Gide told him everything
with the precision of a scientist and the frankness of a
confessional. The doctor responded to this revelation of confidence
with complete cynicism. “Get married. Get married without fear. And
you will realize very quickly that
everything else doesn’t exist, except in your
imagination.
— Francois Fonvieille-Alquier, Andre
Gide
One of Harry’s favorite lovers was a ballet dancer with a wife and two children. “Kirk was compact, with a profile from a Greek coin, dancing black curls he must have combed with an eggbeater, and startling, brilliant blue eyes. I met him at rehearsals for a play I was in and he dallied with us at the Red Door afterwards. Kirk was a wonderfully passionate poet, but his poetry had a nasty meanness to it—like fairy gardens that suddenly dissolve into furious landscapes with vipers. Likewise his love-making was lustfully delicious at one moment and hysterically demonic the next. About a month after we’d met, his wife forbade Kirk to leave the house ever except for work or school. We never saw each other again.”
Kirk was a harbinger of Harry’s own future; within a few years of their affair, Harry too would be married, cut off from the society of men, and plunged into dark moods and tensions. His marriage1, which lasted from 1938 to 1951, seems like a major contradiction in someone so passionately gay and it confounded many of his later gay comrades when they learned of it. A complex mix of political and emotional reasons prompted the marriage; paramount was his inability to find a male lover who tolerated the progressive movement—and a progressive movement that would tolerate his having a male lover.
Marriage was common for both male and female homosexuals of Harry’s generation. The most famous modern homosexual, Oscar Wilde, was married with children. Matrimony, in one of Harry’s more philosophical letters, seemed “the casting couch for society.” The homosexual, he observed, is “pressure-driven by home, church, college and community requirements to marry and multiply in order to place (let alone compete) in any profession.” Kirk wasn’t the only of Harry’s lovers to follow this rule: James Broughton, Will Geer and Stanley Haggart married, and Smith Dawless married twice.
The “community requirements” Harry mentioned could be as important to the gay person as to the dominant straights. Harry knew that professions that tolerated relatively obvious homosexuals—fields like dance, theater, dressmaking and design—tended to be surface-fixated, apolitical milieus that would have frustrated his driven social conscience. Though he ultimately described his thirteen married years as “living in an exile world,” to live as a homosexual in 1938 would have meant exile from the worlds that held all his other passions. His friend James Kepner concurred: “In the Forties, for many gays who wanted to be socially productive, marriage was a necessity. It seemed inescapable.” This extended, even, to the realm of gay politics. Kepner thought that if he himself wanted to educate and organize for gay rights he’d have to look neutral—“and that meant getting married.”
The policies of the Communist Party influenced all Harry’s decisions at that time. By 1938, he had made a full commitment to the Party and the Party held a firm position against homosexuality. It had not always been so. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, homosexual acts were legalized by the Bolshevik government, following, according to one Soviet government pamphlet published in 1923, “the needs and natural demands of the people.”
But by 1928, homosexuality in the U.S.S.R. was described as a “social peril,” and in 1934, Stalin introduced a new federal statute that criminalized such acts as part of a broad policy of “proletarian decency” and gave rise to a righteous, puritanical ethic for Soviet Communists. (The repeal of legal abortion swiftly followed, in 1936.) Since the Soviet Party set the tone for the CPUSA, a severe “Party morality,” which forbade adultery as well as homosexuality, followed for American Communists. When Harry’s marriage ended, his wife charged, with no small amount of truth, “You didn’t many me—you married the Communist Party.”
Getting married certainly made it easier for Harry to work comfortably in the Party, though it would be unfair to say that he married solely for that reason. After the ragged edges of his relationships with men, political involvement seemed his greatest hope for a meaningful life. To come into the CPUSA, he explained, involved almost religious feelings:
“Joining the Party actually was like joining the Holy Orders in earlier centuries. Party ways and outlooks dominated your everyday consciousness from then on. Except that instead of manifesting the City of God on earth, you were creating the International Soviet, that shall be the Human Race, as one sang in the final line of the ‘Internationale.”’
In the future, observers would comment on the similar evangelical fervor with which Harry approached building the Mattachine Society. The Party, on the whole, had a missionary nature, and the relationship with the group was primary: Some Party psychiatrists even argued that the group relationship of social responsibility (including baby-making and family-based citizenship, as well as work) was basic to mental health.
Harry credited a psychiatrist instead of the Party as the catalyst for his thirteen-year experiment with heterosexuality. He visited the therapist for one afternoon at the referral of his personal physician, Dr. Saul Glass.2 While visiting Glass, Harry had poured out his heartache over Stanley Haggart and the doctor made a medical referral to his brother-in-law, who had recently graduated from the Jungian Institute in Switzerland. Psychiatry, which would soon become anathema to the Communist Party, was even then an idea Harry strongly disliked, yet he kept that one appointment.
He told the psychiatrist of his despair “in not being able to find a flower-faced boy who was a Marxist like me, who would stand with me in the class struggle against oppression.” The analyst suggested that the problem might be solved if he stopped discounting heterosexual relationships. He asked if Harry had ever looked for a young woman who could see his point of view. Next, the doctor asked, “Maybe instead of a girlish boy, you’re looking for a boyish girl. Do you know one?”
