It is a terrible thing for
a man to suddenly realize
that all of his life be has been telling the
truth.
— Oscar Wilde
The fragmenting core Circle quickly regrouped, recruiting three new members, all from San Francisco: Mark Thompson, Cultural Editor of The Advocate, who was promoting the Radical Faeries in its pages; Will Roscoe, who had already done extensive work on the tax exemption papers; and Roscoe’s lover, a graceful, handsome young man named Bradley Rose.
To clear the air of differences, Harry sent a letter to those who had met in Oregon restating his own hopes for the Gay Vision Circle and inviting responses. He aired his growing anxiety about Mitch Walker by comparing him to a “classically malfunctioning shaman,” and referred to a rumor that Kilbourne had boasted of carrying out Walker’s instructions to stage exactly the kind of explosive confrontation that had happened. Then Hay demanded, “Did you indeed introduce Chris into our Oregon situation as your puppet-agent? Under other situations your interestingly phrased ‘round-Robin-Hood’s-barn’ excursions in lieu of answers are not only poetic but intriguing; in this situation I should appreciate a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
He never got one. The openness of this blast signaled that his anger had been brewing and would soon come to a head. Despite these tensions, there was still determination to secure the land trust and the new group of seven met in April of 1981 at a cabin Don Kilhefner located on Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains.
The purpose of the meeting, according to Rose’s notes, was “to see if we could commit ourselves to working in consensus as an enlarged core circle.” No one at that meeting voiced misgivings though during a private moment Will Roscoe recalled Walker taking him aside and telling him that “weird stuff was going on around Harry.” Pushing forward, the group agreed to hold an event in the Bay Area to address the strong Faerie community emerging there. With luck it might revitalize the image of “our tattered gang of four,” as Harry rather glumly quipped. Twenty Faeries attended the potluck and discussed the sanctuary with enough excitement to induce commitments to raise funds, tithe income and look for land—immediately.
The luminous new form of the Radical Faeries, free of the shackles of the clone, still held powerful appeal to many gay men. Enthusiasm was so high that they called a larger meeting. Kilhefner, who was particularly anxious to get on with the land trust, took on the logistics and reserved a cabin for July, this time in Sequoia National Forest, then, sent an announcement to dozens of interested Faeries. He also sent a letter to his fellow core Circle members making plain his insistence on accomplishing something other than “just being Faeries” at the upcoming Sequoia meeting.
“No more introductions and generalities for me,” he explained. “Yeah, I guess I’m going to have to say it—I think I’ve reached the point in the project where I can no longer suppress my goal-oriented tendencies—sob sob.”
But at the same time Kilhefner began to re-evaluate his allegiances and a month later the balance tipped. Complaining of stress and anxiety he flew to Berkeley. The trip was quietly labeled “first aid” for his frayed nerves and the consulting health provider was Mitch Walker. At an emotional counseling session that lasted all weekend, the laconic, private Kilhefner let out his misgivings, most of which centered around Harry’s conduct. He felt the Faeries had become dogmatic under Harry’s influence and that tension in the La Cresta collective signaled trouble for a larger community. (Harry noted that Kilhefner never attempted to raise these issues to him, despite the commitment they had made to each other.) Kilhefner was no stranger to the tensions of radical dreams and practical compromise and had a reputation as a peacemaker, but these conflicts seemed insoluble.
Walker supported Kilhefner by expressing identical feelings about Harry. The counseling session quickly became a strategy session. Don decided to quit. He pondered sending a resignation letter to the rest of the Circle, but instead they kept their discussion quiet until the next meeting of the core Circle; that way, they decided, everyone involved could discuss it. Walker said he did not express his own discontent because speaking against Harry would only be perceived as betraying the movement.
The meeting where Don would spring his news was set for June 20 over the summer Solstice weekend. The main agenda item was planning for the Sequoia event and the meeting place was Mark Thompson’s apartment in San Francisco. Harry and John drove Don up and dropped him off in Berkeley to stay with Walker then continued to Thompson’s charming and slightly vertiginous flat on the top floor of a stone art deco high-rise overlooking Buena Vista Park. There they stayed the night. The Solstice weekend had been chosen as a good omen but the meeting proved so disastrous that it became known as “Bloody Saturday.”
