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CounterPunch
October
25, 2002
He
Paved the Way for Modern Gay Activism:
Harry Hay Dies at 90
by STUART TIMMONS
Henry "Harry" Hay, known as the founder
of the modern American gay movement, has died at age 90. The
pioneering gay activist devoted his life to progressive politics
and in 1950, he founded a state-registered foundation and secret
network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society.
He was also a co-founder, in 1979, of the Radical Faeries, a
movement affirming gayness as a form of spiritual calling. A
rare link between gay and progressive politics, Hay and his partner
of 39 years, John Burnside, had lived in San Francisco for three
years after a lifetime in Los Angeles.
Hay had been diagnosed weeks earlier
with lung cancer. Despite his illness, he remained lucid and
died peacefully in his sleep in the early hours of October 24.
"Harry Hay's determined, visionary
activism significantly lifted gays out of oppression," said
Stuart Timmons, who published a biography of Hay in 1990. "All
gay people continue to benefit from his fierce affirmation of
gays as a people."
Hay is listed in histories of the American
gay movement as first in applying the term "minority"
to homosexuals. An uncompromising radical, he easily dismissed
"the heteros," and never rested from challenging the
status quo, including within the gay community. Due to the pervasive
homophobia of his times (it was illegal for more than two homosexuals
to congregate in California during the 1950s) Hay and his colleagues
took an oath of anonymity that lasted a quarter century until
Jonathan Ned Katz interviewed Hay for the ground-breaking book
Gay American History. Countless researchers subsequently sought
him out; in recent years, Hay became the subject of a biography,
a PBS-funded documentary, and an anthology of his own writings.
Previous attempts to create gay organizations
in the United States had fizzled - or been stamped out. Hay's
first organizational conception was a group he called Bachelors
Anonymous, formed to both support and leverage the 1948 presidential
candidacy of Progressive Party leader Henry Wallace. Hay wrote
and discreetly circulated a prospectus calling for "the
androgynous minority" to organize as a political entity.
Hay's call for an "international bachelor's fraternal order
for peace and social dignity" did not bear results until
1950. That year, his love affair with Viennese immigrant Rudi
Gernreich, (whose fashion designs eventually made him a TIME
cover-man) brought Hay into gay circles where a critical mass
of daring souls could be found to begin sustained meetings. On
November 11, 1950, at Hay's home in the Silver Lake district
of Los Angeles, a group of gay men met which became the Mattachine
Society. Of the original Mattachine founders, Chuck Rowland,
Bob Hull, Dale Jennings pre-deceased Hay; Konrad Stevens and
John Gruber are the last surviving members of the founding group.
"Mattachine" took its name
from a group of medieval dancers who appeared publicly only in
mask, a device well understood by homosexuals of the 1950s. Hay
devised its secret cell structure (based on the Masonic order)
to protect individual gays and the nascent gay network. Officially
co-gender, the group was largely male; the Daughters of Bilitis,
the pioneering lesbian organization, formed independently in
San Francisco in 1956. Though some criticized the Mattachine
movement as insular, it grew to include thousands of members
in dozens of chapters, which formed from Berkeley to Buffalo,
and created a lasting national framework for gay organizing.
Mattachine laid the ground for rapid civil rights gains following
1969's Stonewall riots in New York City.
Harry Hay was born in England in 1912,
the day the Titanic sank. His father worked as a mining engineer
in South Africa and Chile, but the family settled in Southern
California. After graduating from Los Angeles High School, he
briefly attended Stanford, but dropped out and returned to Los
Angeles. He understood from childhood that he was a sissy - different
in behavior from boys or girls - and also that he was attracted
to men. His same-sex affairs began when he was a teenager, not
long after he began reading 19th Century scholar Edward Carpenter,
whose essays on "homogenic love" strongly influenced
his thinking.
A tall and muscular young man, Hay worked
as both an extra and ghostwriter in 1930s Hollywood. He developed
a passion for theater, and performed on Los Angeles stages with
Anthony Quinn in the 1930s, and with Will Geer, who became his
lover. Geer took Hay to the San Francisco General Strike of 1935,
and indoctrinated him into the American Communist Party. Hay
became an active trade unionist. A blend of Marxist analysis
and stagecraft strongly influenced Hay's later gay organizing.
Despite a decade of gay life, in 1938
Hay married the late Anita Platky, also a Communist Party member.
The couple were stalwarts of the Los Angeles Left; Hay taught
at the California Labor School and worked on domestic campaigns
such as campaigning for Ed Roybal, the first Latino elected in
Los Angeles. The Hays occasionally hosted Pete Seeger and Woody
Guthrie when they performed in Los Angeles, and Hay recalled
demonstrating with Josephine Baker in 1945 over the Jim Crow
policy of a local restaurant. When he felt compelled to go public
with the Mattachine Society in 1951, the Hays divorced. After
a burst of activity lasting three years, the growing Mattachine
rejected Hay as a liability due to his Communist beliefs. In
1955, when he was called before the House UnAmerican Activities
Committee, he had trouble finding a progressive attorney to represent
him, he felt, due to homophobia on the Left. (He was ultimately
dismissed after his curt testimony.) Hay felt exiled from the
Left for nearly fifty years, until he received the Life Achievement
award of a Los Angeles library preserving progressive movements.
For most of his life Hay lived in Los
Angeles. However, during the early 1940s, Hay and his wife lived
in New York City; he returned there with John Burnside to march
and speak at the Stonewall 25 celebration in 1994. During the
1970s, he and Burnside moved to New Mexico, where he ran the
trading post at San Juan Pueblo Indian reservation.
His years of research for gay references
in history and anthropology texts lead Hay to formulate his own
gay-centered political philosophy, which he wrote and spoke about
constantly. His theory of "gay consciousness" placed
variant thinking as the most significant trait in homosexuals.
"We differ most from heterosexuals in how we perceive the
world. That ability to offer insights and solutions is our contribution
to humanity, and why our people keep reappearing over the millennia,"
he often stressed. Hay's occasional exhortations that gays should
"maximize the differences" between themselves and heterosexuals
remained controversial. Academics tended to reject his ideas
as much as they respected his historic stature.
A fixture at anti-draft and anti-war
campaigns for sixty years, Hay worked in Women's Strike for Peace
during the Viet Nam War as a conscious strategy to build coalition
between gay and feminist progressives. He also worked closely
with Native American activists, especially the Committee for
Traditional Indian Land and Life. Hay was a local founder of
the Lavender Caucus of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition during
the early 1980s, determined to help convince the gay community
that its political success was inextricably tied to a broader
progressive agenda. His decades of agitation for coalition politics
brought him increasing appreciation in later life from labor
and third-party groups.
A second wind of activism came in 1979
when Hay founded, with Don Kilhefner, a spiritual movement known
as the Radical Faeries. This pagan-inspired group continues internationally
based on the principal that the consciousness of gays differs
from that of heterosexuals. Hay believed that this different
way of seeing constituted the contribution gays made to society,
and was indeed the reason for their continued presence throughout
history. Despite his often-combative nature, Hay became an increasingly
beloved figure to younger generations of gay activists. He was
often referred to as the "Father of Gay Liberation."
Hay is survived by Burnside as well as
by his self-chosen gay family, a model he strongly advocated
for lesbians and gays. His adopted daughters, Kate Berman and
Hannah Muldaven also survive him. A circle of Radical Faeries
provided care for him and Burnside through their later years.
Harry Hay leaves behind a wide circle of friends and admirers
among lesbians, gays, and progressive activists.
Stuart Timmons
can be reached at: Stimmons@LAANE.ORG
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