Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will
gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the
answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Harry’s “final coming out,” as he called it, was marked by his relationship with John Burnside. Hay began wearing his longer hair, brighter clothing and a necklace or earring muted in tone but bold in shape. “I decided I never again wanted to be mistaken for a hetero,” he explained. “Ever.”
His daughter Kate noticed the startling change one day in the early 1960s when her father came to meet her for lunch. She had just started a job in a conservative company and, anxiously anticipating Harry’s nonconformist attire, she asked a fellow employee to alert her of his arrival so she could shepherd him out quickly. “But,” she remembered, “in walks Harry with his logging shirt and long hair and a long earring. At the same moment the president of the company walked in. I think they greeted each other while my girlfriend called me. It seems cute now, this meeting of opposites, but it wasn’t cute to me then.” She added, “I saw him twenty years later at my mother’s memorial service and he hadn’t changed one iota.”
Harry came into this pivotal romance quite by chance. After a few weeks of wasting his time and his heart in the bars, he characteristically rebelled against that system and set about designing another, a new venue where gay men might form relationships. An old inspiration resurfaced—square dancing. He had included square dancing in his 1950 prospectus for Bachelors Anonymous, partly because it had served as a favorite form of recreation for married C.P. couples. To make it gay, Harry drew on the journals of Bret Harte which describe men dancing together. In Hay’s scheme, as in Harte’s, “…the butches would wear red hankies in their pockets and the femmes would wear blue. Of course they’d swap every so often.”
He retooled the idea and, in mid-September, 1963 took it to Dorr Legg at ONE. As Harry expounded on his visions of gay square dance leagues, gay square dance competitions and even statewide square dance matches with mixed gay and straight couples, he heard what he later called “a cascade of silvery laughter” coming from an adjoining office. He insisted on meeting its source, who was a middle-aged man with youthful, cherubic features and deep dimples—just Harry’s type.
As he subsequently maneuvered around the man with the silvery laugh it dawned on Harry that “just maybe I was coming to know a five-foot-eight version of the man of my dreams... (and I always thought he’d be tall!)’’ They mentioned meeting again the next day at ONE and did so nonchalantly—Hay dressed in a tight yellow cashmere sweater he had not worn in years, and Burnside wearing scarlet shorts and a matching t-shirt. Then they made a date for a future evening.
John Lyon Burnside III had already met Harry at Gerald Heard’s house but the lightning struck at this second meeting. Burnside’s background was respectable; he’d studied physics and mathematics at U.C.L.A., graduated in 1945 and pursued work as an engineer in the aircraft industry, winding up as a staff scientist at Lockheed. His current business, manufacturing his own optical invention, represented his dropping out of the system. The device worked like a kaleidoscope, but without the traditional glass chips to color the view; instead it turned whatever was in front of its telescopic viewfinder into a symmetrical mandala. Burnside named it the Teleidoscope, and in 1959 he launched an independent business called California Kaleidoscopes, Cal Kal for short.1
The offbeat business reflected John’s personality, which was liberal and aesthetic; he had recendy studied modern dance with Bella Lewitzky. Inquisitive and precise—Jim Kepner described him as a “small town skeptic”—Burnside was at once an attentive listener and as discursive as Harry, the perfect partner for Harry’s ongoing dialogues about gays.
Though John arrived a nerve-racking three hours late to their first date, they postponed the chef’s salad Harry had prepared for another five hours, which they spent in bed. They fell for each other at every level, as they found out how much they had in common. Burnside was also a westerner, from Seattle. Both were lapsed Catholics, were close in age (Burnside was forty-seven; Harry fifty-one) and had weathered long heterosexual marriages.
Next to Harry’s bravado, however, Burnside was timid in nature. He had realized by age fourteen that he was homosexual, but after one unfulfilling experience and a distaste for the limitations of gay life as he saw it then, he repressed those urges. Fate had taught him such caution; John’s mother, out of economic necessity, had left him in an orphanage for periods of his early childhood. His marriage at age twenty-three to Edith Sinclair, a German immigrant, precluded any exploration of the gay world. He described their childless union as “not unhappy,” but his inner life he considered “cursed’’ until 1962, the year he first visited ONE, which he had heard about from some gay employees at the kaleidoscope factory. Within two weeks of meeting Harry—they date their anniversary as October 6—their relationship was “fixed.”
But there was a hitch: John’s wife Edith. Not only was he still married, but Edith was his business partner. For two months John attempted to will an impossible harmony between his straight marriage and his gay passion. Harry found this painfully tense, as epitomized by an “incredibly strained” Thanksgiving dinner, during which John and Edith shared a table with Harry and Margaret.
Obstacle or no, Harry’s sights were set. In keeping with his pattern of determined wooing, he knew he had to leave Baxter Street. Because of Burnside’s domestic situation, the courtship had moved there, and Kepner, though relieved at the end of his own tense affair with Harry, smarted at the sight of “Harry and Johnny spooning in my living room.” Harry brought up the need for an apartment of his own, but the implied question—whether he should rent a bachelor flat or something larger—was dodged by Burnside who was still summoning strength for his leap into gay life.