Harry did. There was a tall girl whom he had seen at all the picket lines and demonstrations. As Harry spoke about her, the doctor encouraged him to pursue a relationship. But Harry worried: Could compatible personalities conquer sexual differences? He voiced serious doubt that he could sustain a physical relationship with a woman. The therapist assured him that he could. “He told me that all I needed to do to change my orientation was to deliberately close one book and open another.”
Harry believed him—or wanted to—and set about opening the new book. He sought out the tall girl, whose name was Anita Platky. She was twenty-four years old and from a large Jewish family which had moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. An athletic girl interested in acting, Anita had tried to get work in movies as an ice skater and was once cast as an Amazon in a stage play. Anita was slim-hipped and strong-jawed, described by many of her friends as handsome and by some, even, as masculine.
She did her best to make her outstanding height work for her by cultivating a regal style in clothing and movement, but she was always self-conscious. One of her favorite things about being married to six-foot-three Harry was that she could wear heels and still be no taller than he. She was also smart, as pointed out by the class anagram from her high school yearbook:
Anita’s
Nice smile
Is good to see.
Tall?
About six feet!
Plays ball
Longer than
Anyone else.
To
increase
Knowledge is her desire.
You know these
intelligentsia.
Helen Johnson, Harry’s friend from the Film and Foto League, was Anita’s best friend in the class of 1931 at Beverly Hills High School. Anita was gifted with fine intelligence, humor and style, Helen said, though because of her appearance she lacked self-confidence. Other of Anita’s friends shared that impression. “Anita really was attractive and had a lot of style,” Helen recalled, “but she was dark, and, as my mother would have said, ‘foreign-looking’—which meant Jewish-looking. In the Thirties, if you weren’t five-foot-two-with-eyes-of-blue, you didn’t feel so pretty.” But to Harry, Anita’s Party membership outshone all else. “She had already gone through the classes I was involved in, and had read the right literature and knew all the right people.” It seemed like the start of a beautiful relationship, free of the deadlocks he had faced before.
He contrived to meet her at his birthday party that April. Leroy Robbins’s wife, Florence, threw a dinner, and Harry asked Helen to invite her tall girlfriend. That night, Harry remembered, “we discovered we liked each other.” They found they thought alike and shared a sense of humor and an interest in the arts. Harry recalled that at political meetings, when slogans were being composed for protest signs, he would start a slightly wicked, sophisticated one and Anita invariably finished it. Harry once said, with awkward sincerity, “If she had been a boy, we would still probably be together.” During the course of public protests and family dinners, they fell in love. He noted, “Anita and I loved each other dearly and had a wonderful time doing anything together. We rarely quarreled because I usually understood her point of view. Most of her family and friends thought we were a perfect match—I never looked at another woman. (But oh the men!)”
Within a week of their meeting Anita invited Harry home to meet her mother. Harry fell in love with the Platky matriarch, too. She provided something his parents never had, a warm home and an open mind. “Annie Platky was an absolutely grand woman—warm, intelligent, cultured and progressive. She was the first mother I had ever met who understood and supported her kids’ being Communists.” A favorite family story recalled by the Hays’ daughter, Kate, told of how Anita and her brothers once met a woman registering voters on the street. “Anita decided to sign up. When asked what party she wished to register, she said, ‘Communist!’ The woman nearly died, but everyone else got quite a kick out of it.”
The more he learned about the Platkys, the more he liked them. Of Polish and French background, they came to America with their family business—boar-bristle brushes—but were prosperously diverted into the clothing trade. In the 1890s, Annie bore a son and daughter; then, when middle-aged, she surprised everyone by bearing three more: Adolphe Kasimir, Joseph Edouard, and Anita. (The boys changed their names. As Hitler rose to power, Adolphe became Ae. While in the Party, Joseph Edouard proletarianized his name to Joe Ed; when he left the Party, he jettisoned the names “Joe Ed” and “Platky” and became John Storm.)
The family was educated, with a background Harry called Biedermeier (Germany’s sensible equivalent to Victorian style and mores), and sufficiently well off to maintain a staff of servants. During the Depression, however, “this family was really poor,” remembered Helen Johnson, “so poor that they stayed in bed all day in the winter because there wasn’t any heat.” They survived their leanest years peddling homemade noodles Annie cut with her sewing scissors; what they couldn’t sell, they ate. Marked by these experiences, Anita and her brothers joined the active Left, but eventually all dropped out. Anita retained a strong social conscience and spent the last decades of her life working at Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in the San Fernando Valley. Her lifelong friend Helen felt that Anita was at heart less a radical than “a bourgeois Jewish girl with very traditional family values.”
Harry told Anita about his homosexual past. She assured him she understood, that she already knew several men who were “that way.” At least one of Anita’s few boyfriends before Harry had also been gay.
The higher purpose of “building the movement,” as Anita phrased it in a letter, colored their romance. To tip the balance, the Largo screenplay seemed likely to be sold soon, and Harry felt confident that his work with LeBorg would finally result in a steady job at MGM. He began to think about marriage. “I thought that it could solve a lot of my problems. Things would all come straight and fly right if she and I could find a working relationship.” Anita wrote to Harry later that summer that she thought the same way:
“You say in your letter you can see no reason we can’t be married shortly after my arrival. Since I can’t either, shall we do the plunge act up good and plan in that direction? Somehow we can get enough to pay the first month’s rent and from then on we can do something. Hell, darling, I do want to be with you, work with you, and live with you—start our job of building together, and I can build without attaching paramount importance to sex. I’m pretty sure I can, and you can too... Certainly our involvement and our desires to work in the groups we are working in is that much in our favor. So many of the people getting married these days have not that mutual interest to use as one brick in the foundation.”
