There is a law in life:
when one door closes, another opens.
— Goethe
After the drama of the HUAC hearing Harry settled into a domestic life that left him more housebound than ever. Jorn insisted that because Harry had been snubbed by the Communists as well as the gays he should reject both. In compliant despair, Harry allowed twenty years of collective companionships—an outlook as well as many individual friendships—to cease. He noted to a friend that Jorn’s domestic alternative was “uninhibited sex, a pleasant lodging well-dusted and even the possible future of a comfortable mutual income.” Jorn let him sleep late on weekends and gave him first one night a week to study, then expanded it to three. But as years passed, the cute blond from the corner of Hollywood and Vine became less “a comfort.”
Harry remained morose and at times felt completely lost. “I was cut off from people. From progressives. From the gay movement. I remember going through one birthday after another and the only people who’d be there were Jorn’s family.” They were accepting but insular and Harry never felt comfortable with them. Even Christmas, which he normally savored enthusiastically, felt staid with its tables of heavy Danish delicacies more suited to icy latitudes than to Southern California. Harry felt even more put off by their equally bland conversation. Jorn himself in no way matched the like-mindedness and companionability Harry had felt with Anita, nor the breathless passion he had enjoyed with Rudi. This incompatibility with his new spouse brought up Harry’s old lament: “I’d long for another gay person.”
Although he vocally defended Jorn to the rest of the world, Harry suffered privately as their differences became more fundamental. Jorn simply did not fit Harry’s definition of “gay” as a homosexual seeking more than secretive sex. Their differences—and tensions—were fundamental. In a letter to Gernreich, Harry described a problem child:
“Jorn is to all intents and purposes a manic depressive; almost vulgar in his buoyancy one minute, he is violently depressed the next, and this depression can take the form of asthma as well as that of a mild migraine. What with ulcers he must have incipiently acquired in Denmark, psychogenic heart attacks, and diverse ailments extending from his war-time malnutrition, he has cost me more at Community-Medical than both the children did in nine years.”
The problem child kept their life on a shrewdly regimented schedule which Harry accepted passively. In the same letter he sketched its tight parameters:
“I may go nowhere without him except to work and back. If I’m five minutes late, the rest of the evening is unpleasant... Even my mail is opened, and if the missive is other than commercial, I am duly chastised. My phone calls at the office or home are subjected to the same examination. My personal papers have been carefully sorted, and most of the Mattachine stuff, Anita’s picture, all your letters and pictures, have been thrown out without my previous knowledge or consent. (The reason given here, as for all the stringencies, is that this is always the second wife’s prerogative.)... Worst is his hate of dancing, which he won’t learn, and of my dancing with anyone other than himself. (Guess how much dancing I do, and remember how I loved it.)”
The stresses piled up throughout their relationship, which came to resemble a soap opera parody of a heterosexual marriage. One spring, Jorn used Harry’s collection of rare American coins as bus fare for downtown shopping trips. If Harry objected or criticized, Jorn flew into a rage; more than one of Harry’s shirts were torn from his back when Jorn got angry.
Part of this may have resulted from Jorn’s early perception that he had to fight for first place in his lover’s affections. At one of the last holiday dinners held for Parsifal—the Mattachine founders—Harry noticed the others staring at him in horror during the after-dinner conversation. He suddenly realized he had just made a series of references to “Rudi and I” while describing current plans. Jorn, “his cheeks flaming against that pale skin,” left the table in a silent rage and stood at the front door.
For his part, Jorn complained that Harry often insulted his intelligence. “You’re so dumb, “Harry would tell me. I couldn’t stand that. One day I told him, ‘If you tell me that again, I’m going to hit you.’ He said it again, so I hit him. Gave him a black eye. We had to go visit his mother that night, who was in the hospital recovering from a cancer operation. She took one look at Harry and one look at me, and she didn’t say a word about it to either of us.”
Though outwardly inscrutable, the relationship had its underlying meaning. In contrast to his politics, Harry’s social instinct was for propriety, which made him reluctant to admit failure in this “second marriage.” In fact, he had cultivated a bit of a reputation as a homosexual moralist in his efforts to distinguish homophilia from the “degenerate” stereotype of promiscuity. He even mockingly referred to himself in one of his letters as “the Priscilla Alden of the Homophile movement.”1
He was also aware that as a middle-aged man in the homosexual world, his chances of having any lover at all seemed diminished. “Jorn would remind me of that constantly,” he recalled. “I was to be grateful that I had him.” Cruel jockeying was a common underside of intergenerational relationships between men; often the older person paid emotionally as well as financially. For Harry, the debts were compounded by his mortgaged inheritance and his mission to change Jorn from a desperate, dependent refugee into an independent businessman. The term “duty-driven,” which one Mattachine founder applied to Harry’s movement politics, also describes his liaison with Jorn.
