Prescott Townsend

He was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the fourth child (third son) of Kate Wendell Sherman and Edward Britton Townsend; his mother was both a descendant of Myles Standish through her grandmother Susannah Perkins Staples (the sister of Yale Law School founder Seth Perkins Staples) and other Mayflower passengers, and the great-granddaughter of the American founding father Roger Sherman and his wife Rebecca Minot Prescott, through their son Roger Sherman, Jr.[2] He attended the Volkman School, graduated in 1918 from Harvard University, and attended Harvard Law School for one year.

He returned to Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, where he began a relationship with theater producer Elliot Paul, with whom he founded the experimental Barn Theatre in 1922.

In the 1930s, Townsend repeatedly addressed the Massachusetts legislature as an acknowledged homosexual man advocating for the repeal of sodomy legislation, urging the lawmakers "to legalize love".

[3] While working at the Fall River shipyard during World War II, Townsend was arrested on January 29, 1943, for participating in an "unnatural and lascivious act".

He accommodated a motley collection of tenants, mostly young gay men, in an eight-unit building at 75 Phillips St; Prescott himself inhabited an old brick townhouse at the end of Lindall Pl, a cul-de-sac that terminated just behind the Philips Street apartments.