I met him at a Radical Faerie Gathering in the spring of 1980. He cut a dramatic figure, his tall frame draped in a pale shawl and topped by a broad-brimmed black hat that might have belonged on a Quaker elder. Harry Hay spoke dramatically, too, about maximizing the differences between gays and straights instead of downplaying them. Maximizing differences? This was utterly contrary to the conventional wisdom—and completely intriguing.
His large hands grasped both of mine when I approached later to say how honored I was to meet him. Gay men who, like me, have been aware of him for years, shower Hay with these earnest introductions. But on each occasion his dome-like brow furrows with concentration, and he holds the hands or shoulders of the individual, staring fixedly into their eyes. An intense personal bond is quickly cast, into which Hay often injects a challenging statement. In my case—as a college junior approaching an offbeat intellectual nearing seventy—he said, “You know, you probably wouldn’t be talking to me at all if we were back in their world, at some gay bar. Remember that when we go back.” With only the wilderness and gentle gay men around us, and given my uncertainties about what life held after school, his words struck deep.
To tease him and perhaps to break the poignancy of the moment, I snatched his hat and put it on. People began to chuckle; in a micro-drama, the twinkie had stolen the crown of the father of gay liberation, as Harry Hay has come to be known. Not missing a beat—or the attention of the audience—he smiled. “That’s my founder-of-the-movement hat. You may wear it, but be careful with it. I’m not through with it.” The laughter of the Faeries deepened, with Harry adding his baritone chuckle. Harry often says that gays have a special talent for affectionate mockery, and we all enjoyed the moment.
Little did I imagine that, seven years later, I would be writing his biography. It was an intense project, which created a deep and sometimes explosive relationship. Here’s an example: After more than a year of intimate interviews and plans for the book, we got into a scrap about homophobia in the Communist Party. He got upset seemingly because, though he had suffered prejudice at the hands of his former Party comrades, his loyalty to their shared ideals survived. With great emotion and conviction, he declared that “homophobia” was not a word, or even a concept, at the time of his troubles. When I failed to appreciate this, he stood up from his kitchen table, shot me a withering glance, and growled, “I’m not sure we are able to communicate at all!”
I saw a year’s research crumbling over what seemed a semantic quibble—or a test of my fortitude. Calculating, I scolded him. “Perhaps it’ll take some work before I can talk about this issue without offending you. But I thought you invited me over today to begin that process, and that we’d do it politely.”
I had miscalculated. Harry drew himself up to his full height of six-feet-three, his intense anger setting in motion the earring by his white mutton-chop sideburn. Flinging his index finger toward the front door of his rose-colored, book-lined cottage, he proclaimed, “You are uninvited!”
We quickly made up—and resolved the problem—but I learned the contradictions of a committed life. Harry is an anti-patriarchal patriarch, a future-looking visionary ruled by Nineteenth century manners and ethics. The mix of Communism and homosexuality may be his most volatile contradiction, and it is at the core of his existence. The skills for organizing and belief in revolutionary change he acquired during his years in the Communist Party USA fostered Hay’s founding in 1950 of the Mattachine Society, the underground organization acknowledged by historians as the starting point of the modern gay movement.
That organization was so effectively underground that Harry Hay, a social reformer of tremendous and long-reaching impact, was for many years scarcely known. This is partly by design; in spite of his flamboyant character, he and his gay compatriots vowed to remain anonymous. The extreme repression that homosexuals faced then made such tactics necessary. The year 1948, when Hay first attempted to organize gays, was “a very painful time for homosexuals,” said Quincy Troupe, a poet and friend of James Baldwin. Troupe emphasized, “You weren’t just in the closet, you were in the basement. Under the basement floor.”
Hay’s radical politics and equally radical sexuality contributed to his remaining buried for decades. Though multitalented and gifted with a magnetic personality, he remained obscure while a number of his friends became famous.
In the Seventies and Eighties, gay historians delightedly “discovered” Hay and told the tale of his founding of the American gay movement. Still, most of his story, which neither began nor ended in the Fifties, has not been told. In his youth he protested fascism and agitated for trade unions, first on instinct, then as a dedicated member of the CPUSA. Even in that context, Hay obsessively studied and decoded folk music as a language of the oppressed, to be used against the oppressors, and quietly discerned shreds of gay history as well by “reading between the lines” of standard texts. Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, his progressive instincts asserted themselves in the Traditional Indian movement, the Gay Liberation Front, and more campaigns leading up to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
Since his values are group-oriented, Hay himself has never ballyhooed his status. He prefers to be thought of as a person of ideas rather than credentials, and sees himself as a figure of today rather than a relic of yesterday. Further, he understands that the gay movement is constantly being lived, no matter who founded it. But his status as the founder of the modern gay movement is an inspiring highlight of a fascinating life. His friend Jim Kepner explained that it took determination and guts to create that breakthrough: “Many people thought about gay organizing, but were never able to sustain the interest of others. It was like getting a periodic fever,” he explained. “Sooner or later, you got better.”