Harry’s weekly allotment of three study nights carried him through this melancholy for eight years. He was so intellectually voracious that he made an art of surreptitiously extending his studies many hours more, mostly by denying himself sleep. He processed as many as thirty books a week in the fields of history, anthropology and mythology, constantly scanning texts for traces of gay people and gay culture. Gay history, he realized, was “between the lines” of straight history, and would take enormous labor to reconstruct.
With his attention to detail and discreet suggestion, Harry searched “between the words and the word-shadows” in the work of scholars who, through personal prejudice or professional intimidation, rarely mentioned any aspect of homosexuality. The terms “immoral,” “lewd,” and “too vulgar to merit discussion,” which he found frequently in standard reference works, became red flags for further investigation. Harry also noticed that “if something got juicy—and dealt with our sexuality—it would usually be printed in Latin. If it was extremely steamy, it would be in Greek, or even Hebrew.”
Like many before and after him Harry was fascinated by the mystery of homosexuality. Unraveling the subterfuge of society’s “conspiracy of silence,” an intelligent gay mind almost inevitably wondered about where the homosexuals had fit in. Had they lived underground or in the light? In other eras, under different conditions, how might life have been different? Harry reapplied the questions he had proposed in Mattachine: Who are gay people? Where have they been? What might they be for? And an unstated question seemed to shape his obsession: Why has oppression against gay people been so fierce?
At his office Harry sneaked in more spare moments of study, and many of the thousands of pages of notes he made during this period of research were written on half sheets of office memorandum paper. This research formed his interior world—a world much richer than his outer one—until the early 1960s. Jorn later agreed that study was Harry’s escape from depression.
Harry had taken on an enormous investigative project. His earliest document was a six-page typewritten outline titled “The Homophile in History: A Provocation to Research,” sketched out from 1953 to 1955. Divided into fourteen periodic sections, it traces homosexual prototypes from the Stone Age through the European Middle Ages up to the “Berdache and the American Scene,” where Hay cited Johnny Appleseed as one example of an “American Fool Hero.” Much of the study for this was expanded from the syllabus of his music classes at the Labor School.
The model Harry used for his study was the berdache. A French term applied to cross-dressing Indians found by the European colonists in the New World, berdache sometimes referred simply to an Indian who committed “the abominable vice” of homosexuality. But to Harry, it meant a cultural role. He became aware of the term from V.F. Calverton’s The Making of Man, an anthropology compendium published in 1931. Harry found this book in 1948 and in it rediscovered Edward Carpenter’s writings, which discussed the intermediary roles gays filled that could be found in many non-technological cultures, both ancient and modern. Harry further researched these writings, as well as those of Edward Westermarck and Ruth Benedict, who were represented in the same volume.
Extending his view of such medieval European figures as the Mattachines, glee-men, jongleurs and many others to this model, Harry became convinced that social roles for gay people had existed throughout history. He hoped to trace these roles over thousands of years in almost every culture, to collect “the total corpus of what gay consciousness had discovered and so contributed to human growth in the ancient and modern worlds.”
Harry believed that, especially in ancient times, some homosexuals were devoted to specific roles by the community at large. According to Will Roscoe, who has conserved and studied Hay’s notes, “Harry attempted to make a historical materialist study of the emergence and development of gay roles. He saw, for example, that these men who did women’s work were the first craft-specialists.” To those specially trained homosexuals, Harry applied the general term “berdache.” These he further divided into the “folk berdache” and the “state berdache,” following the division of social roles in rural villages and cities.
The completion of this research into gay anthropology became Hay’s lifelong ambition, and his fascination with the subject extended well into the 1980s. It was one of the backhanded benefits of life with Jorn—Harry’s sense of intellectual desolation, his isolation from his former causes (which the apolitical Jorn shut firmly out of their house) and Harry’s drive to escape the henpecking—encouraged his persistent reading and note taking. The “Jorn period,” restricted as it was, fostered a tremendous accomplishment of personal work. It saw both the deepening of Harry’s original research and his fashioning of an overview of history that was free from the blinders of heterosexual ideology.
Many of Hay’s writings from the 1950s reflected a strikingly evolved feminism, especially in his concentration on the religion of the Great Goddess, popular in many parts of the ancient world, and the ways in which its values offered harmony to civilization. More specifically, Hay’s references to a cultural unity of Druids, fairies and other queer historical types in his 1955 paper “The Homophile in History” anticipated the work of such writers as Arthur Evans, Judy Grahn and Starhawk by two decades.