Ironically, the same day that Harry began courting Anita, Stanley Haggart (evidently unaware of Harry’s new path and impending marriage) took a final bow in Harry’s life. He seized the occasion of Harry’s twenty-sixth birthday to condemn his ex-lover by running away from their relationship and, ultimately, from himself. “You have absolutely no humility,” he wrote, and warned Harry that without the ability to admit his human frailties, he would face a life of heartache.
He concluded poignantly:
“Two years ago I told you ‘no’ and four weeks ago you told me ‘no’... We are both human and have our human needs, and since I am denied a life with you, I will most naturally accept substitutes—physical. None of them shall take my separateness from me. None of them shall be entangled in my life or shall rob me of my newly found strength. I imagine it is the same with you. Quite by accident, I discovered Jay Britton, the chap you had an affair with in the hills. [I[ picked him up in some park... [He] served beautifully. He has taught me how to have an ‘affair’ without any emotional attachment. It is strange to have affairs without one’s heart being involved. New to me.”
Protesting too much, he concluded, “So, you see, I’m quite detached from you in all ways.”
Marrying a Jew was quite an escalation from making Star-of-David holiday cards. The Hay family, especially purebred Margaret, must have been torn between feelings of relief that their eldest son had finally found a girl, and alarm that she was Jewish. Helen Johnson called it “a bitter pill for Mrs. Hay to swallow.” It was typical of Harry to counterbalance the most traditional, mainstream event of his life with a strike at his family’s bigotry. Once the vow was made, however, mother and daughter-in-law were faithful to it and remained friends long after Harry and Anita were divorced.
Less than a month after his introduction to Anita, Harry went to the downtown headquarters of the Southern California branch of the Communist Party and formally applied for membership. The officials there knew about his checkered past and he informed them of his decision to marry, which everyone involved accepted as a permanent change. He had occasional qualms about this step, but was reassured as his Party work began to fall into place almost immediately.
The couple wooed in the milieu of Los Angeles’ Left-wing culture. Anita and her brother John were involved in the Contemporary Theater of Los Angeles, which produced working-class revolutionary plays. Harry also saw Anita at dance classes and screenings at the Film and Foto League. Anita introduced Harry to her circle of friends, young progressive straight couples who became their friends for many years. They went out frequently, “when going out meant going to rent parties, picket lines, and demonstrations.” They spent a great chunk of their courtship working on an anti-Nazi demonstration produced by progressive Jewish women connected with the film industry.
As the group’s agitprop consultant, Harry suggested it somehow dramatize the atrocities in Nazi Germany, which were still largely unreported in America. Sympathetic studio carpenters and wardrobe seamstresses created the props: dummies burning at the stake, hanging from yardarms, piled high like refuse under the banner of the swastika.
These displays, mounted on trucks, became gruesome “floats” beside which walked demonstrators costumed in Eastern European folk dress, who handed out leaflets from French and British newspapers documenting Hitler’s crimes. The procession, which paraded through wholesome areas of Los Angeles like the Farmers’ Market, must have been a jarring sight. They did this for more than a week and Harry scheduled the cross-town logistics of the troupe and kept long vigils, because of arson threats from the German-American Bund. Despite extensive exposure, the event was never mentioned in the papers.
Harry’s gay life ground to an abrupt halt. He shed old friends and haunts, though he still picked up news from the circuit, such as the arrival of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood from England. Though their life was not dissimilar to the one he had admired in his friend Paul Mooney in 1934, Harry now dismissed the Britishers as decadent: “They had a sycophantic group of younger, attractive men around them to whom they provided a place to sleep, shower, shave, and eat, along with a lot of bon vivant-type conversation.” The tang of sour grapes in this description fits with Harry’s pain at severing his ties with the bohemian and temperamental worlds he had so loved. He maintained in later years that he then thought gay life was “all very beautiful still, but perhaps it was something that must be laid aside, as you lay aside things you love for civilization, for maturity.”
Shortly after the wedding date was set, Anita’s mother, Annie, had a massive heart attack. She was hospitalized, then had a second attack and died. Anita accompanied the body east to help make funeral arrangements. Her brother John and his wife Reat attended, as did Anita’s older siblings, Ira and Mina. The latter two were outspokenly anti-Red, and while Anita stayed at her sister’s Manhattan apartment, she kept quiet about her politics.
In Hollywood, Harry madly finished writing the Largo screenplay. Anita wrote him almost daily. “Went to the movies, saw Three Comrades and Kidnapped, neither of which helped me to forget you.” She dropped occasional references to politics—“you should collect two bucks for that subscription to the People’s World from Sylvia” —but her recurring theme was love:
“At first I didn’t go to the door twenty times a day to look for mail, but now I’m lucky if I get away with fifty. I didn’t used to feel like spending every minute of the day and night with a pen in my hand trying to write you, but now I feel like starting again as soon as a letter has left this floor via the mail chute. I didn’t used to sink inside when I saw how happy John and Reat are together. I didn’t used to want to turn around and go back to L.A. I didn’t used to feel a whole lot of things. Oh but I do now.”