He began inviting Harry over for weekends at the expensive house in the Hollywood Hills he shared with Edith. She liked Harry instantly and was happy that her husband had acquired such a cultured, intelligent friend. The Burnsides’ large home on elegant Outpost Drive had a swimming pool, which served as a pretext for weekend invitations. Harry could sleep in the guest room, across the hall from the master bedroom. One night, after Edith had gone to bed, the two men stayed up late talking, and ultimately made love in the living room. When Harry went to the guest bedroom, John joined him, leaving the door open in an odd gesture of goodwill. For Harry, who had already endured the stress of a disintegrating marriage, the tension became unbearable. He left in the middle of the night, got all the way back to his apartment, but then, terrified that he had alienated John, returned to Outpost Drive. Once there he was unable to so much as knock on the door; all he could do was stand in the driveway.
He did not hear from Burnside for days and was certain he had destroyed their relationship. But on December 9, John showed up at Harry’s tiny bachelor flat and moved in. Falling in love again at fifty-one was, to Hay, a phenomenon of healing. He wrote of the experience, “The pain is lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy. I can remember when John and I first felt that amazement.” The affair was even more of an emotional milestone for Burnside, who came to this first love with a preserved innocence. They began a never-ending dialogue about their backgrounds, reading and ideas, starting on Friday night and continuing till Monday morning when each had to return to work.
They continued attempting a three-way truce with Edith. John even hired Harry as office and production manager for Cal Kal. This was less strange at the time than it sounds today. Until the 1970s, a popular model for dealing with homosexuality was for a gay man to marry, repress his emotional needs from the mainstream of his life, and have homosexual affairs on the side. Donald Webster Cory, author of The Homosexual in America and a pioneer of the homophile era, insisted that for homosexuals not to marry was “maladjusted.” This idea of having a foot in both worlds made Harry distinctly uncomfortable, but for Burnside’s sake he tried.
Hay’s first duty as production manager was to find a larger work site to meet the growth in the business. He found an ideal building on Washington Boulevard near Western Avenue. Having thus established himself he gave his thirty-day notice at Leahy’s, where he said, “the employees were expected to die at their desks—and several already had. Old Mr. Leahy was furious.” For Harry freedom suddenly flowered in all directions.
Outsiders sometimes assumed that Harry’s masculine demeanor and their relative stature (Harry was half a foot taller than John) reflected butch-femme roles in their relationship, but Harry had consciously abandoned that model. At parties they attended, most male couples were attired one in a suit and the other in a flowered shirt; Harry and John both wore flowered shirts. They took a honeymoon of sorts to Baja, California, camping in places Harry already knew and discovering new spots of their own. Their car was caught in a sandstorm and they were stranded for a few days while the engine was cleaned, but they didn’t much care. Such gypsyish trips became a never-ending motif of their relationship. They homed in on New Mexico for more trips and Harry was delighted to find that John already owned land there.
Over the Christmas holidays, Harry and John went to New Mexico and visited Richard Tapia, an old friend of Harry’s who had come out in the Army during the Korean War and gone in the closet again. He was now governor of Pojoaque, one of the pueblos north of Santa Fe. Excited by the optics products and the jobs the business offered, he proposed that Harry and John move the factory to the reservation. Harry recalled, “We were instantly intrigued and met with the tribal council. They agreed to provide a building with living quarters attached,”
As events turned out, that never came to pass, but when they applied for a business license, Harry made an important new friend. The State Employment Office specialist in Native American employment was a Tewa Indian man named Antonio Garcia. Almost immediately Harry realized that “this rather vividly handsome—though no longer young—Tewa was the gay man I had tried in vain to make contact with on earlier summer trips.” Harry mentioned the names of the mutual friends who had told him about the gay Tewa, and dropped a few hairpins about the gay movement as well. “Tony, as he was to be thereafter known, invited us to supper the next night,” Harry recalled, “and thus began a deep and unflagging bond of friendship and brotherhood” that lasted until Tony’s death in 1983. They would see him many times in the intervening twenty years.
When Harry and John returned to Los Angeles, the factory had begun the annual hiatus during which its officers balanced the books, prepared tax records and conducted the annual meeting of the board of directors. This year, however, Harry witnessed a shocking change: “John came running into the front office where I was working one evening. He was upset and was saying, ‘They’re throwing me out! They’re throwing me out! I don’t understand!’” “They” were Burnside’s wife, his mother and a lawyer, who were the other members of the board of directors of Cal Kal. Seemingly in response to Harry’s presence, they had secretly met, planned and voted Burnside out of his own company. In retaliation, Harry and John barricaded themselves in the office. Edith Burnside barred them from the factory premises and allied herself with most of the workers, including, to Harry’s shock, two gay people. After her apparent success, Mrs. Burnside dramatically warned everyone against dealing with Harry, commanding, “Don’t look in his eyes!”
The reversal of the couple’s fortunes was total: Burnside, his assets frozen, was penniless. The newly unemployed Hay was forced to cash some life insurance policies he’d carried during his long tenure at Leahy’s. Any thought of moving the factory vanished. Throughout most of 1965 the pair lived on little more than love. Their great indulgences were the flamboyant matching outfits in bright Sixties styles and colors that Harry found on sale at Ohrbach’s. So dressed, they did their best to scandalize the dinners that ONE held, where the other homophiles wore gray suits and ties.