Harry was literally ahead of his time; in the Fifties, the official dismissal of homosexuality stunted most serious attempts at publication and Hay’s work had almost no exposure. Recently, however, Harry’s place in gay studies has gained some recognition: In a 1988 interview, Australian professor and writer Dennis Altman referred to “the Harry Hay/Judy Grahn approach to gay history.” (Like some other modern gay academics, Altman actually derided Hay’s ideas, but in doing so acknowledged their popularity.)2
Some of Hay’s research did see publication. In a paper called “The Hammond Report,” published in 1963 in ONE Institute Quarterly, the serious homophile journal of the time, Harry unearthed a forgotten document written in 1882 by a former United States Surgeon General Dr. William A. Hammond, while in the field, observed Indians called mujerados, a Spanish term meaning “made women.”3 This tantalized Harry as a possible type of berdache. Hammond described the mujerados he had found among Pueblo Indians in Northern New Mexico, who were the “chief passive agent in the pederastic ceremonies.” Hay offered a lengthy commentary and roundly protested this paper’s “burial by omission” for nearly one hundred years.
Though limited in distribution, Harry’s article was significant for the time as a rare scholarly treatment of the berdache, a subject that has become popular in recent years. Years later, several scholars researching the berdache, including Walter Williams and Will Roscoe, found the article and sought Hay out for further consultations. Williams, author of The Spirit and the Flesh, the definitive study of the berdache thus far, called Hay “the inspirer” to many current berdache scholars, and Roscoe, biographer of the famous berdache We’Wha, credits Harry with doing more than any other single individual to promote research into the subject during a long period of academic neglect.
Harry’s long search for the report was not an easy one. He had read references to Hammond’s paper in several turn-of-the-century books. But in 1962 when he decided to look up the original text he ran into trouble. He started at the U.C.L.A. Research Library, which listed in its holdings Volume I of the American Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry, the first publication to print Hammond’s findings. But when Harry requested a copy he found, to his and the librarian’s surprise that the Hammond article had been cut out.
Four more copies of the journal that Harry ordered from other libraries had been similarly mutilated. He surmised that Hammond’s findings may have been repudiated by some government official and censored. After many months, Harry found a copy of the report in a later text by Hammond titled Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female, published in 1887. Over the years, Hay continued to find many other such cases of obliteration of historical references to homosexuality.
Once or twice a year Jorn “allowed” Harry to present papers at ONE’s Mid-Winter Institutes, small educational symposia held at respectable hotels, and several of these papers were also published in ONE Quarterly and ONE Confidential. The story of David and Jonathan stimulated Harry to research the Biblical era for a gay subtext. The resulting paper, “The Moral Climate of Canaan in the Time of Judges,” grew so extensive that it had to be published in two separate, twelve-page installments. (In 1972, he expanded some of the same ideas in an unpublished paper called “Christianity’s First Closet Case.”)
Harry’s scope continually broadened as he found that many writers whom he otherwise admired would minimize or omit evidence about gays in whatever field they studied. Harry especially scrutinized Marxist anthropologists Gordon Childe and George Thompson as well as mythology specialists Jane Ellen Harrison, Sir James Frazer, Karl Kerenyi and Robert Graves.
At the U.C.L.A. and U.S.C. libraries, Hay spent endless hours looking up their sources, “always hunting for us.” In the process, he created thousands of note cards, all headed “berdache,” with countless subheadings. Frequently, Harry stumbled upon related areas of study, such as the political impact of the changes in calendrical forms on peasant religions. These detours consumed further attention and resulted in reams of additional notes.
In trying to express himself, however, he faced a familiar frustration—“the lack of words, the lack of language and the lack of idea-forms to describe who we had been throughout the ages.” Harry spoke of assessing gay history as decoding a language from a different universe, or as trying to build a temple out of splinters. Another obstacle was his own dense writing style, often laden with esoteric vocabulary and lengthy asides.
To Harry’s great frustration, many of his friends were unable to follow his writings, and Harry himself often attempted many drafts of ideas he could never express to his own satisfaction. Konrad Stevens remarked that during the Mattachine meetings, “It took a while to understand what Harry meant with some of his very unusual ideas, but once we did, everything was fine.” But when he had only the page to work with, Harry’s very unusual ideas often seemed incomprehensible.
