CREDIT: Mark H. Thompson
DURING THE summer of 1948, at an all male party in Los Angeles, Harry Hay began talking about the upcoming presidential election. Like other members of the Communist Party, Hay supported former vice president Henry Wallace, who was running on the Progressive Party ticket. Hay was a homosexual, and he wondered how he could help Wallace’s campaign without announcing his sexual preference, which was a taboo topic at the time. Hay came up with the idea of creating “Bachelors for Wallace,” a coy attempt to encourage other homosexuals to vote for the left-wing politician.
The group did not last long, and it would not have mattered anyway, because Wallace got less than 3 percent of the national vote. But the idea of starting an organization for homosexuals kept Hay awake at night. He wrote a political manifesto that included his then-radical notion that homosexuals were an “oppressed minority.” It began, “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.”
There were few people he could show his manifesto to. But in 1950 Hay and a few other men founded the first homosexual rights group in the country, the Mattachine Society. It was a courageous move, given Americans’ attitudes toward homosexuals at the time. The next year, Hay’s manifesto appeared in print with the title The Homosexual in America, published under a pseudonym, Donald Webster Cory. It was the first commercially published nonfiction account of homosexual life in the United States.
These efforts—the first assertion that homosexuals were an oppressed minority and the founding of an organization that allowed homosexuals to socialize and, eventually, to publicly organize for gay rights—made Hay a gay rights pioneer.
Hay was born in England, the son of a mining engineer. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven. He knew by age eleven that he was attracted to boys. He had his first homosexual encounter at fourteen. At the time, he later explained, the term “homosexual” was not included in most dictionaries. “We had no words to describe ourselves,” he said. He referred to homosexuals as “temperamental guys.”
Hay went to Stanford University in 1930 but soon dropped out and returned to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. There he met Will Geer, an actor and political leftist, who became his lover. Geer introduced Hay to the city’s Communist Party (as Greer later did with his friend Woody Guthrie). The two men got involved with the party’s efforts to help organize the labor movement, organizing demonstrations in support of farmworkers and the unemployed. In 1934, during the San Francisco general strike, they raised money and food supplies for strikers and their families.
Hay supported himself by acting, doing odd jobs, and teaching part-time at the People’s Educational Center, a Marxist-oriented school in downtown Los Angeles. He spent most of his nonworking time occupied with political activism, involved with several Communist Party–sponsored groups, including the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the League Against War and Fascism, Mobilization for Democracy, Workers’ Alliance, and others.
For idealistic young people like Hay, the Communist Party was an outlet for their anger about the human suffering all around them during the Depression. They were not just complaining; they were organizing protests. The party was one of the few groups that seemed to care about the oppression of African Americans and the second-class status of women.
But the Communist Party was not at all tolerant of homosexuals. Like the rest of society, the party viewed homosexuals as deviant. It was tough enough being a Communist; party members did not want to be tainted by the even more stigmatized label that came with being gay. Hay knew the handful of other homosexual men within the party, and they secretly socialized, but they did not dare do so publicly.
When he was twenty-five, alone and depressed, Hay visited a psychiatrist, who urged him to have a heterosexual relationship, suggesting that it might change his sexual preference. In 1938 he married Anita Platky, another Communist Party activist. She knew about his homosexual past but thought he could change. They stayed together for thirteen years and adopted two daughters. But marriage did not change him. He wound up living a double life.
In 1950 Hay met Rudi Gernreich, a Viennese refugee and future fashion designer, at a Los Angeles dance studio. (Gernreich later became famous as the inventor of the miniskirt and the topless bathing suit for women in the mid-1960s.) Both men knew the same small network of homosexuals involved in left-wing politics. That year, the two men cofounded the Mattachine Society, its name coming from the 15th-century French Société Mattachine, male dancers who performed in public, sometimes satirizing social customs, but only while wearing masks. At first the society was primarily a discussion group with fewer than ten members. Whenever the Mattachines met, members brought a “cover” girl, a female friend or relative, because it was against the law in California for gay men to meet in groups. At the time, the American Psychiatric Association defined homosexuality as a mental illness.
