It may well be that the
impossible at a given moment can become possible only by being
stated at a time when it is impossible.
— Leszek Kolakoski
The war years stretched into a decade of tensions for the nation, for the Party and for Harry. He perfected the mask of a heterosexual and lived for thirteen years in what he later called “an exile world.” He fell out of touch with the temperamental life and consequently with his peace of mind. In those respects, he regarded the decade as lost. He once reflected, “I missed the Forties, because I was being married and a Communist.”
Harry and Anita’s return to Los Angeles at the start of 1942 involved a full schedule of logistics, finding a place to live and getting work. They settled in the district around Silver Lake and Echo Park, a charming, hilly area where Chaplin and Sennett had made their movies. The home they found was on Lake Shore Avenue, a winding street that cuts through a sandstone canyon still lush and green today, yet close to the surrounding city. That rented cottage, set on a steep hillside, was so tiny that the tall couple had to stoop most of the time, but it was home, and it was nestled into a ready community of friends. The Hays’ landlords, a German emigré couple named Fritz and Alma Meier, rented several other units in the area to progressive tenants; the canyon was such a haven for Leftists that it was known as “the Red Hills” and well-worn paths connected the houses scattered over the ridge of hilltops. On many nights Harry and Anita walked to nearby meetings or fundraisers.
Harry immediately found a job with Russian War Relief, for which he had previously worked in New York. He organized fundraising events in Long Beach and Santa Ana, and ticket sales to a major concert at the Hollywood Bowl. But that job paid poorly, so through Charles Maddox, an artist friend, he got a true proletarian job as a puddler, pouring molten brass and aluminum at a foundry. Peggy Hay Breyak said she never really knew what her brother did for a living, and for a Communist making money was always secondary to making social change. But Harry had a steady stream of jobs, no less than eight during this period, and his employment finally stabilized in 1948 when he became a production engineer in a manufacturing plant.
To all the world, the Hays were a happily married pair. “I remember them as a lovely couple who adopted two kids,” recalled one of Harry’s superiors in the Party. “They were extroverted and well liked.” For more than a decade, straight couples were his comrades, and, characteristic of all he did, Harry and his wife became a model Communist couple.
They kept a heavy schedule of meetings and activities and when they entertained, as they did frequently, it was almost always within their progressive circles. During this decade Harry and Anita started a family, and with other Leftist parents they formed a cooperative nursery school. They even joined a church. “Kay and John McTernan and Anita and I got sprinkled [baptized] on the same day in Steve Fritchman’s First Unitarian Church on Eighth Street, though we only went to two sermons in five years.” The progressive pastor wasn’t counting and was offering large meeting rooms to Leftists.
Though most of the Hays’ friends were sympathetic to progressive causes, not all were in the Party; in fact, particular political alliances were not discussed casually. “There was a lot of careful discretion in those days,” one close friend recalled. “People didn’t talk about what they were involved in except for certain fundraisers. Harry and Anita had lots of friends, and they themselves were involved in a million things. Almost everybody we knew was involved in some liberal issue, but I don’t think anyone knew who was a member of the Communist Party or not.”
Harry went to meetings of his Party club, took classes and participated in dozens of regional campaigns, from walking precincts for progressives in local elections to serving as the only man on the Los Angeles Communist Party Women’s Commission in 1945. There were always commissions, committees, and campaigns, as well as regular meetings and classes. The Party’s “meetingitis” was legendary and Harry and Anita attended as many as nine C.P. events a week. His Party colleagues uniformly recall Harry as intelligent, sincere and hardworking. “I knew I could always rely on him,” said Miriam Sherman, his section organizer. “Whether it was to give a report or do fundraising or anything else, Harry was reliable.”
Harry’s youthful protests were now solidified by the disciplined, purposeful structure of the Party. All of his C.P. activities were useful training for unforeseen political challenges. Many formulas of Marxist theory, such as the program for “bringing a new idea into the world,” have obvious implications for the challenges he faced in conjuring a gay movement out of nothing. His fascination with Marxist theory consumed his mental energies; he was captivated by the Marxist approach of studying and understanding humanity as a whole, and in bringing previously obscured aspects of history into that understanding. Many Marxists, particularly Europeans, published extensively in the fields of history and anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s and Harry read their books avidly. His “lost” decade served as a valuable period of preparation.
The foundry where Harry worked was closed by a government program and Margaret, ever ready with the Los Angeles Times, spotted an ad for a materials planner at a new company called Interstate Aircraft. The work involved reading blueprints and calculating supplies, jobs Harry had already done on the Main Line house. He was hired there as part of a team to develop a pilotless airplane and as was common during the war, he exhausted himself with sixteen-hour workdays.
At the ends of those feverish days, he rediscovered an old haunt. “Echo Park Lake became important to me again. I started cruising there on my way home at midnight.” The idyllic water park, its benches crowded with old men and children by day, seethed erotically at night and the war infused it with lusty servicemen. Accordingly, the police frequently shut it down. “There were periodic raids during the war. It was easy to be trapped,” he recalled. Harry noticed at Echo Park Lake that “I would pass certain people and get butterflies and leave fast. Ten minutes later there were lights and cops.” Aside from this “radar,” Hay also maintained that he could distinguish heterosexuals from homosexuals by smell, and that compared to gays, he found straight men distinctly unpleasant.
At work, Harry sometimes became so enthusiastic about solving a problem in the complex blueprints that he waved his hands excitedly. “What are you?” his straight male colleagues reproved him, “a goddamn fairy?” But it was trade union politics, not arm-waving, that ultimately cost him his job. He and a co-worker recruited about fifteen others to form a chapter of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians at the company. They had no salary demands and wished only to organize. But management refused to negotiate. Harry and the other picketers were fired.
Another aircraft firm quickly hired him. Avion Aircraft was the largest and most impersonal company he had ever worked for, and there he created a card system to pinpoint the location of tools and supplies, including millions of pounds of scarce aluminum. He regarded that as his contribution to the war effort, and indeed, when Harry’s number came up for military service, he was given a special deferment because of his war-related employment. His immediate supervisor, impressed with Harry’s ability, tried for years to get him into the new discipline of systems engineering at Cal Tech, but a security clearance problem, stemming from Harry’s radical politics, barred him from the profession.