Her letters were filled with the big city: The Harold Rome labor musical Pins and Needles entranced her, the quantity of comrades encouraged her, and she had never seen so many kinds of restaurants. With such enticements, she suggested Harry move east after their marriage. Her brother John had landed a job at Crown Publishing Company and she thought that might help Harry: “John pointed out that he will be able if not of a certainty, to get any novels you may write read at Knopfs, at least to secure you a good agent who may be able to do something about your shorter stuff. All of which may turn out to be sumpin’.”
She planned her return west and asked Harry to find “a room, bath and kitchen for about 18 to 20 bucks a month” for the period before their marriage. She also made several mentions of Harry’s growing participation in “the world fight,” dizzily mixing revolution into her sentimental billets-doux. “I’m so terribly, terribly thrilled at each piece of news of your further activity in the Party work and am horribly eager to pitch in and join you.” On a personal note she promised, “I’ll try not to rob you of your independence.”
Anita returned in late August and resumed wedding preparations. After Harry announced his intention to obtain a double bed, his mother took him aside. “Are you sure you don’t want twin beds?” she queried. “The only reason your father and I didn’t have them at the Kingsley house was the room wasn’t big enough.” The first weekend in September, a family friend threw a stag party which Harry called a “ghastly jollity” complete with cigars.
“What presumably marked the groom’s last night as a ‘Wild Free Blade’ was all pretty much sham and difficult pretending,” he reported. “My brother was away on a job at Hoover Dam and the rest of the ‘men’ I knew, right up to, almost, the day of being hitched, were not exactly the ‘Smoker’ type.” Among these were Anita’s brother Ae and John Storm’s brother-in-law, who had just come back from working with Trotsky in Mexico City.
“These well-meaning guys really didn’t know very much about sex, and of course, it would not have been politic for me to share the considerable amount that I knew about male sexuality.” He ended up slipping off to spend that night with a former lover, an assignation, he insisted, that was “the best sixty-nine I have experienced before or since. That,” he added, “was my real farewell to bachelorhood.”
The Hay-Platky vows were exchanged on California Admission Day, September 9, 1938 in the backyard garden of Ae’s home in downtown Los Angeles. The crowd of fifty faced the bride and groom while the minister performed the ceremony with his back to the crowd, a deliberately unorthodox touch. The Jewish bride and the Catholic groom stood before their Unitarian minister, Steve Fritchman, who obliged their wish to omit any “God stuff.” Their honeymoon was spent in the hills above Laguna Beach in a cottage overwrought with mother-of-pearl decorations. Snapshots taken there show Anita radiant, while Harry offers a strained smile and stands, as if metaphorically, half in shadow.
That week, Big Harry suddenly died. The honeymoon was cut short and the young couple returned to Windsor Boulevard. Harry sang at his father’s funeral. He and Anita moved into their first apartment, a twenty- dollar-a-month flat on North Robinson Street in Silver Lake. Harry planned carefully to be employed long enough to be able to secure the apartment, and then arranged to be laid off to qualify for Relief and a job in the Works Progress Administration.
With Harry’s assistance, Margaret Hay set about liquidating her late husband’s properties and building a new, smaller house. She bought a site on Oakcrest Drive in the then-quiet Cahuenga Pass canyon between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. Harry told her that the shape of things to come was the Bauhaus-influenced International school of architecture and recommended a young protégé of Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, whom she hired as architect. As a result, the grande dame of Edwardian tastes spent the rest of her years in a modular box of wood and glass. (Harry’s advice was on target: Ain’s Hay house is featured in modern architectural guidebooks.)
In October, Margaret took the couple on a late honeymoon trip in her Hupmobile Sedan to the Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. They returned to newlyweds’ poverty, surrounded by lovely appliances and dishes, but not much food. Anita canned everything she could get her hands on and even made jam from turnips. By December, she found work as a receptionist for a short-lived progressive-artists’ gallery on Sunset Boulevard. About a month later, Harry’s WPA application was accepted, but instead of getting the Theater Project job that he wanted, he was assigned to the Historical Records Survey, cataloguing Orange County’s civil records. Shortly, he rose from a $55-a-month clerk job to earning $85 dollars per month as a supervisor and was made responsible for Los Angeles County probate records as well.
They did Party work as a couple, undertaking a photo exhibit on poor housing conditions in the Los Angeles area. With no training and only a Brownie camera, they surveyed the dilapidated Victorian mansions that made up the city’s worst slums, such as the racially restricted areas of Chavez Ravine, South Central Avenue and Bunker Hill. One picture shows the single-faucet outdoor cold-water pipe that supplied twenty-four houses. Their project was part of a city-wide campaign to pass housing subsidies, which landlords argued would penalize taxpayers. To combat that argument, Harry and Anita compiled statistics documenting taxpayer costs incurred by the slum environment, specifically crime, ill health (mostly tuberculosis) and juvenile delinquency. They showed how subsidies would, in the long run, save money. The exhibit was popular and toured the city and state, but was repeatedly vandalized because of its political ramifications: Several city councilmen insisted that there were no slums in Los Angeles and that all talk of federal subsidies was “Communistic.’’