Though John was paralyzed to inaction, Harry swiftly realized that the Teleidoscope patent was in the name of the inventor—John Burnside. An effective strategy, he calculated, was to announce that the patent was being sold to Edith Burnside’s worst perceived enemy—himself. John sold the patent to Harry for one dollar and within a year an agreement had been negotiated and Burnside was then able to purchase control of the factory.
The couple’s social life continued to center around ONE. After chilly exchanges at the group’s official functions, Harry and Dorr Legg found opera a safe topic to discuss. “One of the finest amateur performers I know in the ancient and honorable ART of High Camp is Dorr Legg,” he once noted in a letter. “When we weren’t clawing each other’s eyes out from opposite sides of the political fence, we would get going on famous ‘blips’ we had either seen, had been a party to, or had heard of, in Theater, Opera or Ballet... The two of us, topping each other off, could keep a roomful in stitches for quite a stretch.”
These get-togethers were often hosted by a pair of chubby lovers dubbed the Heavily Twins, who opened their china-dog-and-porcelain-cherub-packed home to the ONE crowd. (The Heavily Twins were at first called the Heavenly Twins, because of their storybook romance—one had waited ten years for the other to come out and leave a marriage—and when they finally got together, they each gained more than one hundred pounds.)
A six-foot-plus transvestite named Sherrie who came to ONE found an especially sympathetic ear in Harry and John and visited them regularly. Even Margaret, now wheelchair-bound from arthritis, visited ONE in 1965. “They honored her public participation in the Mattachine Foundation,” he said. “We were both very touched.”
His feelings were not so warm toward the slowly growing national homophile movement. He was in fact “appalled” by its increasingly assimilationist direction. The yearly conventions of nationwide Mattachine chapters did “nothing but rewrite their own constitutions,” he complained.
Harry’s founding vision of a “loving-sharing brotherhood” had long vanished, but to see it replaced by a gray-suited respectability that might as well have been the Elks or the Kiwanis distressed him deeply. He may also have felt increasing annoyance at the disappearance of the radical vision of the movement. In 1975, he wrote a nettled letter to the national gay newspaper The Advocate, blasting its timid battle cry, “Gay is Okay!” Harry retorted, “Is that all? Big Deal—for 1954!!” Referring to the so-called missing link known as Java Man he signed his letter “Harry Hay, Pithecanthropus Erectus of the Gay Movement.”
Domestic life, however, kept him too satisfied to make much trouble. The couple moved into a charming old house with a garden on Edgeware Road in a quiet section of downtown Los Angeles. In 1965, Harry founded the Circle of Loving Companions, a gay collective that was to remain a part of their lives for decades to come. The Circle was often politically active and Harry stressed that the name symbolized how all gay relationships could be conducted on the Whitmanesque ideal of the inclusive “love of comrades.“
The Circle’s membership specifications were based on affinity, and it seemed to be Harry’s effort to re-establish the subjective intimacy of Parsifal, the Fifth Order of the Mattachine Society. Over the years, the Circle included a number of close friends, including Stella Rush and Helen Sandoz, Lawndale lesbians who, under the names Sten Russell and Sandy Saunders, edited The Ladder. For long stretches, though, it included only Harry and John, which prompted some ribbing about how the ever-ingenious Harry Hay had managed to construct a circle composed of two points.
From their new residence they would walk to Main Street and spend hours at Harold’s, one of the city’s older and seedier gay bars. There Harry gave John private seminars in homosexual mores and bar rituals. On Fridays this continued at Joly’s, a bar for older men on Western Avenue, which offered dinner. Sundays they went to the Red Raven on Melrose that featured movies and a buffet. The middle-aged couple sat at the back of the bar holding hands (under the tablecloth since displays of affection were still grounds for closing a gay bar). They watched the leather men and the pretty boys pose and circulate, and Harry liked to predict—often with high accuracy—which ones would get together as closing time approached.
In the spring of 1965, the homophile establishment of Los Angeles was shaken to its rather brittle core by a bitter struggle for control of ONE, Inc., its legendary magazine, and the ownership of the group’s physical assets. The incident has been called an audacious political maneuver, a theft, and even a bitch-fight, but was most often referred to as “The Heist.” It happened the weekend that Don Slater, a disgruntled ONE member, surreptitiously packed and moved the thousand-volume-plus ONE library to his own premises.
The offbeat drama that held Harry and others spellbound was well cast, and provides a precious glimpse inside the Southland’s homophile society, a society that, despite his long absences from it, remained Harry’s chief social outlet. Longtime editor Slater and longtime administrator Dorr Legg were as committed and determined as Hay. Though their styles were dissimilar, all three were firmly opinionated, strong-willed and so passionately devoted to the homophile cause as to forsake traditional career and income.
Harry was on the opposite end of the political spectrum from both. Slater was a peppery World War II veteran, though Harry found him impishly charming. Dorr Legg was a well-educated, iron-willed man with ultrarefined East Coast manners. In an unguarded moment, Harry once confessed that “I could never look at Dorr without thinking of the carved wooden handle of my grandmother’s umbrella.” Indeed, Legg’s icy dignity lent him a stern, proper façade which he sought to extend to ONE by gravely boosting the importance of every aspect of the organization. ONE, he insisted, was the omniscient pinnacle of homosexual culture. He worked devotedly as its business manager; on paper his salary, forever deferred, accrued until it reached six figures, a debt some cited as an instance of the hold that Legg had on the organization.