Their marriage at the five-year mark and Harry’s earnings steady, Anita began talking about a family. They’d already attempted to have a child; the marriage was physically passionate for the first several years (though Harry admitted to increasing reliance on male fantasies), but they were unable to conceive. A friend of Anita’s, connected with the Children’s Home Society, helped them explore adoption. The couple’s radical politics were not a concern but their mixed religions were and the Hays had to wait through months of investigations.
In the second week of September, 1943, a baby was finally brought to them. They named the five-week-old, red-headed girl Hannah Margaret for both her grandmothers. The Lake Shore Avenue cottage instantly felt squeezed and they found a larger house in the same neighborhood. The Hay family’s new home was an old three-story house beneath a spreading pine on a cul-de-sac named Cove Avenue. The house was split-level, with kitchen and dining room below and more rooms above. There was even a study for Harry.
The centerpiece was a huge, high-ceilinged living room with a picture window overlooking the reservoir for which the Silver Lake district was named. “That view was our pride and joy,” Harry said, and the gentle hills reflected in the lake as if it were indeed polished silver. The acreage was generous, extending far down the hill, which was landfill and could support no more building. Harry kept Sundays free of meetings to maintain the huge yard. The rent was forty dollars a month.
They turned it into a home and saved for a set of Winfield china, a California ceramic decorated with spiral patterns of burgundy, gray and slate blue. Within a few years they furnished the cavernous living room with a grand piano Harry got for a song because the case was scratched. Its tone was so beautiful that a professional musician friend used it for recitals and Harry occasionally composed protest songs on it, but over the next few years, Harry’s friends kidded him that he was too busy with politics ever to play it.
The house at 2328 Cove Avenue hosted an endless cycle of meetings, classes and parties. Pete Seeger was a guest there during some of his early West Coast concert appearances. Mostly married couples passed through the door, but within seven years the first Mattachine meeting would be clandestinely held there. It was always a house of mixed elements. In 1944 Anita’s sister moved to an apartment in San Francisco too small to house the jade mosaics and screens she had bought in Macao years before, so amidst Harry’s collection of American books and records, the exotic furnishings somehow were fit in.
The neighborhood around the cul-de-sac was peaceful. Down the hill spilled several bungalows of Craftsman or Japanese style, accessible from landings off a long stretch of concrete stairs. In the 1980s the neighbors still recalled in hushed voices that the large house at the end of Cove Avenue had once been a Communist cell.
Education was central to the American Communist Party, and it was there that Harry found his niche, both as eternal student and as a popular Marxist teacher. His prowess as an educator earned him a job offer as Communist Party educational director for Los Angeles County, but he declined; he knew he was best in the classroom. There he could follow and synthesize the severe changes that beset the Party during the war years and communicate these to people ranging from factory workers to white-collar professionals, most of whom, he observed, had an equal distaste for study.
“Party line” changes were often abrupt and extreme, and were tied to shifting events in the world and within the Soviet Party. In a central C.P. change of this time, CPUSA chief Earl Browder forbade union strikes during the war emergency, an action later repudiated as a compromise with capitalism—heresy to the fundamentals of Marxism. “Browder’s Revisionism” fomented discord within the Party for years to come. Additionally, even before the end of America’s war alliance with the Soviet Union, some federal agencies planned a campaign of repressive legislation to harass “subversives,” particularly American Communist Party members.
The most notable of these laws was the Smith Act, which required Communists to register as agents of a foreign power. This culminated in imprisonment of many American C.P. officials and more than a decade of UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings and blacklisting in the private sector. The stresses from within and without were so great that in 1944, the Party was officially dissolved and replaced by the Communist Political Association.
Depending on which Communists from that time one talks to, the old Left was either “breaking down” or “tightening up.” By 1946, Earl Browder, the man who dissolved the Party, was officially expelled and his “experimental Marxism” was reversed. The rank-and-file was often confused about how to assimilate changes in Party policy, and urgent back-to-basics classes were regularly required to keep Party members current. Harry was particularly well equipped for such classes because he loved the puzzlements of theory and had studied the fine points of Marxism in high-level courses.
“There were various levels of comprehension of theory,” he said, “which can be compared to elementary school, high school and college.” The Marxism classes he had taken in New York were “college-level,” but Harry had to develop a unique method of his own. He asked personal questions to draw out the everyday experiences of his students and apply it to complex political principles. This was partially influenced, he said, by the Stanislavski acting technique of getting players to relate their “lines”—in this case theories of Marxism—to their own experience so that they could become convincing. As respect for his teaching grew, Hay began to feel what he called “finally, in my life, a feeling of control.”
In Los Angeles, he taught first at Party Headquarters downtown and was also assigned to teach “fraction” classes for Party members who needed private tutoring because they were unable to keep up. He also taught at the People’s Educational Center on Vine Street in Hollywood. The P.E.C. called itself “a bridge between labor and learning” and offered nuts-and-bolts courses such as “How To Run a Meeting” and many cultural classes. The school also had a heavy concentration of motion picture production classes; director Frank Tuttle taught “Motion Picture Direction,” and John Howard Lawson (later of the Hollywood Ten) also taught a class.
“Harry was a guy who knew his subject,” recalled his friend Irv Niemy. “He always put a lot of time into being prepared. And Harry didn’t use cliches, which a lot of Party people did.” Niemy observed Harry as an opinionated and powerful persuader. “He’d aggressively declare how he felt about something when an issue came up, say at a meeting. He’d be forceful in making his position prevail. Sometimes a bit of arrogance would flow into that. There was almost the feeling he was saying ‘I’m the teacher, why do you question me?’ He never said that, but it was implied sometimes.”
Earl Robinson, who taught Marxist music classes with Harry, agreed. “I hesitate to use the word ‘elder statesman’ because he wasn’t much older, but there was something of that feeling about him,” Robinson said. Hay’s courses distinguished themselves as he expanded and interpreted theories. In studying political economy, for example, he identified five kinds of imperialism and was encouraged to teach a course on the subject. He was sent to teach all over the Los Angeles basin—Maywood, Hawthorne, El Segundo, Redondo.