As their first anniversary approached, Harry showed a happily married surface, but he harbored serious misgivings. The stress of repressing his homosexual impulses aggravated his lifelong tendency to sleepwalk and have nightmares. He remembered, “The whole time I was married I dreamed the same dream over and over. I am in my father’s car. He is driving, but something happens and he can’t get his wooden leg from the gas pedal to the brake and we’re going to crash. I would thrash around in the covers trying to move the leg. Often it was Anita’s leg I’d be holding.”
His homosexual urges didn’t diminish, though he waited for them to. By the spring of 1939 he was seeking quick sexual encounters, usually in a park about once a week. His sexual tensions remained so high that on the WPA job he escaped to the lavatory to masturbate daily, a pattern that continued till the end of the marriage. And Party meetings, which ended late at night, provided a perfect opportunity for him to walk through Lafayette Park, which he had known as an active cruising ground for years. What physical relief his solitary sexuality or fleeting “quickies” offered was offset by a sense of emotional misery and constant danger.
One night in Lafayette Park, he was stopped by a policeman for violating a curfew aimed at controlling such activity. Harry was certain he would be booked and his marriage and public life would be over. But somehow “I managed to pop my shocked and innocent eyes at the cop. ‘You mean, officer, that people are not supposed to walk through the park at night?’” he began, and spun a yarn about walking for inspiration for song lyrics he was writing for church socials. “’Oh—you mean it’s dangerous?’ I went on. ‘Oh my goodness, officer, I never guessed!’Boy, was I relieved when he let me go home. I didn’t go again for several months.”
A year after their wedding, the entreaties of Anita’s New York relatives began to sway the newlyweds’ thinking. Although Harry had tried out for hundreds of stage and radio parts over a period of several years and submitted his writing to countless magazines and publishers, none of it had come to much monetarily. Moreover, his laborious investment with Reginald LeBorg—his best entree into the film industry—collapsed when they broke relations in an angry exchange of letters about writing credit and money. When Harry was offered a job as scriptwriter for his old Filth and Famine League buddy Roger Barlow (now director and editor at the Educational Film Foundation at New York University), the California couple decided to make the move.
At their farewell bash, the tennis court of the Windsor Boulevard house spilled over with friends talking excitedly, gobbling down enchiladas (the specialty of Florence Robbins), and weaving in square dances. The dance music was distinctly Harry Hay in inspiration—“We took revolutionary songs and put them to a square beat. It horrified some people, but we did it, and it was fun.”
They sold his car and drove hers on the long cross-country trip. Although this was Harry’s first drive across America, he experienced frequent and eerie déjà vu. Arrival in Manhattan plunged them into the logistics of the present. Roger and Louise Barlow welcomed them into their already cramped one-room Greenwich Village apartment and for several weeks the couples traded off sleeping on the mattress or the bare box springs.
The script work for Barlow paid five to ten dollars a day and was intermittent, so Harry immediately played his ace, an appointment with Harry Guggenheim at his Pine Street office. Margaret had secured this by a letter of introduction in which she reminded the wealthy man of the faithful service rendered the worldwide Guggenheim ventures by Big Harry two decades earlier. Amazed by the scale of Mr. Guggenheim’s office and impressed with the implications of being allowed into it, Harry felt briefly hopeful, but after a few moments of chatting across the wide, polished desk, he realized that nothing more than cordialities would be offered, despite Margaret’s certainly that her son could cash in on the connection. It was, Harry realized, a dozen years too late.
So the Hays were poor in New York—work was never steady for Harry, and when he worked the pay averaged only thirty-five dollars a week. As in Los Angeles, Anita was the first one to land a job, joining her sister, Mina, as a telephone solicitor at Cue magazine, and shortly afterward she was hired as a typist-receptionist at the World’s Fair for the “World of Man” display of the World Health Organization. She kept that job for the duration of their stay. Within a few weeks they found a sublet on the twelfth floor of a tall building near Sheridan Square. Because of his sleepwalking, the height terrified Harry.
While the couple was still adjusting to their new city, Harry’s mother came for a six-week visit. Margaret’s modernist house was still under construction in Los Angeles, so she had taken to travel. During her visit, she bought Harry two expensive new suits, the better to impress prospective employers, of which there were many.
His first steady work was through a progressive contact, Alfred Baruch, an industrial engineer who, with his fabric-designer wife, Frieda Diamond, marketed new types of textiles. They hired Harry to plan marketing strategies in twenty large American cities, complete with a handbook. After that, he was a service manager in Macy’s toy department, a product demonstrator, and an actor in the brief run of an off-Broadway play, Zero Hour, by George Sklar. But this was Harry’s sole stage work in New York, and for much of his two years there he had no job at all. Frequently, when he applied for clerk positions, “they told me I was too well-spoken and would scare the customers away.”
But Harry and Anita signed up with the New York C.P. office almost immediately and Party activities kept him exhausted. He was assigned to the Artists’ and Writers’ branch and enrolled in the regular regimen of meetings, committees and ever more complex classes in Marxist theory. In New York, however, Harry became a Party functionary with the Theater Arts Committee for Peace and Democracy, a major Left-wing group, so his position in it signified advancement within the Party. He also worked on several strike committees and attended the unceasing flow of demonstrations and fundraisers relating to the Party and its many issues of concern.