Legg’s entrenchment posed serious limits as well as provided support. In Slater’s words, “Here it was, 1964. We’d been going along since ’52 and ONE was still talking about what it had done back then. But we as editors of the magazine were looking ahead. We had to. New organizations were forming out there. But when we brought up new issues, Bill Lambert [Legg’s other name] would not deem them appropriate.” Many members of ONE agreed that while Legg single-handedly kept ONE going longer than any other gay organization, his unbending conservatism locked many new people and ideas outside.
Internally, Legg wanted to expand the activities of the organization. He had launched the conferences and the classes in homophile studies and now he was making further plans—to the dismay of other members, who felt that putting out the magazine was all they could handle. As these interests polarized, Slater and his lover, Tony Reyes, led one faction and Legg led the other.
Eventually the board of directors split evenly down the middle. Even Harry and John, who largely avoided political entanglements, got ensnared at a ONE board meeting in 1964. Slater nominated the two men to the board, but before the vote, he instructed them to vote for the candidate who would tip the impasse in his direction. Harry quickly withdrew his and Burnside’s names from nomination as a sign that he would not follow orders. This signal given, he suggested that they be renominated, but the renomination was not forthcoming. “Which was fine with us,” said Hay. This was but one of the bureaucratic power-plays leading up to the split.
“To Don Slater,” Slater himself wrote in a subsequent newsletter: “…the situation appeared increasingly alarming. Nor was he the only Member or Friend of ONE to feel this way. Many other alert and forward-looking Members shared his conviction that action would have to be taken to stop the downward spiral. The Chairman of the Board, however, arbitrarily blocked any and all attempts at free discussion and arbitration. His dictatorial frame of mind was nowhere more evident than in his unilateral attempt to gain complete control over ONE magazine and its editorial format functions. This resulted in the resignation of the editors of ONE, some of whom had been with the magazine... for periods of up to eight years.”
Slater, galled and incensed, recalled that “I festered and festered. But one night I woke up and said to Tony, ‘I have a solution.’” Slater’s solution, arrived at after legal consultation, was to assume that the board was at least evenly split on the question of control of the corporation’s assets, and to invoke a legal measure known as “self-help.” In this case, he decided to relocate the corporation. He hired a truck for the weekend of April 17 and 18, 1965, contacted his sympathizers and emptied out the contents of that large second floor at 2256 Venice Boulevard.
Dorr Legg, of course, saw things in quite a different light: “Don Slater got a group of people together and, from our point of view, stole everything: The library, plus all documents and furniture. We had offices taking up an entire floor of a building. One day it was just empty.” Slater agreed that “we didn’t leave them so much as a return address label.” He had called a board of directors meeting for the Monday to follow The Heist. “So when they came to the office, they didn’t come to an empty room. I was there.”
Harry recalled how earlier that Monday Slater called him and Burnside to a large, sloping-floored garage at 3473½ Cahuenga Boulevard West, not far from his mother’s house. “We didn’t know what had happened, and when we found out we were absolutely astonished,” said Burnside.
By June, the story broke in the Los Angeles Free Press. Evoking the image of a queer amoeba, the Freep headlined, “ONE Becomes Two; Homosexuals Split.” Immediately, Slater’s faction began referring to their garage full of appropriations as ONE and advertised a forthcoming issue of ONE magazine. Legg’s group, still on Venice Boulevard, did likewise. For several months, there were two organizations called ONE, Inc., two ONE magazines, and unlimited snickering over “the strange case of ONE vs. ONE,” which wags referred to as “ONE vs. NONE.”
Harry, already inclined to retire the term “homophile” and many of its associations, was wagging his own tongue that “this was a matter of two dinosaurs spitting at each other and not realizing that dinosaurs had become obsolete.” The spitting got increasingly sulfurous, with hints of blackmail tactics. Slater was said to have either threatened or joked (which was taken as a threat) that any of the several teachers on ONE’s board would lose their jobs if they tried to stop him.
The spoils, however, did seem worth the fight. Since the 1950s, ONE had published three periodicals; its flagship, ONE magazine, had been in existence for eleven years, and inspired a Canadian counterpart called TWO. ONE had run original articles by the likes of Norman Mailer (“The Homosexual as Villain”) and Albert Ellis (“Are Homosexuals Neurotic?”) and had accumulated vast correspondence, the stories of hundreds of average gay men and lesbians struggling for sanity under oppression, as well as the letters and manuscripts of its celebrity authors. Along the way, many admirers of the homophile cause had donated their personal libraries, often containing rare and valuable books, to ONE. All of this got heisted.
Dauntless, Dorr Legg filed suit against Slater, who countersued—an expensive process for all concerned, the membership especially, which was constantly pumped for legal-fund contributions from both sides. Legg’s ONE was represented by a lawyer named Hillel Chodos; Slater’s ONE was given preliminary advice by Herb Selwyn (who, according to Slater and Kepner, had long been one of the few area lawyers to help with gay entrapment cases).
