of five decades, an apartment in Hoboken, where together they uncover a trove of history which tells the story of his gay family from the 1970s to the early 2000s:

With Marsha P. Johnson as their house mother, and the old activist Randy Wicker as their sugar daddy, Andrew, Coco, David, John, and many more queer kids from the Greenwich Village streets make a family living in the apartment nicknamed Hotel Wicker, while they work in Randy’s antique lamp shop. Meanwhile, they party, hustle, try to survive AIDS, and are pulled into Randy’s many bizarre campaigns for justice. In 2022, the surviving members of Hotel Wicker’s family take their stories to the archive.

A story told through its unique archive

2021

Randy Wicker & Devlyn Camp meet & dive into his treasure trove apartment of 50 years…

…and into the gay world of the 1960s.

1969

The gay movement Randy once led is taken over by the street kids who fought at Stonewall, like Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries Marsha P. Johnson & Sylvia Rivera. They start a home for trans girls living on the street. Randy openly denounces trans people in the press, specifically Sylvia.

1970s

Randy quits the gay movement & opens a lamp shop in the Village with his boyfriend David Combs. He picks up hustlers in Times Square, including John Klar & Andrew Glowko, who come work in his lamp shop and live in his apartment across the river from the gay piers.

Marsha is shot by a john who picked her up on the street. The hustlers take her into Randy’s apartment, to his hesitation. But Marsha brings life to their home, and they start taking in so many unhoused queers the place is nicknamed Hotel Wicker.

1980s

David is one of the first people to ever show symptoms of AIDS, followed by many of their friends. As the family begins to collapse, Marsha & Randy take care of their kids. Coco Rodriguez, a ballroom queen & panhandler, moves into the lamp shop. Marsha struggles to stay well mentally, and Randy leans on speed to keep going.

As they form the archive, Randy & Devlyn discover a 1960s precursor to Hotel Wicker, his mentor Prescott Townsend’s home for street people, P-town’s End, revealing Randy’s backstory: a lonely, overweight gay kid obsessively waging campaigns for justice, powered by his diet speed pills. In the process, he searches for gay friends.

1990s

Marsha is found dead in the Hudson River at the gay piers. Randy and the family mount his most hellbent campaign yet.

Sylvia & Randy bury the hatchet, and she moves from the piers to Hotel Wicker. She works at the lamp shop, and is pulled into Randy’s latest campaign: the right for humans to clone.

2000s

A documentarian begins following Randy on a quest for his “unborn twin brother,” a clone to finally give him biological family, while the remaining Hotel Wicker family members—Coco, Sylvia, & Andrew—tolerate his manic fervor for the spotlight.