Harry’s teaching put him in contact with information that later influenced his gay thinking. While digging through books about the historical development of economics in Europe, he amassed data about pagan religion, the oppressive campaigns of Christianity and roles seemingly assigned to gay men in certain former societies. (The latter subject was, of course, a secret study.)
He rediscovered Edward Carpenter in The Making of Man, by V.F. Calverton, an anthology of anthropological articles. Carpenter and Edward Westermark discussed these roles. Hay also credited George Thompson and Christopher Cauldwell, British Marxist writers who had a mystic aspect, as important to him. The metaphysical, while never tolerated within the theory of the Communist Party, often tinged Hay’s passionate, effective communications style and his personal view of politics as a matter of vision and dreams.
Up the hill from Cove Avenue lived a pretty young war widow named Martha Rinaldo, who became friends with the Hays and made them her second family. She spent many hours with them, and nearly every holiday. “Harry and Christmas trees were something to be avoided at all costs,” she recalled with a laugh. “After they separated, Anita said that never in her life was she going to have another Christmas tree, because Harry was such a fanatic about the way it was decorated. There was no such thing as anybody throwing tinsel at the tree and hoping it would stick; every single strand had to be carefully draped just so. All of us were on pins and needles about the issue, and we were all engaged in a sort of conspiracy to keep Harry from blowing up over it.”
Rinaldo, a lifelong friend of Anita’s, speculated that the tree may have been the object of inner identity conflicts she learned about later. His obsession with holiday decoration, however, may also be traced to his folk-culture research. The Yule log and the tree of St. Brigit, he found, were actually disguised holdovers from pre-Christian times, ceremonially carried out to insure an end to winter and a bountiful spring. Harry’s trees were always decorated with ornamental fruit, nuts and birds as well as the lead tinsel. He tried to explain to his two-year-old the “relational and symbolic significance” of all of the decorations. She didn’t understand; it was Harry’s private pagan ceremony.
The pressure of the overtime hours in both job and Party took its toll. Near the end of the war, in the spring of 1945, Harry fainted at work and was diagnosed with hypoglycemia. In retrospect, he realized the collapse was a by-product of his campaign of self-repression: “I was keeping myself so busy I didn’t have time to think deeply.” While being treated for low blood sugar he told his doctor, Yanny Nedelman, that the idea of being conscripted also preyed on him. The problem was not political—America was allied with the Soviet Union at that time and many Party members eagerly enlisted in the service—but Harry was “terrified of falling uncontrollably back into homosexuality” if he went into the Army. He did not declare himself homosexual to the draft board, as some gay men did just a decade later, because during that period such an admission seemed an invitation to legal harassment. His deferment came as a great relief.
All this time, Harry passed for straight to many of his married friends and even to his brother. One incident that reveals the extent of his masquerade as a straight man dealt with cars, in this case several European models that Roger Barlow (Harry’s co-star in Even—As You and I) had brought back to the United States after the war. These early samples of post-war luxury, Armstrong Healeys, Renaults and Jaguars, were parked for months in the Hays’ driveway on top of the Cove Avenue hill. Harry got to drive one of the cars to work, and the sleek Talbot-Durac racer, with its customized gearbox, was the envy of his co-workers at his Avion job in Maywood, where he spent every coffee break showing how it raced up to 120 miles an hour. From them he heard no remarks about “goddamn fairies.”
But while Harry believed that Anita saw his homosexual past as a closed and forgotten issue it seems to have held unspoken tension. Irv Niemy and his wife Sue, who were close with the Hays, stopped by the house one day when the English automobiles were in the driveway. Recalled Niemy, “There were some male friends of Harry’s around, some of whom were obviously gay. Harry and Anita were usually such warm and gracious hosts, but the other visitors seemed to unsettle them, so our visit was stilted and short. When Sue and I got home we talked about that.” Sue Niemy, a therapist, had already wondered about their friends. “She’d say, ‘I have the feeling Anita wants to talk to me about something—she raises the fact she wants to talk, then seems blocked about actually saying anything.’ She guessed it was about Harry’s sexuality.”
Anita’s vexation might have been partly related to Harry’s deep-seated emotional anguish. Long after the divorce, Anita told Hannah that violent nightmares continued to torment Harry throughout their marriage. Harry’s eldest daughter recalled, “In one he was holding onto the edge of a cliff, and knew he was going to fall a long, long way. He was just holding on by his fingernails. It would be painful and very frightening, and he would wake up feeling terrible.” Harry continued to sleepwalk, and one night Anita found him searching through the freezer, his fingers numb, convinced that the family cat was inside.
The Hays sought their second child, this time through a nurse who assisted unwed mothers. The arrangement was made and the baby, another girl, was delivered within forty-eight hours of her birth. After two tender weeks, the new bond was abruptly severed. The parents of the mother arrived from the Midwest and objected, insisting their daughter take back the child and—as a moral punishment—raise it. Legally powerless, the Hays returned the child they had started to love. Again they waited through the long application to the Children’s Home Society. A blonde, blue-eyed baby girl born December 7, 1945, was brought to them within days of her birth. They named her Kate for Harry’s favorite aunt, and her fair coloring drew her constant compliments and the recollection of Martha Rinaldo that “Katie was the beauty.”
But outgoing Hannah was her father’s favorite. “Lithe as a faun and chattery as a chipmunk,” he described her in a short story, “a child who thought all grown-ups were made to love children just because she loved them.” On Victory-in-Europe Day, the family went to Hollywood Boulevard to celebrate, and dozens of servicemen picked up the brown-eyed, strawberry-blonde Hannah and kissed her. Pretty, precocious and talkative, she was in many ways close to what Harry’s biological child might have been. He was ecstatic at the early affinity she showed for music. At the age of two, she heard Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata, one of Harry’s favorites, on the radio. She pointed to it and gurgled to Anita, “Daddy play piano,” a feat of cognition he crowed about for years. Harry encouraged her musical interests and started her with a small phonograph mounted on an orange crate and a collection of records.
Hannah’s greatest flair was in dance. Harry enrolled her in classes with Lester Horton, the premier dancer of Los Angeles since the 1930s. He and Harry had had a brief fling then and had known each other in Party circles since. Horton was prominent both as an inventive choreographer—Rudi Gernreich, one of his dancers, called him the Martha Graham of the West Coast—and for including progressive themes in his dances. His multi-ethnic company performed shows about war, women’s and racial issues. For years, Horton had offered children’s classes. His children’s program was designed, in the progressive tradition to impart “master of the body as an instrument of social expression.”