Hay eventually resigned from the Communist Party, but he used the organizing lessons he had learned in left-wing circles to build the Mattachine Society, recruiting members gradually and promising them anonymity. One of the group’s first members was Dale Jennings, another party member. In 1951 Jennings was arrested for soliciting a police officer to commit a homosexual act. It was a case of police entrapment, which was common at the time. Most gay men pled “no contest” to avoid a public trial, which could embarrass their families (for many were married) and get them fired from their jobs. But at Hay’s insistence, Jennings agreed to go to trial. The Mattachine Society set up the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment to raise funds for the defense, hire a lawyer, and educate the public about police harassment of gays. On the stand, Jennings swore that yes, he was homosexual, but no, he had not solicited.
The jury acquitted him. The Mattachines declared it the first time an admitted homosexual had been freed after being charged with vagrancy and lewdness. It was the first victory for what was still a small and underground movement. But word about the case, and about the Mattachine Society, spread among homosexuals, and its membership grew, with new chapters forming around the country.
In 1953 Hay started ONE, the first magazine to address homosexual rights. The authors of its essays, stories, and other articles used pseudonyms. So did the writers of letters to the editor from around the country. The US Postal Service declared the magazine was “obscene,” which meant it could not be sent through the mail. ONE sued and finally won in 1958 as part of the landmark First Amendment case Roth v. United States. (The magazine continued until 1967.)
As the Red Scare took hold, homosexuals, like Communists, became targets of right-wing witch-hunters. In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower barred homosexuals from all federal employment, including the military, on the grounds that they were susceptible to blackmail by Communists. In 1955 Hay was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he was not charged with any crime.
Many of the new members of the Mattachine Society did not share Hay’s left-wing background. Indeed, many of them believed that Hay’s history as a Communist would hurt what was then called the “homophile” movement. Just as the Communists had once pushed Hay to the margins for being gay, the Mattachines now expelled him for being a former Communist.
Even at its height, the Mattachine Society—and its lesbian counterpart, Daughters of Bilitis, formed in 1955—was never very visible to the general public. But the organization nurtured a generation of activists who laid the groundwork for the later gay rights movement and for a growing number of gays to emerge from the closet.
One such figure, Franklin Kameny—a World War II veteran, Harvard-trained astronomer, and Mattachine member—was dismissed from his position with the Army Map Service in 1957 for being gay. Dr. Kameny argued his case in front of the US Supreme Court, stating that the federal policy against homosexuality was “no less odious than discrimination based upon religious or racial grounds.” This was the first time a civil rights case based on sexual orientation was presented before the Supreme Court. In fighting the federal government’s discriminatory practices in employment, military service, security clearances, and other areas, Kameny challenged the view, widespread in psychiatric circles, that homosexuality was a mental illness. In 1969 a National Institutes of Mental Health task force also disputed this view. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association finally came around to the same conclusion. Slowly, the public image, and self-image, of homosexuals began to change, illustrated by slogans like “Gay is good” and “I’m gay and proud.”
The gay rights movement emerged as a public force with the 1969 Stonewall riot in New York City—a spontaneous demonstrations against a police raid on a gay bar. By then, however, Hay was on the sidelines of the homosexual rights crusade.
In 1963, at age fifty-one, he met John Burnside, the inventor of the teleidoscope (a variation on the kaleidoscope); Burnside became his life partner. They moved to New Mexico in 1970 and managed a trading post on a Pueblo Indian reservation north of Santa Fe. At the end of the decade, they returned to Los Angeles.
Hay resumed his involvement in the gay rights movement in 1979 when he cofounded a group called the Radical Faeries, which he viewed as a spiritual tribe more than a political organization. Unlike many gay rights activists, Hay opposed what he called “hetero-assimilation,” assimilation into mainstream society. His own style of dress—the knit cap of a macho longshoreman, a pigtail, and a strand of pearls—symbolized his attitude. “Assimilation absolutely never worked at all,” he told an interviewer for The Progressive magazine in 1998. “You may not think you are noticeable but you are.” These views put Hay, ever the outsider, at odds with most of the gay rights movement.
Eventually, younger gays acknowledged Hay’s role as a gay rights pioneer. In 1977 he was invited to speak at New Mexico’s first gay pride march, in Albuquerque. In 1999 an ailing Hay accepted an invitation to be the grand marshal of the annual gay pride parade in San Francisco. He remained in that city—the epicenter of the gay rights movement—living in a Victorian house, painted pink.