Harry Hay
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For the Australian Olympic swimmer, see Henry Hay.
Harry Hay (April 7, 1912 – October 24, 2002) was a leader of the gay rights movement in the United States. He was raised as a Roman Catholic.
Starting in Los Angeles in 1950, Hay worked with a handful of supporters to found the Mattachine Society. At this time, nineteen years before the Stonewall riots, virtually no gays or lesbians were publicly out, it was illegal for homosexuals to gather in public, and the American Psychiatric Association defined homosexuality as a mental illness. Very slowly, he gathered members to this group. The Mattachine Society met in secret, with each member accompanied by a female friend in case the police broke the meeting up. It was the first public gay rights group in the United States, making Hay a plausible entry for the founder of the American gay rights movement.
Although Harry Hay claimed 'never to have even heard' Template:Cite needed of the earlier gay liberation struggle in Germany - by the people around Adolf Brand, Magnus Hirschfeld and Leontine Sagan - he is known to have talked about it with German emigres in America including Mattachine co-founder Rudi Gernreich.
A married man (beard/wife Anita Platsky) and a member of the Communist Party USA, Hay composed the first manifesto of the American gay rights movement, writing:
- We, the Androgynes of the world, have formed this responsible corporate body to demonstrate by our efforts that our physiological and psychological handicaps need be no deterrent in integrating 10 percent of the world's population towards the constructive social progress of mankind.
Though it may seem very dated today, the group was very radical compared to the rest of society at the time of its beginnings. It and Hay were among the first to advance the argument that gay people represented a cultural minority (see Queer culture) as well as being just individuals. As the Mattachine Society grew with chapters around the country, the organization saw its founders, including Hay, as too controversial and radical and expelled them from leadership. The organization took a more cautious tack so that by the time of the Stonewall riots the Mattachine Society came to be seen by many as stodgy and assimilationist.
Despite being an active member of the Communist Party, his founding of the Mattachine Society got him unceremoniously kicked out of the Communist Party.
Hay later became an outspoken critic of gay assimilationism and went on to help found both Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and the gay men's group the Radical Faeries, as well as being active in the Native American movements.
- "We pulled ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity over us, and that's how we got through school with a full set of teeth," Hay once explained. "We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you're going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you."
One of his first male lovers was actor Will Geer, who found fame as "Grandpa Walton" on The Waltons. In 1963, at age 51, he met an inventor named John Burnside, who became his life partner. They lived first in a Pueblo Indian reserve in New Mexico, then in Los Angeles, and finally in San Francisco, where Hay died of lung cancer at age 90.
Hay was the subject of the 2002 documentary by Eric Slade, "Hope along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay" (2002). He also appeared in other documentaries such as "Word is Out" (1978).
References
- Bullough, Vern L., (ed.) "Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context," Harrington Park Press, 2002.
- Hay, Harry and Roscoe, Will, (ed.) "Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder", Beacon Press, 1996
- Timmons, Stuart, "The Trouble with Harry Hay," Alyson Publications, 1990