With parental pride, Harry described Hannah as “a little flame once she stepped onstage. She distinguished herself from the others and naturally held the attention of the audience.” Horton agreed that she had exceptional potential and awarded her a scholarship with his company that lasted until his death. She devoted herself to dance through her teens and took classes from Bella Lewitsky and Carmen Delavallade, Horton protégées who became celebrities in the dance world. At home, Hannah remembered dancing for Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger when they visited Cove Avenue.
Harry was careful to observe the rituals of fatherhood and friends noted his closeness to the children. Every summer he filled an old wooden, canvas-lined swimming pool for the girls. Joan Mocine, the girls’ constant playmate, recalled that Harry loved to help them with theatrical games and when they put on circuses, he showed them how to put on makeup from their Max Factor Junior Makeup Kits. Like his father before him, he packed the family car “with everything we needed and a lot we didn’t,” as Kate recalled, for their camping . He undertook to pass on all that he knew and both Hannah and Kate recalled that he “lectured for hours in terms we could not understand.”
They were a family both happy and troubled. Hannah ceased communications with her father in the 1970s over what she called his “tormenting gay chauvinism,” but many of her memories of him were tender. He took her hiking and showed her the most beautiful spots he had known as a child, as well as the wonders of the backyard.
“He used to carry me out at nighttime and set me on the white barrier at the top of Cove Avenue and tell me all about the stars and what was going on in the sky—the relations in the universe. He made the moon very special to me, and animals. He could be very spiritual.” He instilled a respect for nature and its ways. “Any creature that died—bird, rat, cat—we would bury it and sing a special song. That was a spiritual thing too.” Family photos show Anita always smiling and the children bright-eyed, but in most pictures, Harry looks sadly burdened.
Harry’s mother Margaret remained a fixture in their lives. She made sure that birthdays and holidays were always observed with cards, gifts, and occasionally, meals in fancy restaurants. So that the children would read something other than the People’s World, she paid for the Los Angeles Times to come to Cove Avenue. One night Harry and Anita tried to broaden her horizons by taking her to a public rally against Gerald L.K. Smith. A white supremacist, anti-Semite and anti-Communist, Smith was campaigning to establish a beachhead of his fascist ideology in Los Angeles, among other American cities. The Mobilization for Democracy, a coalition of popular political and public figures, sponsored the rally at one of Los Angeles’ largest auditoriums, the Olympic.
“This particular event was jammed, with 11,000 inside and twice as many outside,” Harry recalled. “Poor Mother—we were trying to help her understand how wrong all of her political information was (taken, all of it, of course, from the Los Angeles Times).” A number of celebrities, including Gregory Peck, Orson Welles and Burgess Meredith, were visible in expensive first-floor box seats and took turns at the microphone denouncing Smith’s credo of bigotry. The band leader Harry James was among those who pledged a sum of money, and he introduced his wife, Ava Gardner, who sang the still little-known Kentucky folksong “I Wonder As I Wander.”
“She sang it a capella, and in the middle of this political demo, it starkly touched the listening throng, and the many outside for whom loudspeakers had been set up that night.” In the subsequent edition of the Times, Margaret was shocked to read that only a few thousand people milled in the otherwise empty Olympic. With her unshakable faith in the status quo, she insisted, “The reporter must have gone on the wrong night.”
Harry recalled a more intimate protest in the fall of 1945, when Josephine Baker brought her glittering show to the Biltmore Theater in downtown Los Angeles. “A large fundraising dinner in her honor was planned at Silver Lake’s Thistle Inn, for the late afternoon,” he wrote in a letter. “Among the first fifty to sixty guests to arrive were a number of local celebrities from Los Angeles’ black community. To the utter shock and consternation of the planners, the Thistle Inn management adamantly refused to seat or serve them because of their race. These formally dressed and coiffed celebrities and socialites threw a picket line around the entire premises and out onto Glendale Boulevard at the height of late afternoon homecoming traffic. When Miss Baker and her entourage arrived, she joined it with gleeful hilarity.”
As the CPUSA continually adapted its Party line, Harry maintained his faith in the Party and its principles, even though some members were beginning to drop away. “I remember him as very determined that we should follow the fundamental line of changing society,” wrote Pete Seeger, who had regular contact with Harry during the 1940s.
This clannish loyalty, the stuff of political commitment, was in Harry’s blood. Helen Johnson, Harry’s friend for more than twenty years, observed that from ballroom dancing to walking picket lines, “whatever Harry did, he did it two hundred and ten percent. That rigidity was like a motor, driving him forward.” His allegiance to the Party raised conflicts and Harry could make savage comments to friends or relatives he considered unenlightened.
Just after the war, there was a strike at Warner Brothers by the Conference of Studio Workers. Johnson, by now married to screenwriter Lacie Gorog and a secretary at Warners, was one of the picketers. Jack Warner called in armed police, and Gorog was hit in the eye with a tear gas bomb. Her own doctor was not immediately available, so she went straight to the Hays. “I, who was so rarely political, expected to be embraced as a wounded comrade by Harry,” she said. “But the C.P. line was ‘no strikes till the war is over,’ so he snubbed me.” (Upon hearing the story forty years later, Harry winced and offered amends.)
This tendency to rigidness, combined with his temper, could make the simplest disputes explosive. “Harry stormed out” is the exact phrase used by many friends and associates to describe the end of his short fuse. On one such occasion, progressive lawyer John McTeman and his wife, Kay, were visiting the Hays. “Harry and I were arguing a point,” Kay recounted. “I can’t recall over what, but it got heated, and Harry said, ‘I’m going to go check,’ and went up to his study. It was a name or a quote in a book, something he could look up. He never came down. We waited, and finally just went home.”
Anita did her best to keep things in check. Once when they and the Gorogs were playing charades, Harry acted out something and his partner couldn’t get it. When the game was over and the term was revealed, they disagreed about the definition and, insisting he was right, Harry left angrily. “Anita brought him over early the next morning and made him apologize,” Helen remembered. “That was just Harry. It didn’t affect our friendship. Later, when our daughter ran away and we stayed up all night worrying, it was Harry and Anita who held our hands.”
