09/09/2026
Deep gratitude to Two Arrows Zen for this wonderful portrait of Issan Dorsey.
September 6 marked the thirty-sixth anniversary of the death of Issan Dorsey (1933–1990), a Sōtō Zen priest and teacher whose life occupies an important place in the history of American Zen, LGBTQ Buddhist practice, and the Buddhist response to the AIDS epidemic. Dorsey died in San Francisco on September 6, 1990, from complications associated with AIDS. Contemporary records from his Zen community confirm the date.
Born Tommy Dorsey Jr. in Santa Barbara, California, Dorsey served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War but was discharged after his relationship with another male sailor became known. He subsequently settled in San Francisco and worked for a period as a drag performer. His early adult life also included serious problems with alcohol and drugs. By the late 1960s, however, Dorsey had begun practicing Zen with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center.
Dorsey’s development within the San Francisco Zen Center was substantial. Suzuki gave him lay ordination in 1970. Dorsey later served as tenzō, or head cook, at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, Green Gulch Farm, and the City Center. In 1975 he received priest ordination from Suzuki’s successor, Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi, and in 1977 served as shusō, or head monk, at Tassajara. By 1980 he had become director of the San Francisco Zen Center’s City Center operations.
At approximately the same time, gay Buddhist practitioners in San Francisco were beginning to organize more explicitly around their own experience. The Gay Buddhist Club, established in 1980, initially met at the San Francisco Zen Center before moving to a house at 57 Hartford Street in the Castro. A zendo was formally inaugurated there on December 8, 1981, and the community gradually developed into what became the Hartford Street Zen Center. Dorsey became one of its principal teachers and was installed as its abbot in 1989. The temple became known as Issan-ji, or “One Mountain Temple,” after Dorsey’s Dharma name, Issan.
The historical importance of Hartford Street became particularly visible during the AIDS epidemic.
By the middle of the 1980s, AIDS was devastating San Francisco’s gay community. In 1987, when one of Dorsey’s students became seriously ill and had nowhere adequate to live, Dorsey brought him into the Zen center. Other patients followed. What began as care for individuals inside the temple developed into Maitri Hospice, described by Hartford Street Zen Center as the first Buddhist hospice of its kind in the United States.
The development is significant in the history of American Buddhism because Maitri did not begin as an abstract program in Buddhist social ethics. It emerged directly from the circumstances confronting a particular sangha. Meditation, temple life, nursing, cooking, companionship, and care for people approaching death became parts of the same community practice.
Dorsey himself was eventually diagnosed with HIV and developed AIDS-related lymphoma. He continued teaching and participating in the hospice community as his health declined. He died at Maitri on September 6, 1990, surrounded by the community that had grown around Hartford Street. He was fifty-seven years old.
Maitri survived him. It eventually moved from Hartford Street to a purpose-built facility in San Francisco and continues today, its work having expanded beyond its original role as an AIDS hospice to include specialized nursing, respite care, and other forms of support. Hartford Street Zen Center also continues as a Sōtō Zen temple in San Francisco’s Castro district, maintaining its historic connection to LGBTQ practitioners and the Suzuki lineage.
Dorsey’s biography complicates conventional images of how a twentieth-century Zen teacher was supposed to look or where such a teacher was supposed to come from. His path ran through q***r San Francisco, nightclub performance, addiction and recovery, the formative decades of the San Francisco Zen Center, and finally the AIDS wards of the 1980s.
In the history of American Zen, Issan Dorsey is therefore connected not only with the transmission of Sōtō practice from Shunryu Suzuki’s generation to American students, but with an early attempt to make Buddhist community directly responsive to people whom the surrounding culture was frequently unwilling or unable to care for.
Further reading
David Schneider, Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey
https://www.shambhala.com/street-zen-9781611802561.html
Hartford Street Zen Center, “History of HSZC”
https://hszc.org/about/history-of-hszc/
Maitri, “Our Story”
https://www.maitrisf.org/our-story
David Schneider, “Accidents & Calculations,” Tricycle
https://tricycle.org/magazine/issan-dorsey/
LGBTQ Religious Archives Network, “Issan Dorsey”
https://lgbtqreligiousarchives.org/profiles/issan-dorsey