In court, Slater was ably represented by attorney Ed Raiden, and despite his legally tenuous maneuver, Slater made out fabulously. Part of his success was due to Legg’s imperious statements in the courtroom. “Your Honor,” Jim Kepner remembered Legg reprimanding the judge, “you must not treat us as equals. This is clearly a case between a banker and a bank robber.” According to Slater, Raiden cannily appealed to the judge’s bigotry. “Ed said, ‘You know, Your Honor, this is a bitch-fight. They’re suing themselves in a way because legal title to the name has not been established by either party.” The judge’s final pronouncement, Harry recalled, was repeated all over the gay grapevine: “You two old aunties go out in the hall and fight this out.”
The agreement, arrived at through arbitration, was to split the library down the middle. Some multivolume sets were even split every other volume. Slater agreed to make copies of documents on a rented IBM copier, but on Raiden’s advice copied only documents that Legg could request by name. Since Slater had been the librarian he knew the collection far better and thus kept many of the treasures of ONE’s library and most of the valuable magazine files.
Slater agreed to give up the name ONE and called his group Tangents—ironically, a name Jim Kepner created for his column in ONE magazine. Though part of the agreement was that neither side would lay claim to winning the case, Legg defiantly issued a victory statement. In a tribute to their tenacity, both Legg’s and Slater’s groups (the latter eventually became known as the Homosexual Information Center) survived into the 1990s.
Despite comic undertones the event really was a tragedy for the burgeoning gay movement. The books and papers that made up the treasury of the homophile movement were never reunited. The brimstone fury between the litigants, both valiant servants to the cause of homosexuals, took decades to cool. Worse, The Heist came to symbolize how members of that now-older generation could not even work with one another, let alone with a broader gay constituency.
In this, those involved were not much different from other minority leaders seized by righteousness and driven by oppression.2 Kepner commented of the affair, “Those not involved frequently underestimate the tremendous differences between those struggling to set up a movement.” Despite their mutual animosity, the principals in the case of ONE vs. ONE never broke ranks and discussed the matter outside the gay community, and spoke little of it even within that community.
In light of such goings-on, Harry Hay was content to move ever further from traditional forms of organizational power. He concentrated instead on his Circle of Loving Companions, adding its voice to the wider gay circles that would convene for progressive campaigns. His private life with John, which flourished, became his central focus.
The other founders of the Mattachine went in various directions. “For Konrad, Harry and me, this was a life work,” said Chuck Rowland, who continued to work with ONE. He started a new organization, the Church of One Brotherhood, similar to Mattachine, but under religious auspices; but it was short-lived. Rowland resigned his job at the furniture factory and, unable to get work in Los Angeles, returned to Minnesota where he taught college-level drama until his retirement in the late 1970s.
Jim Gruber and Konrad Stevens, the sweethearts who had tipped the balance and gotten Mattachine going, left activism and joined the Satyrs, a motorcycle club.3 Eventually, after a decade-long relationship, they split up. Gruber remained a schoolteacher but took up writing fiction; Stevens gave up photography to work in a lab. After his landmark trial, Dale Jennings worked on ONE magazine for its first year, writing under a variety of names and styles, and even penned the “Feminine Viewpoint” column when no lesbian was available. He turned his talents toward commercial ventures and worked as a promoter for the Ice Capades to supplement his residuals from writing. Eventually he became wealthy enough to buy a ranch outside of Los Angeles.
The most visible success, of course, was Rudi Gernreich. After a string of accolades in the late 1950s for his breakthroughs in fashion and fabric design, he skyrocketed to fame in 1964 for his creation of the topless bathing suit. Known as both boy wonder and bad boy of fashion, he was its reigning innovator and showman throughout the Sixties. His great wit and progressive politics continued to show up in such groundbreaking concepts as unisex and anti-fashion, and in the professional heresy of his declarations that “fashion is dead” and that “the only relevant issue is freedom.” When he died of lung cancer in 1985, Jacques Faure, art director of the French Vogue, summed up Gernreich’s career as that of a “fashion activist.”
The saddest story, by contrast, was that of Bob Hull. The “Viceroy of Mattachine,” known for his capacity to communicate with everyone on every level, continued to work as a chemist and participated minimally in ONE, but never again pursued activism. Several friends noticed that as the boyish Hull entered early middle age, he had great difficulty adjusting. His love affairs became increasingly brief and unhappy, and he slid into alcoholism. “Part of his problem was that he had difficulty letting go of his boyishness and his youth,” sighed his friend Jim Gruber. “Back then you were either cute or over the hill. If you reach that mid-life crisis and pour alcohol over it—and Bob, as a chemist, had knowledge and access to lethal materials—it adds up to disaster.”
The disaster happened in June of 1963. “He set it up one night with things he brought home from work,” Gruber recounted. “Turned on the TV and started getting drunk until he could face taking the chemicals.” Hull knew exactly what chemicals to mix and in what doses and he downed an effective concoction. The gifted, idealistic and humorous Hull was mourned by many, and Harry wrote a eulogy for him that was printed in ONE. Evelyn Hooker, who had been a close friend, observed, “I know everyone has a right to end his life. But why Bob?”