By 1946, Harry’s sister-in-law Mina would escape her San Francisco job for regular week-long visits in Southern California. She, Anita and the girls often took a motel in South Pasadena, or in Avalon on Catalina Island. Harry joined them on weekends, but during the work week he stayed home alone. On some of these occasions he brought home men he met while out cruising. One such night, he chanced to meet an old flame named Clyde Rossman. In 1935, Harry had introduced Clyde to poetry and Clyde had introduced Harry to marijuana. Their intense flirtation was not consummated then, and when it finally was, eleven years later, the changes in Harry’s life were sharply underscored.
After years of quick, furtive intimacy, even the luxury of an entire night could not fulfill his reawakening need for gay company. “Occasionally we were invited to an art opening, or some Hollywood-type fundraiser. I’d be there with Anita, but I was aware of men talking together on the other side of the room. And I’d so much want to cross the room and rejoin the fold. But I knew I couldn’t.” Such lonely flashes of insight pointed to a bleak future. “Other married men I knew were looking forward to their retirement, to time with their wives,” he realized. “I didn’t have those dreams. I had made a dreadful mistake and I felt I must simply play it out, getting through every day.”
It got worse. The five years that began in 1946 with the adoption of the second child and ended with his divorce were Harry’s “period of terror,” a sort of stifled breakdown. “I was quite struck, during the late stages of the marriage, at the amount of tension Harry showed,” recalled John McTernan. “He was a very somber, very tense human being.” Harry’s bad dreams worsened. “While Anita and the kids were away at Catalina with Mina once, I had dreams of blacking out and hurting them,” he recalled at one point. It was a nightmare that disturbed him deeply. “I was confronted by the horror of my own existence. I didn’t know what to do.”
The last years of Harry’s married life were taken up by a Leftist mass organization called People’s Songs. This early wave of the folk music movement was established during the spring of 1946. Hay recalled, “We first caught fire as a couple of folk-song round-robins held at Otto K. Oleson’s building on Vine Street in November, 1945. At the second one, we discussed working out songs for demonstrations, to replace the usual chants. We continued to have sing-alongs, and, taking a hint from Woody Guthrie’s activities, we called these ‘Hootenannies.’”
A New York chapter of People’s Songs was run by Pete Seeger, and by the 1950s, every major American city had a chapter. Seeger’s friend Mario “Boots” Cassetta, a Left-leaning disc jockey who had served in the Army with Seeger, joined a West Coast branch along with progressive composer Earl Robinson, who wrote the classics “Joe Hill” and “That’s America To Me.” Harry, with his interest in performance and his passion for music, threw himself into the new movement.
The effort quickly divided into a performance group, People’s Chorus, and at the request of the People’s Education Center, a music history class. “Earl and Billy Wolfe were too busy,” Harry recalled, “so they said to me, ‘You do it.’ So I did it. By then I was working at Alfred Leonard’s Gateway to Music, a major music store in town, so it seemed perfect.” According to Robinson, “Harry became the theoretician of People’s Songs,” in keeping with the Marxist practice of creating a theory for everything. “Harry took it seriously, so people had to go along with it. And he was able to inspire them. Harry was an enthusiast.” Fifty to seventy-five people gathered at Cove Avenue for monthly meetings, which sometimes had celebrities from the Left, like Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds.
People’s Songs helped popularize progressive ideas years before they became mass movements. Its messages were catchy, current and meaningful. Poet Ray Glazer and musician Bill Wolfe wrote songs along with Harry. “Atomic Energy” called for control of nuclear weapons proliferation: “It’s up to the people to crusade, / To see that no more bombs are made.” Another offering from the People’s Song-Bag (the forerunner to the national journal Sing Out) was “Put It on the Ground,” a blunt assessment of government excuses for social ills. To the endless stream of bureaucratic doubletalk, the song exhorted, “Dig it with a hoe, it’ll make your flowers grow!”
By the fall of 1947, Harry had outlined and begun to teach his music class, “The Historical Development of Folk Music,” which he referred to in later years as “a survey of historical materialism in 3/4 time.” His typical, exhaustive research drew heavily on the work of musicologists Evelyn Welles, Sigmund Spaeth, John Jacob Niles and many Marxist historians; more than 500 reference readings and musical examples are cited in his course outline. Harry also brought his personal insights into this novel and original counter-history of music.
His guiding principle was that music was a people’s method of communication, a language, and that it always sprang from the grass roots, the “folk,” to become the official culture. He viewed it as a valuable tool of rebellion and social progress. One example in his class was the Negro spiritual, which was used in the Underground Railroad during the slave days. “This language beyond the spoken word had the power to communicate ideas, plans and issues through the form of songs and dances under the noses of the authorities—as a weapon of struggle against oppression. The people’s collective language of music always had the power to inspire revolt and revolution.”
The class got longer each time he taught it, from ten weeks to two months and then finally to two years. A syllabus for the course, which Harry copyrighted in 1948, was by then titled “Music: Barometer of the Class Struggle.” Individual lessons were at once scholarly and familiar, with such titles as “Feudal Formalism and the Guerilla Warfare of the Carol” and “The Counter-Reformation of the Baroque and How It Dug Its Own Grave.”
Those who took the classes always found the theory buffered by fascinating musical selections Harry played from his extensive 78 rpm record collection, including folk music from around the world. (Harry delighted in flabbergasting people with his esoteric musical knowledge; a friend once asked to hear bagpipe music, and Hay asked which of a dozen countries he meant.) His entertaining musical lecture technique so enchanted his students that many repeated the course, which he taught through the mid-1950s, even after leaving the Party. By the late 1940s he became a popular culture act at fundraisers and other gatherings. Phonograph at his side, he presented a diverting sampler of his class, and using innovative techniques such as sing-alongs of ballades and medieval part songs, he invariably held the audience in the palm of his hand.
It was in his research about music that Harry first encountered the term “Mattachine Society” and recognized it as an ancestor of modern homosexuals. The ancient Romans celebrated the New Year time with a lavish week-long festival, Saturnalia, during which all laws were relaxed, so that slaves and women enjoyed equal rights to participate in festivities where masked revelers could freely satirize their superiors, and sexual orgies proliferated.