One of Harry’s nonpolitical adventures took place at the upstairs gallery of Gimbel Brothers department store, where an estate liquidation sale was taking place. While perusing the shelves of unusual books and artworks, Harry came across a slim volume of picture writing labeled “Old Indian Manuscript.” He recognized it as an old Central American codex (a classic manuscript volume), and suspected that it might be quite valuable. He ran off to scrape up the fifty-dollar price, but when he returned with the money, the item was gone. Later he read in the papers that Manly P. Hall, a philosopher of the esoteric sciences, had become very wealthy from the sale of such a codex and Harry suspected for years that he had been the purchaser. Hall confirmed that he had indeed purchased three antique volumes of that description from Gimbel’s gallery at that time. He added that he published one of the texts, with a monograph, through the University of New Mexico Press, under the title Codex Hall. (Hall did not comment on the economic value of the books he bought, but evidently, the world did come close to having a Codex Hay.)
Such heady brushes with fortune, rather beyond the ken of Los Angeles residents, were common occurrences in New York, the cultural capital of the world during the 1940s. Although poor, Harry and Anita scraped together the means to visit the many museums and, less frequently, to attend the Metropolitan Opera. They saw flamenco artist Carmen Amaya, American bard Carl Sandburg, popular Brazilian soprano Elsie Houston, and mime Agna Enters. With money Margaret sent him for his birthday, he took Anita to see the original Broadway production of Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life.
The simple fact of being in New York made even everyday events take on a more vivid quality. “Every Sunday there was a parade somewhere or other,” Harry recalled, “parades for various saints of the Catholic Church, for local candidates, for the neighborhood junior high school. If we wanted to have a parade that was important to the Left, we’d have to check with the junior high first.” The Hays frequented parades.
“In 1940, I bought Anita an Easter bonnet, a huge cap of woven jute, in a lovely sulphur yellow color, to which I added more than a yard of yellow tulle, tied in a huge bow. We went from watching the large Easter Parade to walking in it, and with me at six-three and Anita, with that hat, even taller, we became a separate section. We were giggling because of the impropriety of Leftists in such activity.” They marched quite properly in the thousands-strong May Day parade that year. As it entered Chelsea Square, Harry recalled, “Everyone was singing the Leftist anthem, the ‘Bandiera Rossa Trionfera.’ It echoed through the canyons of the city. People were hanging out of windows singing. You’d really think the whole of Manhattan had signed up with the Party.”
As Harry immersed himself deeper in the Party, he began to observe a paradox. Though the C.P. was officially opposed to homosexuality, a fragmented, unofficial subpolicy existed beneath the surface. For certain homosexuals, Harry saw exceptions made.
“I knew a number of black and white men from the performing arts in the Communist Party who were gay, but the Party didn’t seem to suspect. I realized that since they weren’t that unnoticeable, certain Party people saw the necessity of tolerating and covering for them.”
He elaborated that the Party officially knew of homosexuals only if they were arrested and exposed—in which case they would invariably leave the Party—or if they were “star exceptions,” like Marc Blitzstein, the Leftist composer of The Cradle Will Rock. Though Harry never met Blitzstein, he knew the married Marc was homosexual, but also knew that because of his value as a famous and effective cultural worker, Blitzstein remained secure within the Party. His own political zeal fulfilled Harry enough to comply with the Party’s double standard.
In comparison, other issues pressed hard and urgent. In May of 1940, Harry, along with a black, married couple and a single, white man who were progressives, drove to Chicago for a conference of the America First Committee. On the way there, in Gary, Indiana, an incident took place that Harry recalled years later:
“It was just after daybreak and we stopped to go into a busy all-night diner. The stoney-faced middle-aged waitress took our orders at the counter, then as she served coffee to me and to the other white man; she turned to the side cupboard and took out a self-standing card runner. Dusting it off with the pleats of skirt which covered her voluminous ass, she noncommitally set it on the counter in front of the cash register: “We reserve the right to refuse service to customers whose patronage is unwelcome,” and so neglected to put the thick white coffee cups in front of our black comrades who sat between us.
“The other guy and I nudged each other, drained our cups, got refills and gave them to our friends. We waited quietly until our Denver omelettes were served us, complete with checks from the waitress’ pad. Then we pushed off our stools, deliberately ground the meal-checks firmly into the food so that the plate could not be served again and all four of us wordlessly stalked out, clumsily knocking over the “Refuse to serve” sign as we left. It was the limit to which we could protest this act of Jim Crow in those years. The black couple held themselves tightly throughout all of this, saying nothing to the waitress and nothing to us, just waiting to see what we’d do.
“They didn’t signal they wanted special personal reassurances, but I’ve never forgotten the silent tears that overflowed. I felt it too. It wasn’t fury which I suffered, but a frighteningly quiet grief too deep for words. I remember thinking someday those tears are going to have to be paid off. Like the taunting and rough handling Queers get on the same streets by some of the same rednecks. Someday, someday, there’s going to be a reckoning if I can help it. But this last part, personal only with me, I couldn’t share with the others.”
Overwhelmed by the unrelieved flatness of New York and the New Jersey skyline, he expressed homesickness for the Sierra Mountains of California, so some of Anita’s high school friends, who were now also young Reds, took them on a picnic to Mount Orange. Several weeks later, the group had an all-day picnic in a wooded Catskill park surrounding an abandoned marble quarry near Peekskill, New York. Harry and Anita brought along Anita’s sister, Mina, and her son, Peter, a Harvard freshman home for Easter holiday. Peter was eighteen years old and just out of prep school, but he was still adolescent, overweight and clumsy.