What he lacked in clear writing skills he more than made up for with dramatic intensity while speaking. Sometimes the papers seem to have been written as scripts, with his signature jumble of capitalizations, italics, underlinings and every possible combination thereof. This allowed his voice to pound out urgency for a plan of action, or to caress a tender new idea, and he always made an emotional connection with his listeners. That charismatic delivery often clarified his Marxist-tinged anthropological discourse.
Even when it couldn’t, he at best made a memorable appearance. Dorr Legg recalled, “Harry made a very impressive entrance and impression, then went off into the clouds, like Joshua lifted to heaven. He was like that—he manifested and he disappeared. He was a star, with a star kind of approach.” Martin Block added that the intense persona could obfuscate as well as illuminate. “Most of my memories of Harry are in a haze,” he said. “Sometimes I had the impression it was a haze he was deliberately creating.”
The haze could overtake those interested in gay organizing. When Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon attended an event at ONE’s Mid-Winter Institute in 1957, they listened as Harry read a paper that was allotted forty-five minutes but ran through lunch and took up two and a half hours. Martin and Lyon were all worked up by the Hay charisma, but lost by his terminology. “Isn’t he marvelous!” Dorr Legg recalled them exclaiming at the lunch break. Then they turned to Legg and asked, “What was he saying?”
Harry was better understood in the scholarly realm. In 1961, he wrote to Robert Graves, the British poet and scholar known for his historical novel I, Claudius and for his studies of myth. In The White Goddess (1948), an important study of the historical patterns underlying mythology, Graves implicitly repudiated homosexual love, skirting the importance of androgynous mythical figures in his scholarship. He concluded in his afterword that a man can achieve true creativity only in heterosexual union, by “the love and wisdom of a woman” and by “the experience of a woman.” In 1955, in The Greek Myths, Graves dismissed most of the famous male-male relationships in classical mythology and legend as late, “decadent” additions to the true heroic tradition.
Harry’s long letter to Graves was filled with scholarly questions and observations, in part because he respected much of Graves’ work and wished to congratulate his meticulous, highly original scholarship. He also cordially chided the great writer’s “hate” and “blindness” regarding homophilia. Harry’s secret hope was to provoke a comparing of notes, as one scholar to another, on historic homosexuality. He suspected Graves had surely gained vast amounts of original information about the subject but had maintained a prudent silence. Harry recalled pointedly, “I wanted to find out what he knew.”
Graves’ brief reply, dated only six weeks after the date on Hay’s own letter is postmarked Majorca, Spain, the site of his retreat. He graciously thanked Harry for “a very kind and decent letter,” adding, “I’m glad you don’t consider me an enemy.” The poet offered his position that “Homophilia as a natural phenomenon is respected in most societies—and by me ... Homophilic careerism and Homophilia indulged in for kicks are what I hate.” (Emphasis his. Graves’ capitalization of “homophile” apparently follows Harry’s lead.) The letter further confirmed Harry’s belief that homophiles had been traditional advocates of the Goddess. Graves closed with a challenge: “An alliance of Goddess worshipping Heterophiles with natural Homophiles makes sense to me. The literary and art world is so full of irreligious and perverted messiness. You should purge your ranks! Yours v.s. Robert Graves.”
Whenever Harry visited ONE, his friends there would inquire after his mammoth study. But after a few years went by and no book was forthcoming, they eventually stopped asking. His deep concern with “the contribution of gay consciousness” to humankind did not turn up in his writings for many years. His masses of notes ended up in boxes that he hauled from household to household over the next twenty years, but the questions and memories of the data on them became the underground stream to nourish his future work.
His mental travel down the sideroads of history lured Harry to travel the physical world of 1956. Starting that year, with Jom at his side, he took off on a series of excursions over the next half dozen years. For these vacation retreats from Los Angeles, Harry customized his two-door Studebaker sedan so that the back seat could be replaced with a foam rubber and plywood bed he designed. The bed, when not in use, was carried on top of the vehicle in a locking container, also of his own design.
Harry and Jorn visited Mexico and San Francisco, but most often they traveled in the American Southwest where Harry found the fulfillment of his academic interests and of his heart. He was looking for surviving remnants of the mujerados or of other queer traces and tradition he had read about. It had become obvious to him that if they did survive, such things would not be reported with accuracy by contemporary anthropologists. The Pueblo Indians of Northern New Mexico were a stable society with their own languages, economy and culture. From a Marxist historical perspective, they were a non-technological “peasant” culture—an ideal laboratory for Harry’s studies and theories.