This pagan custom survived into the Christian Middle Ages as the “Feast of Fools,” celebrated in churches everywhere from spring Equinox until April 1—All Fools’ Day. In those days, “fool” meant, as it does in Shakespeare, jester or clown, and during the Feast of Fools, the populace would choose a Lord of Misrule, an Abbot of Unreason—even a Pope of Fools—who, dressed in the jester’s motley with mock scepter and crown, would reign for the fortnight of Feast days and could freely ridicule those in control.
During the Fifteenth century, when the Holy Roman Empire seemed to be verging on collapse, both church and state banned the Feast of Fools in an attempt to suppress its biting satires, but secret societies formed to continue the festivities—and the social parody—under private aegis. These “Sociétés Joyeuses” (“Gay Societies”) had different names in various towns—for example: the Société Basoche in Paris consisted only of lawyers. The Mattachine Society performed a special dance with staffs that was a parody of lance warfare and warlike posturing similar to the Morris Dances in England. It proved so popular that it spread to other countries. This all-male society was called “Matassins” in France, “Mattaccino” in Italy, and “Mattachino” in Spain. The dance even spawned jester characters in the Italian Commedia Dell’Arte and Moliere’s Comedies Françaises and it spread to the Spanish colonies in America, where, called “Las Matachinas,” it is still performed as a ritual dance by a secret male society among certain Indian tribes at Easter in Mexico and Christmas in New Mexico.
An alternate French name for the dance, “Bouffons,” gave rise to our English words “buffoons,” which also preserves the essential characteristics of the Mattachine—the flamboyant, costumed jester who ridicules the false pretenses of society by his critical mocking cloaked in comic antics and graceful dances. The famous Mattachine dance, notated in 1588 by the French musicologist Arbeau (though it originated much earlier), had consistent elements of masks, magic, humor and clownishness.
Harry was particularly concerned with the social activism of this society. According to his notes, “the Mattachine troupes conveyed vital information to the oppressed in the countryside of Thirteenth to Fifteenth century France and perhaps I hoped that such a society of modern homosexual men, living in disguise in Twentieth century America, could do similarly for us oppressed Queers.”
Because his research into folk music, particularly ballads, was so extensive and original, Harry was approached by John Storm, his brother-in-law at Crown Publishing, to update a book on the subject. This too-good-to-be-true opportunity withered under Harry’s daily crush of political commitments.
The Hollywood progressive community then was nothing if not eclectic. One night at a People’s Songs meeting Harry got a call from Bill Oliver, a reviewer friend. He had met three Peruvian singers at the Wilshire Ebell Theater and would be late to the meeting. He explained that the singers had been promised a solo at intermission, but it had not worked out. Oliver invited them to come to the meeting, commenting, “I don’t think they’ve eaten in a week.”
Accordingly, the People’s Songs meeting turned into a dash to the deli for cheese sandwiches and a few salads. Harry noted, “American cultural capitalism had failed them, [so] we offered supper and entertainment with American folk songs.” Harry translated Spanish to the male of the trio, who in turn spoke Quechua to the two women.
“At about two o’clock in the morning, the man suddenly gestured that they would like to show their thanks by singing a song of their country they’d not yet been able to share here. He turned his guitar belly-down to use as a drum. A small, stunningly handsome Indian woman threw back her head and in the most glorious, tremendous voice started ‘The Inca Hymn to the Sun.’ We were all simply stunned, so unprepared were we for anything of that quality. I was in total tears. I knew I’d heard it before—in the Andes when I was a child—sung almost identically. The singer, of course, was Yma Sumac, eighteen months before she was discovered by Hollywood.”
Harry’s subsequent attempt to secure a quickie recording session for her at Alco, a small record company he knew, failed. Over the years Harry watched, a little sadly, as Sumac developed from a first-rate ethnic folk singer into a Hollywood glamour exotic.
His job at the music store was pleasant, but Harry proved himself to be more of a record enthusiast than a salesman of the more profitable hi-fi equipment. After nine months of friction with his boss he left. He worked next in a friend’s television repair shop, but the business foundered and soon Harry was again looking for work.
At Leahy Manufacturing, an old, somewhat eccentric company at Eighth and Alameda Avenues in an industrial part of downtown Los Angeles, he finally found a job that lasted. Its patriarch, whom Harry always referred to as “Old Man Leahy,” manufactured burners for the boilers that heat large buildings. His wife, “a Tennessee biddy who left a whiff of swamp water whenever she passed by,” always watched over the old man’s shoulder, especially to bowdlerize any unionizing attempts—earning Hay’s eternal bile.
He again had the job of production engineer, keeping track of plans, tools and inventory. At Leahy, which had neglected such matters since it opened in 1902, inventory was scattered in thousands of pieces over several locations. Given the dramatic intensity of the other parts of his life, Harry may have found something comforting about the intricate mindlessness of the place; he boasted that his system enabled the company to cut prices and show a profit for the first time in its history.
This lower-end job was the best Harry could get in his field; the security clearance problem prevented better. His suspicions of this were confirmed shortly after starting at Leahy when Deb Watt, a friend he and Anita had known for a decade, called to say he needed to talk to Harry.
“The FBI came and talked to me,” he told Harry when they met. “They knew all about you anyway.”
“Anyway?”
“When they said all the things they knew about you, I said yeah, I knew that too.” Harry thanked Watt for telling him and never saw him again. This was not the only time the FBI came making inquiries; once an agent rang the door of the Cove Avenue house and Anita automatically invited him in before she realized who he was and that she could say nothing to him. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged that it has files relating to Harry in Los Angeles and New York, though it has not, as of this writing, complied with Hay’s Freedom of Information Act requests for their release.
FBI harassment and infiltration of the Party was an increasing problem. By the late 1940s many organizers had the comfort of paid positions and, according to Harry, began enjoying extramarital affairs as part of their newly plush lives. When, after several distressed C.P. wives saw psychiatrists who turned out to be FBI informers, the Party directed “no psychiatry.” This spurred Harry to begin seriously reevaluating his own marriage, based as it had been on a psychiatrist’s advice.