When Roscoe and Rose arrived in the morning they were greeted by Thompson who hinted that something was afoot concerning Don. The next arrival was Mitch Walker who riled Roscoe by commenting that his jeans and t-shirt looked straight-identified. Roscoe recalled, “He attacked me for having a clone image—a typical Mitch tactic.” Walker (who later favored a crew cut and a black leather jacket) was dressed that day in the Mexican skirt he had worn to bless the land in Colorado. It was stiff muslin with a flounce at the waist, solid black save for its border design of skulls encased by a lightning pattern.
Everyone took a seat. Thompson remembered that “Mitch and Don were on one end of my apartment, which was rather long and narrow, and Harry and John sat at the other end.” Mitch, who was designated as chair, recalled his manner as “very businesslike,” although others remember his wild shaman affectations in full force. “During all of this [meeting],” recalled Rose in extensive notes, “Mitch was changing his bead necklaces, putting on one, then another, then removing the first; rummaging in his big medicine purse; wrapping things and unwrapping them in Cost Plus scarves. Smoking lots of dope, mumbling, snickering, humming.”
Walker called the meeting to order and announced that for emergency reasons he would give the floor to Don Kilhefner. According to Rose, “Don began complaining of problems he was having with John and Harry. He talked about the accusations of Faerie Fascism, and said he believed Harry and John were power-tripping, especially Harry. He was not specific, but he eventually reached his point, which was that he was resigning, that his ‘heart was no longer in the project.’ Don removed himself to a corner of Mark’s apartment so the rest of us could continue our meeting.” (In an open letter he wrote July 26, Kilhefner repeated the sole reason that “I was no longer working on it [the project] from a heart-felt place.”)
The shock of Don’s resignation was compounded when Mitch followed suit. The reconstituted core was crumbling again. “Brad and Will and I all sat with turning heads, like at a tennis match,” recalled Thompson. “It was formal at first. But I remember saying to Will later that it was like watching a horrible, slow automobile accident.” There was more actual arguing over the second resignation than the first, inflamed when the defectors announced that they might call an open meeting in the Bay Area within six weeks.
As words grew heated, Walker delivered an especially cruel coup de grâce. Though Mitch later denied it, most present vividly recall Mitch’s statement to Harry: “How I feel is you are like a cancer on the gay movement. And what do you do with a cancer? You cut it out!” Harry also remembered Mitch saying something else. “He demanded that I pass on the torch to him, that I was a burned-out cinder and that he was to lead now.”
Will, Brad, John and Harry walked numbly down Haight Street to the Cordon Bleu restaurant, where they ate a Vietnamese dinner. For months Harry felt devastated and betrayed. He wrote to friends shortly afterward that he felt “other people’s projections” had been forced upon him and that he could not understand much of it. The following day, at Roscoe’s insistence, the group had a final meeting in Berkeley’s Tilden Park to tie up several loose ends—most importantly the already publicized meeting in Sequoia National Park, which now had to be canceled. Roscoe hoped that specific issues related to the break would surface, but none were forthcoming. Afterward, while they were returning to their cars, Harry stopped to pick berries along the trail, disturbed a bees’ nest, and complained of being “doubly stung.” A shaken Harry and John drove Don back to Los Angeles, and they coexisted for four strained months at La Cresta Court before Kilhefner was able to finance a move.
Muted antagonism continued. Walker circulated a mock press release summarizing the meeting to select Faeries. It read, “Harry Hay, founder of the modern Gay Movement and a Gay Vision Circle Director, was shocked and hurt but vowed to go on with His Dream. Meantime, the two resignees say they are presently planning a new corporation—tentatively titled PRIMEVAL SLIME—and they feel the situation is far from a setback.” The phrasing mocked Hay’s often-quoted definition of spirituality: “The magnificent heritage of consciousness which is everything from the first cells dividing in the primeval slime to what you and I just thought.” For months the new group offered “Primeval Slime Study Groups.”
This defeat was a particularly bitter one. The Faerie sanctuary, where Harry had hoped to make his last years his most meaningful, was a dream that had taken a pounding and now seemed irreparably damaged. Having dismantled their retirement paradise in New Mexico he and John felt too old to sustain another move. But perhaps the worst of it was the searing familiarity of seeing his hopes of a cooperative gay brotherhood shattered. “I’ve built up the dream so often,” he said once, “only to see it torn down.”