They decided to explore the quarry. Harry, the most experienced outdoorsman, gave careful instructions for the others to follow his movements: Crouch to keep the center of balance low and move slowly. This was especially important because the marble faces were often slick and slanted, and slipping would be dangerous. But teenage Peter brashly stood up and jumped from one ledge to another. He landed on his feet but lost his balance. Anita reached out but failed to connect with his hand. Falling from the ledge, Peter injured his head and died shortly thereafter. Mina, who had so recently lost her mother, was naturally in despair, but Anita and Harry were also devastated. Many of their new friends stepped forward to comfort Mina and the Hays; nevertheless, for many years afterwards, Harry sensed that Mina blamed him for the tragedy. “I always felt haunted by that,” he said.
That spring, summer and fall, Harry cruised regularly in Central Park. These encounters generally took place, much as they had in Los Angeles, on the walk home after C.P. classes and meetings. One popular spot for sex was called Sheep’s Meadow, which was so wide and shadowed that it sheltered couples in the center. Another was a large, lake-bound rock accessible over a Japanese-style footbridge. In the warmer months it was overrun all day and early evening by necking heterosexuals, but on cool nights, after ten o’clock, it was gay.
Now in his second year of marriage, Harry’s involvements with men were increasing to full relationships, which also put him in jeopardy with the Party with its demand for an upstanding public image. He confided to no one about his moonlit cruising in Central Park. Such surreptitious meetings gave way in the winter of 1940 to his first actual affair since his marriage.
He was at Macy’s demonstrating celluloid closet compartments to protect furs and woolens from moth damage when a handsome young blond man watched his pitch for a longer time than usual. The man expressed interest—though not in the product. His name was Barry, and he had an apartment where they met, but that affair ended when Barry brought along a friend named John Erwin to meet Harry at Macy’s for lunch one day. John, a medical student at Bellevue, had beautiful skin and eyes and, as Harry noted years afterward in a fond recollection, “a mouth that begged to be kissed again and again.” Their involvement lasted several months, though often they could do no more than sit together at lunch hour in Central Park, because John lived with an older man who paid his medical school tuition, and Harry lived with Anita.
One thing they discussed was Harry’s dream of homosexuals getting together and understanding themselves. John suddenly commented that at Bellevue Hospital, research on that very subject was being conducted by a doctor named Alfred Kinsey. John had met lots of interesting people while waiting in the Bellevue lobby—would Harry consent to be interviewed? The introduction was made, and in a little office at Bellevue Hospital, Harry Hay added to the statistics that would greatly influence his own destiny when the Kinsey Report was published eight years later.
One night John Erwin and Harry went to the Metropolitan Opera to see Wagner’s Parsifal. “The standing room gallery was unheated,” recalled Harry, “and very cold. The room seemed to be completely male, and considerable sexual activity was going on underneath the overcoats. The smell of sex must have been apparent even in the loges!”
Parsifal’s theme of sacred brotherhood would become important to Hay’s later ruminations about gay organizing, so this stray memory, in such a homoerotic context, is especially intriguing.
In the spring of 1941 Harry met a man who nearly jarred him loose from marriage and political commitments. It started while Harry was in the Village, looking for a new apartment. “I was walking down Morton Street, east of Canal, and stopped to look at a building when this handsome, pixieish face peered out the window. He motioned me to come up, and, thinking he was the manager, I did. When I got to his apartment I realized he wasn’t the manager but I didn’t much care.”
The handsome pixie, William Alexander, was a rising young architect and a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright. Harry recognized that the chairs in his apartment were by Charles Eames and was quite stunned to see a painting of Paul Mooney, whom he had known years before in Laguna. When he mentioned that he had known Mooney, Alexander explained that he and Mooney had been lovers—but Mooney had embarked on a voyage in a Chinese junk with adventure writer Richard Halliburton, and all hands had been lost in a storm. “When Bill told me that Mooney had been drowned on Halliburton’s last ego trip, I was crushed and had to sit down. Bill got me a drink and, as he leaned over with it, he kissed me.”
Their relationship lasted for more than seven months. “I came close to leaving Anita and the Party over Billy,” Harry said. “In so many regards he was the person I wanted to share with.” The youngest son of a large Russian immigrant family, Bill Alexander was independent and highly cultured. In the 1950s, he abandoned his successful career as an architect to found a West Hollywood gallery and boutique called The Mart, providing an oasis of aesthetic imports during Los Angeles’ provincial decades. He loved music as much as Harry, and introduced him to the Fifth Symphony of Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich, which was an appreciation of the Bolshevik Revolution. (“You listen to the first and last movements and you can see it,” insisted Harry.) It became Harry’s favorite, which he played every time he visited Bill, and it was the first record he bought upon his return to Los Angeles the following year. Every day after work he played it, doubtless reveling in its associations of his affair with Bill.3 But since Shostakovich was a leading Soviet composer, Harry’s appreciation of him could appear as simply progressive zeal.