At this same time arose another form of government intimidation known as Executive Order 9835, the loyalty oath, known more simply as “The Oath.” This demanded that people swear, among other things, that they were non-Communist and it became a prerequisite for teaching and civil service jobs. The oath caused bitter debates over the nature of intellectual freedom at U.C.L.A., where it was first introduced in Los Angeles, and some teachers resigned over it.1
Harry saw the oath as an attack on freedom that induced “psychological terror in the workplace, especially the arts and the schools—and all industries involved with government contracts.” There were signs of even worse measures afoot, specifically the appearance of stories in Los Angeles newspapers about putting known Leftists in the concentration camps that had unconstitutionally, but effectively, held Japanese-Americans during the war. A new scapegoat was emerging at the federal level: homosexuals.
The clerk-typist at Leahy’s was an attractive young man named Bill Lewis, who became friends with Harry and was always interested in his ideas about organizing homosexuals. “One day Billy brought a friend to have lunch with me. The guy worked in the State Department in Washington and told me that kids were already getting kicked out of the Department because they’d all slept with someone named Andrew. This was in the summer of ‘forty-eight. Billy had told him that I was interested in organizing people and he had sought me out to tell me about what was happening in Washington, to warn me.”
On August 10, 1948 Harry Hay first formulated what later became the Mattachine Society. The day began as important for other reasons. It was Margaret’s birthday, and more importantly, Harry had been invited to sign the state candidacy petition of Henry Wallace who was running for president on the Progressive Party ticket. Ray Glazer, who wrote for People’s Songs when he was not writing for the popular radio show Duffy’s Tavern, had invited Harry to the occasion. He considered that invitation an honor and an indication of his rising recognition in progressive circles. He finished drafting a cost-breakdown analysis for Old Man Leahy and left work early to meet Glazer and the others at a municipal building downtown.
The Wallace campaign was a high point of People’s Songs, and in some respects of the preceding twenty years of the American Left. Henry Agard Wallace had been Secretary of Commerce under Herbert Hoover and Secretary of Agriculture for Franklin Roosevelt. He later served as FDR’s vice president and was considered his spiritual heir. Wallace was committed to continuing the social welfare policies of the New Deal. Handsome and plain-spoken, he had been a successful horticulturist, and his slogan was faith in “the quietness and strength of grass”—the grass roots. Hoping to overwhelm the main parties, many progressive constituencies lined up instantly; in Los Angeles, U.C.L.A. Students for Wallace marched against racially segregated barbershops near the Westwood campus. The campaign was a wild card and, for many, a grandly hopeful play.
Business (including most major newspapers) uniformly dreaded the implications of a Wallace administration. They Red-baited and ridiculed him. Claire Boothe Luce, author of The Women and wife of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, summed up the establishment’s aggressive dismissal when she called Wallace “Joe Stalin’s Mortimer Snerd,” referring to the country-bumpkin dummy of popular ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.
Many people were afraid Wallace’s candidacy would act as a spoiler, taking votes from incumbent Democrat Harry Truman and putting conservative Thomas Dewey into the White House. The drama only fired up the Left, including Harry, to work overtime on the campaign. There was hope for major political change in America, they thought, if they could demonstrate that there was a choice other than the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the Republican and Democratic Parties.
The signing of Wallace’s candidacy petition exhilarated Harry. Most of the ninety people present (fifty signatures were needed, but there were reserves in case some were disqualified) were Democrats who had changed their registration to Progressive. Several Hollywood personalities added to the thrill, including actress Gale Sondergaard, her husband, director Herbert Bieberman, Writer’s Guild president John Howard Lawson and director Frank Tuttle. Viola Brothers Shore, whom Harry had known from the 1930s, and Reverend Fritchman were also there.
Over dinner that evening, Harry excitedly described the signing to Anita, to slight response. She was already well into her disenchantment with the Party; she would break from it completely the following year. When he added that he was going out to a meeting, she merely nodded.
But he was not actually going to a meeting; he was going to a party to which a handsome man had invited him. The man was named Paul Falconer, and the two had met while cruising Westlake Park and later at the music store where Harry worked. Falconer, whose name came from his interest in falconry, had beautiful coloring and a premature world-weariness. Paul had never given his address, and the party he invited Harry to was at the apartment of a friend, also interested in music, who lived on St. James Park near the University of Southern California.
What Harry later described as a “beer bust” was actually a sedate gathering of seminarians and music students in a Victorian-style apartment. He found to his delight that all the two dozen guests chatting and sipping beer on the plush sofas were male and seemed to be “of the persuasion.” The first he spoke to, a seminary student from France, asked if Harry had heard of the recently published Kinsey Report.
Its first volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was the season’s most talked-about book, especially among homosexuals, with its claim that thirty-seven percent of adult men had experienced homosexual relations. To Harry, that newly revealed number suggested the dimensions of an organizable minority. He voiced the idea. When his friend protested that organizing homosexuals was impossible, Harry rebutted him. There could be millions of people who might fall into a group that would find great benefit in organizing. Certainly it would be difficult, but it was not impossible.
Others were listening and added their objections. There was too much hatred of homosexuals. Any individual who went public could be entrapped and discredited. There were too many different kinds of homosexuals; they’d never get along. And anyway, people belonging to such an organization would lose their jobs. Hay countered each objection enthusiastically, further convincing himself of the viability of organizing homosexuals. Since the Wallace campaign symbolized a new era in U.S. politics, an era full of possibilities, he leaped to the notion that this minority might even be able to somehow be represented at the Democratic Convention. No one got excited.
He spun forth ideas anyway. One was to pool funds to provide fast bail money and legal help for victims of police entrapment. This he referred to as “a fraternal Civil Insurance and Mutual Protection League.” Since lewd conduct arrests—or the fear of them—threatened most homosexuals with severe debts to corrupt lawyers and officials, this insurance fund was a high priority. Another was education; hygiene classes in high schools could discuss homosexuality as a way of life.
They might speak to even more of society through a person of respected social standing. Returning to the idea of homosexual representation at the upcoming Democratic Convention, Hay proposed that such a person might represent the volunteer work and the votes of homosexuals, and could press to secure a plank in the Progressive Party platform supporting the right to privacy. This aroused considerable response and Hay spun it out logically. With the right literature and enough volunteers, he argued, some form of political recognition might be possible.