There were now two gay spirit organizations. Rank-and-file Faeries pondered the opposing camps. Harry and John wanted to persevere with the land trust, but the three new core circle members took a wait-and-see attitude. (Only Thompson was successful at maintaining relationships with all the Faerie founders.) Kilbourne, Walker’s dashing acolyte, remained a loud mouthpiece. His frequent denunciations of the original movement—“Faerie is dead,” “Faeries are lame”—hastened the decline of Faerie Central at La Cresta Court and the northward drift of West Coast Faerie activity. Will Roscoe recorded that “the Faerie movement itself remained healthy, vital and growing, but the land trust, its premiere project, languished. The whole idea seemed cursed.”
The spin-off organization called itself Treeroots and adapted Walker’s old field of study, Jungian psychology. To adapt this practice to the gay sphere, Treeroots promoted ceremonial magic and Jungian psychological analysis. Kilhefner and Walker, the group’s guiding forces, sought to identify gay archetypes based on the dreams of openly gay men. “Gay Soul-Making” and “Coming Out Inside” were the names of classes they offered along with “Gay Voices and Visions” and an ongoing series of dream workshops called the “Dreamworld Descent of the Hero-Shaman.” Eventually Treeroots set hundreds of men in the Los Angeles area on the “healing path,” as Thompson phrased it, of its gay Jungian technique, though by the late Eighties it had scaled down its level of operation as Walker, Kilhefner and Kilbourne got their credentials and went into private practice as therapists.
(Even after Treeroots had “cleansed itself” of Harry Hay, he noted later that its troubles continued; Kilhefner, Walker and Kilbourne refused to speak to one another for long stretches, though none resigned from the corporation. Though Walker had laid his Faerie Fascism campaign on the basis that Harry was power-tripping, many people who approached Treeroots found that any criticisms they made about its handling of power were forcefully parried by being discredited as psychologically unstable.)
The resignations of Bloody Saturday wounded Harry emotionally and compromised him politically. It was the second rebellion in a year and, along with Walker’s destabilization campaign, sullied Hay’s reputation within the growing Faerie network. To seek solace, and perhaps as a chance to revitalize the group, Harry invited several friends to a hiking retreat in the Desolation Valley near Lake Tahoe. It was a favorite wilderness area of his, one he had visited often in the 1930s. “Young Indians long ago went [there] to discover their life’s totems,” he wrote in his invitation. “It might be a place for us to find renewal.”
Only Roscoe and Rose accepted, and the two couples hiked ten miles to the spare, exquisite valley with its granite peaks and crystal-clear lakes. The visit launched a deep and lasting friendship between the couples. They enjoyed each other’s company and in years to come made semiannual visits together to other locales. Will and Harry became especially close and found they had much in common. Roscoe, a left-of-center gay community organizer and writer, was fascinated by the older man’s ideas. For a long period, he became Harry’s closest tie to the San Francisco Faeries.
The Faeries, largely oblivious to any trouble among the “heads of a hierarchy” of which many refuted the very existence, continued in their own time and on their own terms as a national movement. Harry and John attended a third annual large Gathering, held in Pecos, New Mexico, in the summer of 1981, but Will and Brad, struggling with disillusionment, did not. Participants were as enthusiastic as at any Gathering before, though the idea of a national Gathering found some criticism as institutionalized and stale.
The “quantum leap of consciousness” the founders had dreamed about was still euphorically real, especially to first-timers, but to those who had envisioned a long-term community, it seemed like a short and temporary hop. But something slowly edging into gay life began to supersede any philosophical debates: the many-headed monster called AIDS, which required a major adjustment of sexual behavior and self-definition to all gay men. As the epidemic progressed, many felt fortunate that the Faerie movement, already based in social redefinition and in values of heart over crotch, allowed them to adjust more quickly and deeply to the challenges of the AIDS crisis.