The trouble with Harry Hay was his refusal to adapt to a reality he found unacceptable. He made trouble for anti-gay attitudes in an era when most homosexuals bore, according to Allen Ginsberg, “that wounded look.” It took quite a person to do what Harry did. I wanted to know what kind.
“Harry is an enthusiast,” said his friend Earl Robinson, the well-known composer who, along with Pete Seeger, worked with Harry in the Forties. Robinson also called Harry a “behind-the-scenes person”; others have called him a dreamer, an administrator, a brainstormer, a daredevil, and, most frequently, a visionary. That intense personality was key to Harry’s accomplishments. Robinson continued, “I can see his face light up about things I wouldn’t get so excited about—a bit of historical information, or an action of Pete’s at a hootenanny. I remember Harry’s manner of putting his whole self into whatever he was excited about at the time. There was a sense that you had to listen to this man.”
The good fortune of having a living biographical subject demanded that I listen to Harry a lot. Over a period of nearly three years I recorded almost sixty hours of tape, took seventeen tablets of notes, sorted through approximately three filing cabinets of personal papers, and talked with him on a weekly basis for countless hours. I interviewed more than fifty of his associates, including his children, siblings, former lovers, friends, adversaries, political comrades, and all but one of his surviving Mattachine Society co-founders.
The bulk of material in this biography is from original sources, though I also did considerable library research; all sources are documented for the use of the future researchers that Hay and the gay movement deserve. It should be noted that a number of people who knew Hay declined to be interviewed, either because of his Communist background or because of his homosexuality. Noteworthy in another way is that Hay’s memory checks out with great detail and accuracy. Since, when Hay recounts his memories, tenses frequently shift between past and present, in this text, with his approval, tenses have been aligned for the sake of consistency and clarity.
Also adjusted, though in this case against his wishes, is Hay’s capitalization of terms denoting gay people. In writings as early as the late 1940s, Hay capitalized every term he used in his activism: Androgyne, Homosexual, Homophile, even Minority. This was Hay’s way of promoting respect for gays and is a campaign that follows the paths of Jews and Chicanos who also fought the lower-case syndrome. The challenge this poses to the rules of grammar and to the shifting nature of conventional usage, Hay argues, is insignificant next to the physical reminder of self-affirmation.
Hay insisted that I see the context of gay life as he lived it. He regularly challenged me to understand the enormous changes in gay culture since his first awareness of it in the 1920s. His distress over my usage of the contemporary word “homophobia” is one example. Another time, early in the research, I asked about gay lifestyles in the Thirties. Harry rolled his eyes and groaned, “Honey, we didn’t have ‘lifestyles’ in the Thirties.”
Various readers may be challenged by parts of this biography. One day when glancing at the obituary of classical musician who had lived in Los Angeles, Harry sighed and said, “He was so handsome.” When I asked if he knew the man, Harry screwed up his face, obviously searching for words, and finally said, “I didn’t know him well. But I knew him often.” Some non-gay readers have expressed puzzlement over the sexual abundance that was a hallmark of Hay’s youth, especially in contrast to his deeply sentimental emotions. Gay readers, on the other hand, understand. In many instances, I have reported rather than analyzed.
Harry Hay is determined to express himself on his own terms. Given that and his imaginative and far-reaching mind, Harry sometimes wandered far astray from a narrative sequence, often with seeming delight. Whenever his tangents got long and, for my purposes, pointless, I would wait for him to take a breath (often an amazing period) and slip in a polite “May I ask a question?”
His reflex answer, always with a smile: “You can try.”
In the end, and indeed throughout the process, the effort has been worthwhile. Beyond his driven and effective activism, Harry Hay deserves recognition and study as an innovator and potent thinker on the fronts of gay politics, historical research, philosophy and spirituality. He has labored for forty years to probe the depth and breadth of the culture of gays as “a separate people” and to create a theory for the existence and nature of gay people. Mark Thompson, editor of Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, credits Hay with forming the only “unified theory” of gayness.
There is much of Harry’s busy, complex life that I was not able to cover or definitively assess in this book. Only time will tell if his founding contributions to the Radical Faeries or his writings on the relationship of “gay consciousness” to humanity will outshine his work in the Fifties. Many of his achievements, theories, and opinions—and opinions are something Harry is never without—await another examination; after all, he has not stopped moving, thinking, or agitating.
His legacy, however, is clear. As well as serving as its Father Figure, Hay has given the once-faceless gay populace a series of fabulous mascots: the masked Mattachines; the mocking Fool, who requires wit to play his part; and the luminous Faerie, who does good deeds at whim. Hay’s own symbol, which often guides his actions with uncanny effectiveness, is the benevolent Troublemaker. Like the sacred Contrary of Native American societies, the Troublemaker upsets the order of things, shows new possibilities, and pushes the agenda. And in so doing, he is a balancing force for the order of life.
Behind Harry’s achievements of stirring things up, blazing trails, and calling forth movements, there is a kind of life story that is rarely told—a gay life story. If everything doesn’t at first appear to be there, do what Harry does: Read between the lines.
— Stuart Timmons
Los Angeles, 1990