Some men responded with serious interest, though they suggested campy names like “Fruits for Wallace” or “Queers for Wallace.” Hay seized upon the discreet yet obvious “Bachelors for Wallace.” Both scepticism and seriousness faded with the beer, but Harry forged ahead. On a large sheet of butcher paper, he wrote out a homosexual agenda. One inebriated party-goer started to run out the door with the list, waving it like a banner to show the world. Harry stayed with the idea for five hours that night, buttonholing every party guest to extol its merits.
On the drive back to Cove Avenue he talked with himself about the idea and later noted his train of thought: “The post-war reaction, the shutting down of open communication, was already of concern to many of us progressives. I knew the government was going to look for a new enemy, a new scapegoat. It was predictable. But blacks were beginning to organize and the horror of the holocaust was too recent to put the Jews in this position. The natural scapegoat would be us, the Queers. They were the one group of disenfranchised people who did not even know they were a group because they had never formed as a group. They—we—had to get started. It was high time.”
This inspiration changed him. In a letter he wrote years later, he characterized himself as “so pregnant with aspirations ... that it was too late for me to ever return to pre-Bachelors-for-Wallace innocence.” On another occasion, he described the details of that day as being “somewhat overexposed in my memory. I was leaving that world in such a rush that I couldn’t look over my shoulder to see what it was.” Once home, in his study, he wrote two papers. “One was the plank for the Progressive Party and the other was the structure for an organization to go on after the convention was over.”
This second, much more elaborate paper, based in a Marxist perspective, forged a principle that Hay had struggled years to formulate: that homosexuals were a minority, which he temporarily dubbed “the Androgynous Minority.’’2 Since 1941, Harry had taught Stalin’s four principles of a minority; these were a common language, a common territory, a common economy, and a common psychology and culture.
“I felt we had two of the four, the language and the culture, so clearly we were a social minority.” This concept of homosexuals as a minority would be the contribution of which Hay was proudest—and one of his greatest struggles was to convince others of its validity. As a political strategy, he aligned the “Androgynes’’ with the Left and set both against “encroaching American Fascism.” He suggested a comparison of the political manipulation and murder of homosexuals in Nazi Germany to recent firings of gays by the State Department.
This especially alarmed him; could what happened in Germany happen here? Hay modeled the organization and membership structure along the lines of a fraternal order, and so named the organization, using the capital letters that would always mark his customized, emphatic writing style. He called it the “INTERNATIONAL BACHELORS FRATERNAL ORDER FOR PEACE & SOCIAL DIGNITY,” sometimes referred to as “BACHELORS FOR WALLACE” (A service and welfare organization devoted to the protection and improvement of Society’s Androgynous Minority).”
Hay addressed the dominant heterosexual community, equating the civil rights of the homosexual with civil rights for the entire society. Specifically, Hay wrote that “guilt of androgynity [sic] BY ASSOCIATION, equally with guilt of Communist sympathy by association, can be employed as a threat against any and every man and woman in our country as a whip to insure thought control and political regimentation.” He further appealed to higher levels of law than the laws of the state, invoking the Atlantic Charter declared by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1941 and the Charter of the United Nations, founded in 1945.
“The laws we had in this country were archaic and motivated by fundamentalist religion,” Harry explained later. “The idea of reassessing ourselves by a more modern and humane standard of law was the logical approach.” He got no sleep that night, and when he finished the five-page document in the morning, he signed it “respectfully submitted to whom it may concern, Eann MacDonald.” The name was from his own Scottish family and Harry had used it for acting, ghostwriting and for some political activity.
The writing of “The Call,” as Hay referred to the organizational prospectus ever afterwards, marked the dedication of his life to gay activism. The original was lost during the 1950s, but a revised version he wrote two years later survives. By its next draft the organization was called “Bachelors Anonymous,” in reference to Alcoholics Anonymous, the new organization that relied on a grassroots, self-help model. But the structure and most of the text remained essentially the same. At the end of the first page, he proclaimed a formal incorporation:
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% OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION TOWARDS THE CON-STRUCTIVE SOCIAL PROGRESS OF MANKIND.
Some of this would change radically; the term “handicap” soon vanished from his language. Still, the keystones of the Mattachine Society and of Hay’s lifework were laid down that night: to bring homosexuals together for the purpose of self-understanding and, even more unheard of, to recognize their contribution to humanity.
“The bubble soared to burst promptly in the dawn’s early light,” he wrote. The next morning at Leahy’s he got the phone numbers of everyone who had shown enthusiasm the night before. But they had lost all interest in the light of a sober day. “Many gasped in fear, as if I were trying to tear away their Divinity degrees. Others simply sneered, ‘Honey! That was the beer!’ I heard that over and over again.” He even heard it from the host. “The handsome Falconer roasted the very idea with his self-destructive and withering cynicism,” Hay recorded. No one gave him a shred of encouragement.
He turned for support to several progressives who were well established as social workers, teachers and ministers, but their response was politely evasive. “Several said, ‘Tell you what you do. You get a discussion group on your ideas going, and we’ll come. If we think it is promising, we’ll loan our names as sponsors.’ And the progressive-minded gays I spoke to said, ‘Now, tell you what you do. You get a couple of prominent people who’d be willing to lend their support to such an endeavor, and we’ll look over their names. If it looks like we’ve got good allies and good protection, maybe we’ll come and bring friends.’ So—there it was! I couldn’t get a list of sponsors until I got a discussion group going, and I couldn’t get a discussion group going until I had a committee of sponsors.”
He looked for both constantly and without success. It took Harry Hay two years to find even one person who was interested in his unlikely dream.
1. Hay’s section organizer, Miriam Sherman, turns out to be me only person fired at U.C.L A. for actually having been a Communist. Sherman, who left die Party in 1958, never spoke to students since her job was as pianist for dance classes. Still, she was blacklisted for “playing with too heavy a left hand!”
2. Though he continued to use that term for the next five years, till his expulsion from the Mattachine Society, Hay had reservations about it. “I wasn’t happy with androgyne since it connotes a combination of men and women, and I didn’t believe that about us. I had read Ulrichs’s idea, that we were women trapped in men’s bodies, and discarded it. I was looking not for mat, nor for straight men who would consent to be serviced, which John Addington Symonds proposed, but for other people like me.”