In April of 1982 Roscoe and Rose came to visit the La Cresta house for six months, staying, as would a stream of Faeries throughout the decade, in the trailer parked there which Harry called the temenos1 The young San Francisco couple, by now affectionately referring to Harry and John as their “great aunts,” saw a continuation of the salon culture the older couple had cultivated at the Kent compound. Roscoe wrote that the visit was “a never-ending Faerie Circle,” and shared insights and communion lasted around the clock, “from sunrise, with John already in the kitchen, to sunset, about when Harry got active—to midnight, when he really got warmed up.”
During this visit Harry’s gay historical research had the dust shaken off it. “One night after dinner,” Roscoe recalled, “while making some point about gay people in the history of civilization, Harry made a sweeping gesture toward a dark corner of the room and said, ‘Of course, if you really want to know about this you’ll have to get into that: He was referring to a haphazard pile of cardboard file boxes crammed with thousands of pages of notes from the Fifties.” When Roscoe returned to San Francisco the next Autumn, he took four boxes of the notes with him to index and copy. He found Harry’s notes impressive in their scope and detail, though to a contemporary scholar, Hay’s preoccupation with the intricacies of Marxist historical materialist theory appeared dated.
Roscoe was intrigued by the fact that Hay had started with the North American Indian berdache, and then researched the history of civilization as he looked for specific manifestations of that role. Roscoe decided to take up where Harry had left off and develop full empirical studies.2
A Gathering held in the summer of 1982 proved to be a pinnacle of the early Faerie movement as it birthed a Faerie image and sent it into the world. Two plays were performed there, Without Reservations, a collaboration directed by Prince Panesi, which depicted a Faerie Gathering, and Midas Well, by William Moritz, which showed homoerotic, nature-worshipping values triumphing over materialism. The latter play, which Moritz wrote while living at the La Cresta Court house, was all the more poignant because the natural setting of the Gathering enhanced its theme that the values of antiquity are eternal and accessible. Both plays were performed later in Los Angeles.
Two Faerie films were created that summer, Devotions, by James Broughton and his lover Joel Singer, and Gathering, by Harry Frazier. These artworks were graceful fulfillments of Harry Hay’s hopes of seeing this new gay consciousness take form and venture into the world. That the scene for all of this, Eagle Creek near San Diego, was owned by a gay men’s leather group and had hosted S/M bike runs for years, made the Faerie magic especially miraculous.
In the early spring of 1983 Anita Hay died of cancer. For several years she had kept her illness secret from most of her friends and a stunned Harry attended the funeral. He was viewed as “the ghost of Christmas past” by a number of former intimates, including Martha Rinaldo and Helen Gorog, whom he had not seen since the divorce more than thirty years before. Kate and Hannah also saw him for the first time in years. He felt unwelcome and defensive; several old friends snubbed him completely, he sensed, out of bigotry. He did, somewhat gruffly, reach out after that event to re-establish a few friendships with some of those who had been dear to him in a very different lifetime.
That same year, Harry’s stock in the historian’s marketplace rose dramatically when the University of Chicago Press published John D’Emilio’s book, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. Its detailed account of the Mattachine Society in a serious historical context fixed Hay, Rowland, Jennings and the others as the founders of the continuous modern American gay movement, and the Mattachine founders generally praised the detailed reconstruction. Since D’Emilio’s interviews, interest in Hay remained. Shortly after his return from New Mexico, he was sketched by a local art collective called SPARC (Social and Political Art Resource Center) which portrayed his passing out the organizing “Call” to masked homosexuals in one scene of a massive mural in the Tujunga Wash of the San Fernando Valley.
Mitch Tuchman of the UCLA Oral History Program also requested further interviews. Oral history was a natural for Harry; Jeff Winters, an old antagonist of Hay’s from Mattachine days, reviewed D’Emilio’s book and ribbed, “Harry Hay curls up to an interviewer like a cat to a fire,” and another writer observed simply that “Harry Hay likes to talk.” Tuchman recorded seventeen and a half hours of Harry talking in great detail about the vast scope of his life, and the two-volume transcription, entitled We Are a Separate People, was added to the university’s Department of Special Collections in 1987.
As the Faeries became stronger and more independent Harry watched a shift in his role and a swelling of attention to more personal matters. A particularly memorable convergence was the 1983 Gathering at a gay-owned cattle ranch in Napa County. Harry arrived at the Blossom of Bone gathering, as it became known, with a physical problem: Months before, a falling bookcase had injured his left ankle. He was too restless to allow it to completely heal and by the time he arrived at the Gathering it had ulcerated and he was badly hobbled. Since Harry always enjoyed pitching in with the physical labor and the driving involved in preparing for Gatherings, he was miserable and unable to venture far from his immediate campsite.