Bill Alexander returned Harry’s affections. “Harry was warm and lovable. It was pleasant to be together, shopping, doing anything,” Alexander said in 1987. He even gave Harry occasional jobs in his architecture and decorating company, handling everything from accounting to furniture finishing. But Harry’s anxiety over being spotted by a C.P. associate dogged and constrained him:
“Bill and I went around only in his immediate neighborhood. I was always concerned that I might be recognized. As a married person and as a Party person, it was impossible to be seen with anyone who was not my wife and not directly involved with the movement. The Party taught us early to be careful of appearance and association in public.”
Despite this dilemma, Harry wanted Alexander to accompany him to demonstrations and become more politically involved. But the architect refused. “I knew endless people in the C.P.,” Alexander explained. “I never went to any of their meetings, but l sympathized with what they had to say.” Once again, the conflict between political commitment and personal freedom posed a barrier to Harry’s intimate relationships.
For most of 1941, Harry worked as interim head of the Left-wing New Theater League after its previous chief, Ben Irwin, was hired as a screenwriter in Hollywood. The N.T.L. encouraged both theater talent in various unions and use of theater as an educational and organizing tool. As shop after shop signed up for the unions, Harry recalled, “Somebody would eventually say, ‘Jeeze, somebody ought to write a play about what we went through ... If we told our story, other shops could learn from us.’” Trade union theater became an organizing, unity-building and educational technique of unionism. “To be sure, the material was crude, obvious, heavy-handed and even occasionally obnoxious. But for the most part, union audiences didn’t care. It dealt with what was on everybody’s lips and immediate to their needs, and what they might do to improve their lives.”
In his capacity as director of the N.T.L. Harry was the contact person for all the community and trade union theater groups, and offered advice to unions that wanted to set up theater groups. To fund such activity, twice a year the N.T.L. director was expected to organize a fundraiser. Harry’s benefit concert in the spring of 1941 featured the likes of blues great Leadbelly, Burl Ives (years later, after Ives was a friendly witness before HUAC, Hay always referred to him as “that drunk”) and Aunt Molly Jackson, and was presented at the Auto Workers’ Hall in Lower Manhattan.
He also taught, with a woman named Mary Tarcai, classes on acting to members of several labor unions, including the Longshoremen, Cooks and Stewards, and Bus Drivers unions. Hay and Tarcai taught the Stanislavski method, of which Tarcai was an early though uncredited advocate. In their classes, people often re-enacted actual confrontations with their bosses, living out the idea of shops learning from one another’s struggles.
So Harry joined the clan of theater teachers, from whose distinctive bag of communications tricks he would draw heavily in his future activism. One of his secrets as an acting teacher came from hours of cruising. “There was much in Stanislavski’s art I used to improve the self-preservation improvisations I occasionally needed in cruising the park or evading the demure football player types who promenaded the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza at lunch time. When they suddenly reversed their hauteur and came on too strongly, or just plain smelled wrong, I had to invent a scene to escape.
“Sometimes an agitprop circumstance could overlap with a pick-up. ‘Join the Union! Join the Union! The truth shall make you free!’ And with the employment of a not-universally-noted eye-lock, I could connect without speaking. ‘Join me in another kind of union! This way lies another freedom!’”
In the summer of 1941 Bill Alexander won a contract to design and build a house in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The house was to be built on the famous Main Line Highway for a wealthy male couple. Bill hired Harry to assist, especially in planning and locating the building materials. Harry learned to read blueprints and manage materials on this job, which he would turn into an employment mainstay in later years.
Back in New York, the Hays felt increasingly discontent, vaguely homesick and restless for the West. Their quandary over whether to leave vanished in early December with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. At the moment they heard the news, they happened to be in a partitioned restroom at a gas station in Mystic, Connecticut, returning from a visit to relatives of Anita. A radio was playing and the announcement came through. “We weren’t sure it was real when we first heard the news. It was like another Orson Welles stunt.”
As he realized the seriousness of the situation, Harry grew worried for his brother, Jack, stationed in Hawaii with the Air Force. By the time they got through to Margaret, who had learned that Jack was all right, Harry had decided to return home. Headlines immediately proclaimed that Japanese submarines threatened the California coast; and if there were an invasion, Harry dreamed of organizing a guerrilla resistance group which he could easily teach to appear and vanish in the mountains he knew from childhood.
He dropped in unexpectedly to say goodbye to Bill Alexander. Another young man had been pursuing the architect, nonetheless Harry was perturbed to find the fellow seated, having lunch with Alexander. Bill seemed embarrassed and finally said, “Well, you told me you were leaving.”
Harry later said that reasons deeper than fear of Japanese invasion made him want to leave the East. “My gay consciousness was beginning to stir. I sensed it would do better in the West. I felt no room in New York, no company to daydream. And daydreaming is important to gay consciousness.”
1. For various reasons, chiefly respect for her privacy, Harry rarely discussed his marriage until after the death of his ex-wife in 1983.
2. Harry was participating in an experiment Glass conducted in the late 1930s, looking for physiological indicators for homosexuality. Harry was in a group whose blood and urine samples were tested against a pool of homosexuals in the “Fruit Tank” of the county jail. Glass, H.J. Deuel, and CA. Wright published the result of the research, “Sex Hormone Studies in Male Homosexuals,” in the journal Endocrinology in 1940.
3. It was one of the many times Harry used music to express his gay yearnings—from that time on, he associated a song with each of his lovers.