Combining vacations with field research led to adventures and occasional humorous mishaps. On one trip to Northern Mexico, Harry noticed an Indian man in a loincloth working in a field. “He was the most breathtakingly handsome man I’d ever seen in my life. We stopped and I asked if I could take his picture. He agreed, and signaled for us to wait a moment, whereupon he carefully donned his pants, shirt, hat, serape and string tie, adjusting each carefully. Having covered up every bit of the handsome physical attributes which had caught my eye in the first place, he was then ready to pose. All I could do was smile and take the photograph.”
On these trips Harry and Jorn saw performances of many Native American dances Harry had researched (including the Mattachine dance, which he saw performed by masked dancers in Sandia, New Mexico in 1962) and met same-sex oriented Indians who would become friends and, in anthropological parlance, informants. Harry and Jorn made friends with so many Indians that after they split up an entire Tewa family took up their earlier invitation to visit out west and camped at Jorn’s for months. Jorn remembered spending hours of every vacation in libraries and church archives associated with towns where Indians lived. Occasionally they were offered friendship and hospitality by men they were certain were homosexual—though rarely was this verbally acknowledged.
By and large, Harry was disappointed in his hope of finding berdaches functioning on reservations or in other Indian populations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, he came to realize, had systematically educated Indians throughout the nation to abandon their original language and culture, especially those cultural practices found “vulgar” or “abominable.” He did, however, find references to a few Indians who were “like the berdache,” and his fascination grew.
It was piqued even higher one summer while talking with Ann Smith, a librarian at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. They were discussing the suggestion of an anthropology professor (Omer Stewart of the University of Colorado at Boulder) that an “observer-participant” relationship, a traditional technique in anthropological study, could be highly intimate and highly informative between a gay subject and a gay investigator. Smith said that she had heard of a homosexual Tewa man at San Juan Pueblo, just to the north. Harry went up to try to find him, and confirmed his existence, but the man himself was gone—vacationing in Mexico that summer.
The first Indian with whom Harry did form a close relationship was a heterosexual man. He lived in northern New Mexico, at San Ildefonso Pueblo, part of the same cluster of pueblos as San Juan, where Harry would live in the 1970s. Enki, as he was known, had a tribal role as the head K’ossa, or sacred Winter Clown, and was Harry’s first “contact” inside a pueblo. They met through a salesman Harry had befriended at work in Los Angeles; the salesman retired early to northern New Mexico and for several years invited Harry to visit.
When he finally did, in 1957, Harry met this “very strange, very interesting little man,” who took care of his friend’s garden. He had braids at either side of his head and sharp, dark eyes that seemed to observe everything. “Every morning Enki started work at ten, but at nine-thirty it was time to have coffee. The first morning we were visiting, he took one look at me and shook my hand and said, ‘Saturday we will go to Zia.’” Indeed, that Saturday the small Indian took the tall Anglo on his first visit “inside” an Indian pueblo to witness dances. After this experience, Harry couldn’t wait to visit New Mexico again, and whenever he did, he usually saw Enki. Their friendship lasted fifteen years. Enki talked about Indians called kwidó, who had lived their lives as spiritually responsible people, who had been trained for a set role. The kwidó, he informed Harry, were “your people.”3
Harry figured Enki must have been born at about the turn of the century, and it was through Enki that Hay observed what he called “the ceremonial mind,” which had an ordered understanding of how things were to be prepared and accomplished for any undertaking. The name Enki was a diminutive for his baptismal name, Encarnación. Under his Tewa name, Soh-kwa-wi (or Soqueen), he was famous as a painter of ceremonial images. Harry learned that he was known by other names too. “Were I to telephone him at his house at eight o’clock in the morning, I would have to ask for ‘Dough-maker.’ Enki would not be there. At sunset, he was ‘Grandfather Teller of Tales.’”
At times Enki acted in ways Harry could only describe as psychic. On a visit in 1959, Enki showed Harry and Jorn an unexcavated ruin northwest of San Juan, on the Rio Oso. At one place, he stopped and announced that there was something nearby. He began digging and soon unearthed several ceremonial objects known as paint sticks, which Harry later had dated at between four and six hundred years old. He showed them another ruin called Tsankwe, where San Ildefonso Indians had lived in former times. “Tsankwe had a section set off from the Pueblo proper, which curiously had its own urn-field, where the pottery of a person was broken when he or she died. Enki pointed at this place and said, ‘This is where your people lived.’” This meant, in Hay’s mind, where the berdache lived. More than a decade later, when Harry was living in the area and helped organize its nascent gay movement, he would take special groups and individual friends to the place at the edge of Tsankwe, to show them where “our people” had lived a thousand years before.