Though he was a realist about his age, Harry’s stamina and enthusiasm had naturally prolonged his active engagement in the thick of the Faeries. It was shocking to see the hardy elder statesman felled; he even had to be carried to Circles. But his physical incapacitation gave him an opportunity to view the onset of age and the fading of power—and to ask for help. A homeopathic Faerie healer gave him a poultice of toasted cannabis seeds, which at first made the ulcers even worse, but was promised to be effective.
Harry was treated on a psychic level as well. William Stewart, a calligrapher from San Francisco, rather audaciously “adopted” the old man at one of the great Circles. Stewart had seen a specific need in Harry: “I realized that this man was struggling and needed to be ‘birthed’ into old age.” Stewart consequently provided himself as a symbolic gentle father—one, Harry realized, that would not beat him.
The next morning, Harry emotionally shared with the Heart Circle that he had awakened from powerful, sexual dreams about his real father and that he realized for the first time in his life that his father had truly loved him. Before leaving the Gathering Harry was the center of a healing Circle whose oms, all focused on him, sent a strange humming through him which he compared to ultrasound treatments he once had. As the gathering ended, Hay saw that his ankle, after months, had finally begun to heal.
Will Roscoe pointed out that the Napa Gathering had produced enough of a surplus for a down payment on a piece of land and began to promote a new model for the dormant sanctuary. The San Francisco Circle formed a nonprofit corporation with the Faerie name NOMENUS. (“No Men Us,” “No Menace,” and “No Menus” were among its interpretations.)
NOMENUS became the phoenix from the ashes of the Gay Vision Circle which all over again began the struggle for nonprofit status. In the Bay Area, Mica Kindman, Lloyd Fair, Cass Brayton and Will Roscoe were already guiding the project, and Harry and John drove up frequently to participate as well, sometimes for a single meeting. Being half a state away from the main Circle seemed to have a mellowing effect on Harry’s relationship with the group; Roscoe characterized Hay’s new role as “influence without dominance.”
Harry still took controversial positions and when he held the talisman he spoke passionately, but he followed the consensus of the whole. Eventually, the initial ideal of establishing an ongoing, self-sufficient community was abandoned as too ambitious for urban-based people; the new idea was to own a smaller piece of land that would be home to only a few caretakers and would host regular gatherings.
Mitch Walker and Chris Kilbourne moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and Treeroots followed. Kilbourne, Walker and Kilhefner made an unhappy attempt to reinvolve themselves with the Faeries, with the result that Harry and John, appalled by what they felt were crude psychological confrontation tactics (with Kilbourne again acting as caustic spokesman), withdrew from planning meetings and suffered the criticism of freshly activated Faeries who insisted that Faerie love conquer all. Hay and Burnside missed their first major Gathering (at Madre Grande near San Diego) which turned out to be the most explosive in Faeriedom; those Faeries that had chided Harry for staying away told him afterward that they wished they had stayed home too.
Treeroots returned to its fifty-minute-hour politeness and Kilbourne made it a point to attend other Faerie Gatherings later with substantially toned-down rhetoric. In 1987 a low-key Don Kilhefner visited the Gold Creek Gathering hosted by the Los Angeles Faeries. Still, it took long months for Harry to resume his relationship with the Faeries.
Harry found a day-glow-green button that warned, “Do Not Feed or Tease the Straight People.” He wore it everywhere; age did not dull his social daring or his tongue. The more completely he immersed himself in what he often called “my real family” of gay friends, the sharper became his ripostes to straights. Two of the straight people he teased were the wives of his ex-lovers. When Will Geer died in 1974 Harry injudiciously blurted to Geer’s widow, Herta, “I had him first.” (To her credit, Mrs. Geer shot back, “I had him longest.”)
In 1983 Harry was invited to a large birthday celebration at which James Broughton shared his films and poetry in a sort of cultural love-in. Broughton introduced his former lover, the famous film critic Pauline Kael, to Harry and said, “Pauline and I have a child together.” Hay queried, “Oh really? Which one was the father?” William Moritz, who accompanied Harry on that occasion, recalled that Kael’s review of Harry Hay was a withering glance and a muttered, “Son of a bitch!”