The crumbling of the homophile movement, as symbolized by the ONE fiasco, had long been coming. Dino De Simone, a member of the original Mattachine West Side Discussion Group in New York, quickly decided its members were “Sissy-Mary-Nit-Pickers, the most bureaucratic old ladies I’d ever met.” The homophiles’ strategies were executed through white gloves: to educate instead of to confront; to use “experts” to explain (and sometimes even condemn) homosexuality; even to refuse to identify as a homosexual group.
But changes were coming. New organizations were forming with younger, more flexible personalities at the helm. The civil rights and counterculture movements sent out strong messages about oppression and militancy and many gay people were active in these movements. When new gay organizations began to coalesce throughout the country, many of the organizers were veterans of freedom struggles, and they advocated a new militancy.
The struggle of reforming the homophile movement was shared by such people as Franklin Kameny, who in 1961 had founded a Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C., and Guy Straight, who started the League for Civil Education in San Francisco that same year. Meanwhile Harry was actively organizing in Los Angeles. One particularly daring campaign he worked on was the first gay pride parade in Los Angeles and perhaps in the nation. This effort was guided by Don Slater and the Tangents group, whose Committee to Fight Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces had already fought a number of draft cases involving homosexuals.
In February of 1966, at the first meeting of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) in Kansas City, a nationwide day of protest was planned with events scheduled for San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The group planned to bring public attention to the discriminatory policies of the Defense Department, setting a pattern that would become widespread in the 1970s and 1980s as dozens of court cases challenged the military’s exclusion of homosexuals. May 21, 1966—Armed Services Day—was chosen for the nationwide demonstrations.
Harry became chairman of the Los Angeles committee, which met twice weekly for two months to plan the protest. Though his politics were not exactly in favor of military service (indeed, within a dozen years Harry would establish a Gay Draft Counseling Network in his living room), he supported this action. Since at that time an oath compelled inductees to pledge they were not homosexual, he thought that a campaign to illegalize the oath as an invasion of private conscience would be progressive; he argued that the resulting confusion and suspicion about who was and wasn’t gay would paralyze the generals. In brief, he explained, “You can’t say ‘Shaft the Draft’ if you’re excluded.”
The Los Angeles group conceived of a picket line on wheels; automobiles would take protest placards all over the city. News releases advertised the gay motorcade as a first and reporters from Newsweek and Time made inquiries, whipping up the already excited planning. Harry made dozens of sketches of John Burnside’s designs to secure four-foot- high boxes on the tops of cars. On the sides were painted eye-catching slogans: “10% of All GI’s Are Homosexual!” “Homosexuals Are the Most Moral People in the Service—They Have to Be!” The succession continued, “Sex Belongs to Private Conscience,” “Write LBJ Today!”
They leafletted gay bars for three weeks with maps of the motorcade route and pleas for support, but Harry hesitated to predict a revolution. His doubts were quoted in Slater’s Tangents article:
“If this comes off, it will be something our city has never seen before. If it comes off. Imagine a motorcade of fifteen cars on about a twenty-mile route through Los Angeles. Ideally we should have had the support of the entire community; then we could have really staged a grand demonstration. But most homosexuals are still hiding. With the work we have put into this thing, [most of which had fallen, by default, to him and Burnside] and with the thousands of homosexuals in the area, it is fantastic to realize we will be lucky to have forty persons show up for the motorcade tomorrow—and at least twenty per cent of those who do will not be gay.”
A handful of clerics attended, along with “at least one actor, two engineers, two teachers, a couple of beatniks and others,” making up a total of thirteen cars. “Before amazed neighbors and passing motorists,” reported Tangents:
“The placards were boldly attached, and with riders visibly tense, the cars pulled into formation down Cahuenga Boulevard, past the Hollywood Bowl, to head east on Sunset Blvd. in the direction of the Plaza and downtown... In front of Central Market, Mexican women with bulging shopping bags and wayward youngsters barely noticed or understood the signs. Servicemen gawked and shrugged; a few clenched their fists at their sides helplessly. At Pershing Square, crackpots interrupted in their harangues shouted louder.”
Though the homophile motorcade felt vividly historic to its participants, the previous year’s Watts riots had changed what most of the media now regarded as newsworthy, and the city editor of the Los Angeles Times said he would be interested in the gay motorcade only if someone was hurt. In what they felt was a small consolation, the parade was featured at six and eleven on the CBS News. Said Hay, gratified by the experience if not by the coverage, “I can honestly say that I did not expect to see such a public demonstration on behalf of homosexuals in my lifetime.”
The next day, he appeared with John on a television show hosted by Melvin Belli. There, and at every media opportunity, Harry stressed his message that gays should reject society’s negative stereotypes and insist on defining themselves. On April 24, he squared his account with Paul Coates, the columnist who had deviled the Mattachine thirteen years before. Now he was with the Los Angeles Times, which printed Harry’s response when Coates rose to the bait about the funny word Harry kept using.
“Homophile... why do you prefer that to being called a homosexual?”
“Because it’s a word that expresses much more,” [Hay] explained. “It has an implication of spiritual love, while homosexual is a legal term relating to people who commit specific sexual acts.”