The cares of his own white man’s world did not go away. Tension with Jorn increased, alimony for Anita remained a steady outflow, and the girls required new fatherly responsibilities. Harry as a dad was conscientious; a raft of cards attest his presence at recitals, performances and graduations. He continually sent gifts and letters of advice. And Dad regularly provided money. He financed vacations, auto insurance and many “extras” not covered by the child support, a payment, Jorn recalled, which was always prompt. “If it was a day late, Anita would call and say ‘Where the hell is the check?’ Harry never missed.” Harry remained close with his daughter Hannah and he often wrote, encouraging her to stay in school and to pursue her dancing; she was now a graceful adolescent who had been training for a decade.
Their father’s relationship, however, distressed the girls. Though Jorn tried to be friendly and made hats for her to play in, Hannah complained that he was cruel to her and in turn she was hostile to him. So was Kate, on occasion, suggesting that the “second spouse” syndrome applies to homosexual as well as heterosexual divorced parents.
The most serious hostility came from Anita: In 1958, she forbade Harry to bring Jorn along during visits to the children, partly because the men had exchanged rings, which she did not want the children to see. In his response, written in May of that year, Harry’s blast of rhetoric masks his anguish over this attempt to split apart relationships he had struggled for six years to integrate: “It was with a deep sense of shock that I heard you parrot that neat little petit-bourgeoise cliché of reactionary Freudian cant, ‘that’s not my problem.’ What a long ways from collective sympathy and wisdom has your cozy little path into country-clubbish Babbitry taken you.”
He continued to protest Anita’s condemnation of his relationship and expressed anger at apparent judgments of erstwhile friends from the Left. He continued,
“Since WE are not welcome in your house, I cannot see that it is my problem to explain this to the children. You should have no trouble finding clever little brain-washing platitudes to handle it. ‘Dear children—since your Father continues to contain the same incurable condition he had before our marriage, and since he now seems unable to leave it outside when he comes to visit, we mustn’t let him in, must we?’... Incurable did I say? Yes, I did. Only your precious little coterie of die-hard sectarians clings to the fetish that it isn’t—even though they have never been able to validate a genuine “cure” for all their blather... My people constitute the second largest minority in the nation, and signs are already beginning to appear to confirm that we shall require to be socially and civilly accepted as a valid social minority—not merely tolerated or patronized or diffidently negated as at present.”
Despite his protestations to outsiders about Jorn’s traumas and privations, Harry’s eleven-year homophile marriage to the strait-laced Kamgren was coming to an end. What mutual support had earlier balanced the relationship was long gone, and Harry felt a growing despondency over its restrictions.
In the fall of 1962 they happened to visit Harry James, leader of the Trailfinders boys’ group in the 1920s. The two Harrys had stayed in touch over the years but had long stopped visiting until that November afternoon, when Hay accepted an invitation to the beautiful handmade house on a vast plot where James had retired in the San Jacinto Mountains, southeast of Los Angeles. Other Trailfinders alumni were there, among them a college instructor who was using James’ extensive collections to research the language and culture of his Indian ancestors. As the afternoon wore on, they swapped memories and songs. Hay was transported. “To be sitting at Harry James’ bonfire once again and to hear this man sing ‘The Water Is Wide and I Can’t Get Over,’ that lovely, lilting old Scots song I’d known as a child was a tremendously moving experience.”
But, inevitably, the visit was marred by Jorn. “We were supposed to stay for supper,” Hay recalled, “but Jorn took offense at something—as he so often did—and put me in the terrible position of having to side with him against Harry James. Back home that night, I realized that I’d have to get out if I didn’t want to see myself cut off at his whim from everyone I’d ever loved.” He informed Kamgren he would leave as soon as possible.
At that declaration the relationship effectively ended, and Harry counted each day of the next few months until he could move out. Even then it took years to extricate himself fully; Harry continued to fill out Jorn’s tax forms and balance his books until 1966, when Harry’s new lover, John Burnside, insisted he had done enough. Kamgren thereupon abandoned the business Hay had labored to set up and became a private clothes shopping consultant for rich women.
Some months before leaving, Hay began a relationship with Jim Kepner, a friend from the tail end of First Mattachine and through most of ONE, Inc., who over the years involved himself in almost every activist campaign available. A compulsive reader and inveterate pack-rat, Kepner eventually amassed the largest collection of gay and lesbian material in the world, known today as the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.