At home Harry spent increasing hours with his massive music library, making tapes for friends and deepening his already vast familiarity with various musical styles. Then, quite suddenly, he lost his hearing. It happened in 1985 at a ceremony honoring a Faerie friend, held in a low-ceilinged hall. Harry stood in the back, between two loudspeakers at ear-level, until a pain began that swiftly grew unbearable. He left too late.
“I walked in hearing and walked out deaf,” he discovered. His diagnosed condition of acoustical trauma in his left ear would have healed within weeks had he been a young man, but at seventy-one improvement came slowly; he was already deaf in his right ear from early blows delivered by his father. He grappled with a fierce depression because of the loss, and wrote to Earl Robinson, “This has been such a grief because Music has been my constant companion since I was about six months old.” It all sounded like toneless noise. Though he was fitted with an effective hearing aid, he never regained the full range of his hearing.
After the long wait, the dream of Faerie-owned land finally came true. In 1987, Magdalene Farm, on a forty-acre lot near Grant’s Pass, Oregon, was purchased by the large NOMENUS collective. The parcel was bordered by forested mountains and by Wolf Creek, the waterway for which the neighboring town was named. It offered large meadows for Circling, glades for tents of convening Faeries and dells for dallying. An old barn on the property served as the kitchen and first-aid station.
A gay man named George Jalbert had bought the land more than a decade earlier and the RFD collective in nearby Golden, Oregon, expanded there. Jalbert had long been concerned with creating a gay land trust collective, an interest which, amazingly, he got through a meeting with Harry in 1975. Jalbert was a friend of Carl Wittman and when Harry and John had dinner with them while at the height of their own land trust fever, Jalbert caught it and wrote regularly to Hay of his search for land. When he finally found it, he invited the Circle of Loving Companions to become part of the permanent collective there. That never worked out, but when Jalbert sold the land to NOMENUS, it seemed an uncanny fulfillment of Harry’s earliest vision.
“The Faeries need to come together for spiritual renewal,” Hay said often, “but their work is in the world.” Thus Harry was continually active in political campaigns, often as one of the few open gays and certainly as the only radical with white whiskers and a long, dangling earring. Among many other campaigns, he worked actively with Women’s Strike for Peace, Resist the Draft, and the Lavender Caucus of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. In his many speaking engagements on these various efforts, Harry wove gay consciousness into his message, always balancing coalition politics with a firm insistence on recognizing gays “as a separate people whose time has come”—a people who, he demanded, must not be “blackmailed into silence by the Left.”
Phyllis Bennis, a friend from the 1980 anti-draft campaign, recalled that Harry was as effective addressing straights as he was in the gay world. “He is quite charismatic and knows how to use certain verbal techniques in winning people over to his position. I think he is tactically aware that as an older person he can command attention. He does it very shamelessly and it’s great.” She spoke for many when she added, “If I didn’t agree with his politics, I’d probably be pissed off at how he uses power. But I do agree with him.”
Bennis provided an example of Hay’s determination to contribute his gay presence to coalition politics. “There was a huge blow-up between Harry and three Iranian students in the coalition. It wasn’t over his being in the coalition himself, but it was voiced as a challenge to the importance of the gays and lesbians in the movement. These guys were really denigrating the significance of gays, and doing it in a very superior, macho way, all the while trying to make it sound part of the progressive struggle.
“At some point in the meeting it turned into a screaming match. Harry went off. He launched into the most vitriolic attack on them, from the most flagrant sort of Radical Faerie style, yelling things like, ‘We are a nation!’ Finally he went out to take a little break and came back after a while. These guys cooled out too. Business somehow continued—for months. The point was that Harry was willing to work in a group where he knew there were folks who had less than respect for his identity and integrity. A lot of folks would have stomped out and stayed out. Not Harry.”
Harry attended countless demonstrations for progressive causes. In the 1980s he marched against the Contras, the pope, apartheid, the spraying of insecticide on urban areas, the death penalty and the profits-over-people policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Harry demonstrated for nuclear disarmament, a national policy to fight AIDS, and for a woman’s right to abortion. To many protests, he carried his customized all-purpose protest sign, a stick holding a pink cardboard triangle with colorful ribbons streaming from the upper corners. It read “No U.S. Intervention in Central Anywhere!”