Such media activism swiftly became an important tool for the gay movement, but it was still rare; few people were willing to identify publicly as homosexual. Another occasion came in 1967 when Hay and Burnside were invited to appear on “The Joe Pine Show,” hosted by a well-known television muckraker. They plotted their appearance as an openly gay couple, wearing identical outfits, blue yachting tops with vermilion pullovers, which Harry bought on sale at Ah Men!, a gay boutique in West Hollywood. To combat the notoriously aggressive host on an equal footing, Harry brusquely began many of his sentences, “Look, Pine,” as he jabbed his finger. To an inane question about “How could you guys control yourselves in the Army?” Harry made his frequent point that homosexuals “had to learn to control ourselves so we could get through high school with a full set of teeth.” The exchange was so lively that they were asked to do a second taping.
By August of 1966, the newly formed North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, convened in San Francisco. The Circle of Loving Companions, with its vote of two, attended, and Harry became acutely aware at that conference of the division of temperament between movements on the East and West coasts.
Easterners, he sensed, were overridingly conservative and assimilationist, while activists in the West seemed more radical. (Harry felt their politics were more “truly gay.”) A resolution passed at another conference recommended that street people (the voluntary dropouts of a more generous economic era) be included in the liberation efforts—a contentious issue then and one thus far frowned upon by the white-glove homophiles. The resolution proposed by Jim Kepner began, “Since the homosexual has no image to lose...” and Harry quoted it frequently in his exhortations for gay people to develop the unique identities still latent within them.
The Council on Religion and the Homophile (CRH) was another subject of Harry and John’s attentions. An interfaith body of clergy and openly gay people, CRH initiated discussions to “bridge the gap” between those groups at a time of growing social activism in religion. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, were active in its northern branch, the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. The CRH had many statewide conferences and meetings which John and Harry attended faithfully.
At a theology convention in San Francisco in 1966, several CRH participants were struck by Harry and John’s tenacity as a couple. All couples who arrived together were asked to split up; a technique organizers felt would open up dialogue. The Circle of Loving Companions refused. With amused annoyance Lyon recalled, “With all of us against them, those two won.”
For several years in the late 1960s the Circle took its message to the Renaissance Faire; John sold piles of kaleidoscopes and Harry, dressed in authentic costume with the sign “Sodoma” hanging from his neck, passed out thousands of leaflets. He continued working with various organizations, traveling to conferences, writing letters to other active gays. He lived every day as a gay activist, earring and gay perspectives swinging in the breeze. Sometimes, just doing the laundry was gay activism, especially if he and John dared to snuggle up next to each another while driving home. Every bit of action promoted the social and political climate from which the Gay Liberation movement would take off at the turn of the decade.
The kaleidoscope factory paid the rent. The flower-petal vision of its products seemed tailor-made for the psychedelic motifs of the counterculture. It grew popular in the mainstream as well, and orders poured in from museums, department stores and head shops. After regaining control of the factory from Edith, Harry and John began hiring anyone they liked, including more gay people, the new “long-hairs,” and other non-conformists. (In fact, when Dorothy Healey was let go as secretary of the Southern California Communist Party in 1968 and applied for unemployment benefits, Harry extended a job offer at the factory. She declined but was touched by the gesture for years afterwards.)
The proprietors cultivated an anything-goes atmosphere and young people enjoyed the work and brought constant discussions about the sexual revolution, consciousness expansion through drugs and the tactics of flower-power activism. The large old building became a free-flowing community center. “We had long, high tables at the factory,” Harry recalled, “and the kids were always bringing in their pounds of marijuana and separating out the seeds and weighing it. This amid Gay liberation posters being silk-screened and in various states of color registration, hanging over the tables to dry; meetings being conducted; and even a few kaleidoscopes being made.”
Open to anything, these graying free spirits even attended some of the mass love rites of the Sixties. One Be-In, held in Elysian Park, a canyon adjacent to Dodger Stadium, made an indelible impression. “As we entered the park, we could see this great river of young people—perhaps 25,000 were there,” Harry recalled. A utopian, sharing essence seemed to rule the day, and as their contribution they brought a box of twenty-five Teleidoscopes which they passed out among the crowd.
After many hours and thousands of hands, every single Teleidoscope was returned in perfect condition. They were amazed. “Whether it was the excellent quality of the pot that was being passed around—which John and I did occasionally sample—or simply the spirit of the day, it was a mind-blower, watching this mass of people relating to one another with what I would later call subject-subject consciousness. Whatever it was, we felt it just blowing through us and it made a big difference in our thinking.”
Those winds of change reached deep into his inner life as well; the political dogmatism and the tense homophile façade were falling away. Others noticed the change. Del Martin observed that “this was a different type of Harry Hay than we had seen before—one who was filled with the joy of life and love and spirituality. And one who could speak our language. He was a different character than we knew in the Fifties.”
Harry’s last progressive odyssey of the decade was not a gay one but combined many of the fascinations of his life. A main flagship of the American Indian movement of the 1960s, the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life (CTTLL), rekindled his long-standing concern with Native Americans, this time in explicitly political terms.
It started in early 1967 after local radio personality Peter Bergman of KPFK broadcast Hopi prophesies that had been printed in the San Francisco Oracle, an organ of the counterculture.4 A resulting colloquium between traditionally minded Indians and interested non-Indian youth gave birth to the Committee, which became an active support group. All this caught Harry at a deep level and held him for almost three years.