Like Hay, he was self-educated and had an intuitive approach to researching and analyzing gay culture. At the time they met, Kepner drove a taxicab, one of many trades he plied to subsidize his studies and activism. As an editor for ONE magazine he had worked on several pieces Harry submitted and found them “full of bad typing, worse handwriting and very interesting ideas; for me, it was an enormously pleasant job.” It was also the basis of their lifelong friendship.
When Kepner quit ONE in 1960 over a falling out with Dorr Legg, his friendship with Harry began to deepen. Kepner was also an ex-C.P. member and he combined deep shyness with an opinionated intellect that could spar with Harry’s. He was also slender and wistful, with large, soulful eyes. By 1962, Harry and Jim had regular lunches in Kepner’s cab, parked on Leahy’s small lot. They talked about everything from gay historical theories to their personal problems, but mostly they lamented the lack of a viable gay group within reach. “Mattachine was dead in Los Angeles and I couldn’t become a Daughter of Bilitis,” Kepner said. “Harry and I became one another’s father confessor.”
They carried on an enormous dialogue, much of it in correspondence. Harry often spun off thousand-word letters, many of them typed on quarter-page strips of paper to look like Leahy estimate summaries. (The better to throw off the watchful eyes of the boss, Hay often opened these billets-doux with the word “Gentlemen,” conspicuously at the top of the page.) Along with romantic personal plans, Harry pitched many activism proposals, from researching actual child abuse statistics (in response to a homophobic series in the Hollywood Citizen News) to fighting for gay rights on constitutional grounds. He even laid out an elaborate schema for a “Mattachine III” all in an attempt to revitalize the homophile movement from its doldrums.
Occasionally Kepner managed polite, cautious visits to the Hay-Kamgren domicile. At these times, he witnessed his normally deep-minded friend consumed by superficial concerns. “Harry was very tense,” Kepner recalled. “He paid inordinate attention to food and how it was prepared and served.” Like most of Harry’s friends, Kepner was mystified by this odd coupling. “Jorn was the most unpleasant person I think I’d ever met,” Kepner said bluntly. Kepner lived alone and was smarting over a recent bad relationship; Hay sought to bail out of his. They secretly discussed moving in together and used an elopement reference from Dickens’ David Copperfield, “Barkis is willing,” as they gathered the strength to make the move.
Though Hay had prepared him for months, Kamgren took the departure as an ambush. He threw all Harry’s clothes in the street, drank an entire bottle of Pernod and woke up two days later, “my head on the floor, my feet still in bed.” Harry recovered his clothes and possessions, which left Kamgren feeling typically aggrieved. “Harry had three or four thousand records at the time we split up,” he said. “He left me six of them. I never even played them, but he only left me six!” The jilted party, however, recovered swiftly. Within weeks Kamgren took a taxi to the first gay bar he’d visited alone in a dozen years and left with a new lover, with whom he stayed for the next dozen, until the man’s death.
Harry moved into Kepner’s cottage on the steep hill of Baxter Street, just a block from Fargo, where he had first lived with Jorn. Immediately, the romance became tentative instead of intense. The two spent much of their time discussing a magazine they envisioned as a gay version of The New Yorker crossed with Playboy—they were boycotting ONE, as would many others. Not until 1966 were two issues published by Kepner, under the name Pursuit and Symposium, to reflect the erotic and cerebral poles of the gay life cycle.
At such close range Kepner felt overwhelmed by the strong personality of his new housemate. They clashed on everything from decorating styles to ideas about where to go on trips. Once, rather than take a rugged camping trip Harry had planned over his protests, Kepner found his only escape was to cancel his vacation entirely. Frequent late-night phone calls from Jorn, complete with threats of suicide, capped the craziness of that summer.
The insurmountable problems, Kepner said, “sent our relationship to hell pretty quickly.” When Kepner accidentally ran over the Siamese cat that Kamgren had awarded Hay from their eleven-year union, it seemed almost to symbolize the ill-fatedness of the new relationship. Still, Harry persisted in their intellectual bond and what he called his “spiritual passion” for Kepner.
Their mutual devotion to the ephemeral gay culture around them prolonged the affair. The most extraordinary such event they attended was a series of private seminars on homophilic studies conducted by the British savant Gerald Heard. Then seventy-three, Heard had developed a quiet legend in both Britain and the United States as a historian, anthropologist, philosopher and mystic. He was a BBC correspondent on science and current affairs in the 1930s and a sought-after speaker, with a delicate but rich voice. Christopher Isherwood had known Heard before they separately came to America in 1937 and together they edited two books. Heard was also an intimate of Aldous and Julian Huxley, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Igor Stravinsky.
Kepner had already heard the Englishman discuss his ideas of possible goals for the homophile movement back in 1953. Heard’s provocative theories included the belief that homosexuals, whom he called “isophyls,” had a prolonged youthful nature. He also believed gays were the next step in the evolution of humanity. His lectures continued, some at ONE, some in private residences, for ten years. Jorn had prevented Harry from attending these talks, but another chance came in 1963, when Heard invited a group from ONE into his home for what turned out to be his last seminars. In attendance, along with Jim Kepner and Harry, were Dorr Legg, Don Slater and two U.C.L.A. students. Also there that day was John Burnside, a heterosexually married engineer who manufactured kaleidoscopes for a living. Partly to tease him personally, Harry was sure, Dorr Legg referred to the engineer as “our capitalist.”
Kepner recalled (though Harry did not) that the soon-to-be life partners were already chatting away during these lectures in the book-lined room, which was illuminated only by a small fire. Heard, his red hair graying and wispy, kept his large blue eyes closed most of the time he spoke. The effect of darkness, flickering fire and the brilliant mind expressed in a solemn British accent was captivating. Over four evenings several weeks apart, he spun out an overview that Harry called “enticing, appealing and mysterious.”
Kepner likened Heard’s speaking style to “a shower of ideas” that he found mesmerizing, but he had trouble following a central thread. The main thrust, Harry recalled, was a Masonic-style, secret, gay brotherhood that had existed throughout history, influencing kingdoms and regimes.
“Heard kept hinting at a sort of hidden ‘Illuminati,’ or secret, Sufi-type brotherhood with initiates in each generation down through the centuries. At our fourth session, he asked if our group was willing to make a commitment to study this brotherhood and hinted at our joining it.” Harry was fascinated with the idea of studying with the great scholar, but felt extremely reluctant to reinvolve himself in a secret, gay group. “I did not think it was historically correct to go back underground. What Heard wanted were adepts”—the initiate covert alchemists of mystical orders of the past. Harry argued strongly against the idea. When the ONE group adjourned to the Gold Cup Coffee Shop in Westwood to rehash the discussions, Harry made sure his view was known.
In contrast to Harry, Jim Kepner recalled, rather, that Heard had proposed “some group yoga-like exercise” involving gay consciousness and sexuality. Moreover, he felt, Heard had spoken mostly of a general brotherhood that gay organizations such as ONE must actively consider; he did not believe Heard was proposing a specific power-oriented lineage. Kepner recalled Heard’s annoyance that several members of the group were distracted by the historical points and concepts he threw out as peripheral detail, ignoring his main thesis. After an unfocused response to his fifth discussion, the Englishman angrily terminated the sessions.
The friction between Heard and Hay may have also resulted from their similarities. Kepner, who had edited manuscripts of both, found them alike in several respects. Both were armed with vastly esoteric homophile knowledge, and both were personally driven to formulate a unified theory of gay existence. Though Heard had published many books, he never wrote more than a few obscure articles about the “isophyl.” Within five years, he lapsed into a coma from which he had not emerged at the time of his death in 1971.
By the end of that strange summer, Hay and Kepner knew that a relationship between them was not going to work out. Harry was “back on the cruise again, and at fifty-one, I knew I was a full twenty years over the hill.” With low expectations, he visited a few gay bars he had known in the past, the House of Ivy and the Vieux Carré, both on Las Palmas on either side of Hollywood Boulevard.
After several dismal experiences, he decided he was “past the end” of that sort of hunting. He was lean, but had acquired a craggy, middle-aged look. Love was, after all, a young man’s game in gay life. How little did he know.
1. Harry speculated endlessly on the cause of “compulsive cruising” but later rejected the application of heterosexual morality as inappropriate to gay impulses. He concluded that all respectful relations were positive and regarded “our lovely sexuality” as “the gateway to spirit.”
2. This painful irony echoed other slights Harry suffered for being ahead of his time. Until the 1970s, writers and scholars sympathetic to homosexuals were forced to do their ground-breaking work independently, on the margins of academia. In recent years, as homosexual studies have become assimilated into university research departments and curricula, Hay and other pioneering gay scholars have suffered derision for lacking credentials and being out of step with prevailing theories.
3 Harry seems to have been the first contemporary scholar to recover this term, a contraction of the Tewa words for “old woman” (kwio) and “old man” (sedo). Hay’s transliteration of it, kwih-doh, appeared in several publications, though has since been superseded by the preferred kwidó. Hay insists that he transliterated it as Enki and Harry’s Tewa friend Tony Garcia told him was required for proper pronunciation.