When he attended the colloquium, Harry felt an “instant connection” with the 130-member group. This connection must have been amplified by his lifelong associations with Indian people and by family stories ranging from that of his great uncle in the Battle of Wounded Knee to his own encounter with Wovoka. CTILL adopted consensus decision making when Harry related its effectiveness as a nonparliamentary method. John Burnside volunteered the kaleidoscope factory as a meeting place and they became immersed in the movement.
Among the close friends Harry and John made through CTILL were Silvia Richards, a non-Indian woman, and Craig Carpenter, a part-Mohawk man. Carpenter was intelligent, radical and with his dark skin and green eyes, he was also extremely handsome. From the time he was a teenager in the late 1940s, Carpenter explained, he had made a life mission of discovering and communicating with the few Indians still practicing traditional cultural roles throughout the country. Almost two decades of this work had developed a unique communications network integral to the formation of the Traditional Indian movement.
Carpenter made fast friends with Harry, calling him “Chief Long-hair.” Harry’s work with CTILL involved fundraising, research and handling the travel logistics for a series of national conferences. He applied his vast organizing knowledge to dozens of different aspects of the Committee, mediated disputes and was happily in his element. In one time-consuming project he helped American Indians to beat the draft by uncovering in the U.C.L.A. library an old treaty that forbade Shoshone Indians to bear firearms for any reason. He took several trips to the Hopi country in Arizona, where he met some of the same people Harry James had known forty years earlier.
That summer of 1967, the first North American Traditional Indian conference was held at Tonawanda, an Indian ground in upstate New York. Harry and John attended, taking along several participants who had no transportation of their own. Early one morning there, Harry was cleaning up the campground, as he had learned to do in the Trailfinders. An old man approached him and said, “I see you are a Snake Brother.” He explained that members of the Snake Clan always tended the campground, adding that a person could only be a Snake Brother after being bitten by a rattlesnake but not killing the snake. Astonished, Harry confirmed that thirty summers before, in 1937, this indeed had happened, but the old man gave no indication of how he knew that.
He introduced himself as Clifton Sundown, an elder of the Seneca tribe, and Harry recognized the man’s name and remembered that he had a message to give him. At a party at Morris Kight’s house that summer before leaving, Harry had met a young Seneca Indian who was in the process of having a sex-change operation. When Harry mentioned that he was going to the meeting at Tonawanda, the young Indian said that his grandfather, Clifton Sundown, would be there. He knew that after his operation he could no longer visit his homeland, and he asked Harry to deliver a farewell message. “He spoke to me in Los Angeles,” Harry relayed, “and he sends you his love.”
Though little open tolerance of gay people was exhibited by the Indians they met in CTILL, Harry and John remained inseparable as a couple and always felt accepted on a personal basis. (Their friend Craig Carpenter told Harry that though he “had no use for queers, maybe Scotch queers were okay.”) Group homophobia, however, persisted. CTILL had provided their mailing list of more than 6,000 names to a Mohawk Indian named Jerry Gamble, whose traditional name was Rarihokwats. With it, he began a national Indian newsletter called Akwesasne Notes.
In 1979, under new editorship, AkwesasneNotes began returning exchange magazines sent by gay publishers such as RFD, the periodical for rural gay men. They complained that they did not want such “European behavior,” which they equated with Christianity and alcoholism, encouraged among their people. Their elders, they said, considered homosexuality “not normal and a detriment to our way of life.” This raised a storm of protest from gay periodicals, gay supporters of CTILL, and as-yet-unorganized gay Indians themselves.
Harry soon parted with CTILL. His conclusion was that there was “no such thing as a traditional Indian—only Indians trying to find their way back to a traditional way.” This influenced him to give up city activism and changed his thinking about the gay movement and community. Harry did not, he said, equate the transitions of Indian culture with the transitions of gay people’s culture, but he acknowledged a strong parallel between CTILL and the Radical Faerie movement of the following decades, mostly in redefining cultural identity, assimilation and relationship to environment and society.
Harry’s involvement with CTILL ended after he helped organize the third colloquium of Native American Traditional Leaders in March of 1969. The event was successful, but other events, such as the Indian occupation of Alcatraz and a physical attack on his friend Craig Carpenter, disturbed him.
As the 1960s drew to a close Harry felt adrift in the wake of the fragmenting Counterculture. He was particularly disillusioned by the growing discussion of violence as a means for changing society, which displaced his hopes for a revolution of enlightened consciousness. The new decade offered him no sure direction.
But a summer riot called Stonewall would soon change everything.
1. The Teleidoscope caused a minor sensation, getting write-ups in many papers, including the Village Voice and an inquiry from the New Yorker. The lucrative business was his economic mainstay for more than a decade, and was at its height when he met Harry.
2. See Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years for a parallel discussion of agonizing intraracial political fights that were kept tightly within the African-American community for decades.
3. The Satyrs, founded in 1955, is the oldest gay motorcycle club and is still active today.
4. Though traditional Hopi do hold prophecies sacred, much of the material that was printed in the Oracle turned out to be exaggeration.