Some straight Leftists criticized the sign as too bright for the somber events of the times, but Harry was determined to protest always as a Radical Faerie. At a massive demonstration called “L.A. Rejects Reagan,” shortly after the 1980 election, he worked with a group that wore all lavender and called itself “the Purple People,” one more effort to liven a “straight” demonstration with refreshing Faerie sparkle.
Diverse venues continued to feature him, including the documentary film and book Before Stonewall, in which he described the formation of the first Mattachine Society and his years before that in the demimonde where a people without a collective identity struggled to meet. In 1986, his gay movement role was discussed in Francis Fitzgerald’s book Cities on a Hill, serialized in The New Yorker, and Harry was astounded to find his interview with Jonathan Katz cited in Citizen Cohn, the biography of HUAC counsel Roy Cohn, Right-winger, closeted homosexual, and feared power broker; Harry Hay was the only openly homosexual Leftist of the period against whom Cohn could be contrasted.
After the Ball, a conservative attempt to reshape the gay movement as an advertising campaign for the “product” of gay rights, blasted the obtuse style of Harry’s writing. Critics notwithstanding, his letters and ideas often appeared in the gay press and an essay distilling many of his favorite themes was included in Mark Thompson’s edited anthology Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, alongside writings by or about Gerald Heard, Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Don Kilhefner and Mitch Walker. Hay’s piece, “A Separate People Whose Time Has Come,” recapped his theory that gay people represent a genetic mutation of consciousness whose active fostering is now required for human survival.
As it brutishly invaded the lives of so many in the 1980s, so AIDS darkened the lives of Harry and John. The phenomenon seemed inconceivable at first, though by the middle of the decade they had lost one housemate and several dear friends to the disease, including their beloved friend Carl Wittman. Harry added AIDS-related matters to his voluminous newspaper scanning and clipping. He had long predicted that conservatives would seek revenge in a backlash against the gay movement and stated that he suspected malicious government complicity in the ethnically targeted carnage of the epidemic.
At whistle-blowing, drum-beating demonstrations of ACT UP Los Angeles, Harry was there—with his hearing aid turned off. The AIDS epidemic gave new urgency to a comment that Harry had made often about gay political strategy: that gay people must explain their contribution to humanity as a whole. The heterosexual mainstream, he insisted, “has to understand why it is to their advantage to change their laws to protect us. That understanding is our only security. And we are running out of time to get that across.”
John Burnside explored the Symmetricon as a therapy for people with AIDS. His instrument had gained steady attention throughout the 1970s and was used as a special effect for several film and television projects, as well as for deep relaxation therapy. In 1987, Symmetricon performances were part of the Spiritual in Art exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The couple had always been curious about the impact of the moving light mandalas on the autonomic nervous system, and as the epidemic grew, Burnside built more models to make videotapes for viewing by people with AIDS.
Harry continued to receive speaking invitations from groups as diverse as the Los Angeles chapter of Black and White Men Together, gay students at U.C. Berkeley and Georgia State University. He took his speaking engagements seriously and often stayed up night after night to prepare. Frequently, he felt he had made a new breakthrough in understanding who gays are and what, as a group, gay people needed to do next. In addressing groups outside the Faeries, Harry invariably spoke of expanding gay identity beyond his original proposal of the minority model, which he felt was no longer politically effective or fitting to the unique natures and talents of gay people. He tended to speak at great length and dramatically, and, with techniques honed over a lifetime he always conveyed his message.
His most prestigious invitation came in 1989 when Jacques Vandemborghe, head of the French Gay Archives, invited him to give an address at the Sorbonne, which he regretfully was unable to accept. Hay served as a featured speaker at the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade in 1982 and, with John, as Grand Marshall of the Long Beach Gay Pride Parade in 1986. On his seventy-seventh birthday, in 1989, the city council of West Hollywood issued a proclamation honoring Harry’s lifetime of activism. Quoting Harry’s own description of the spirit of the Mattachine, the council saluted his chief characteristic: “Above all, audacity.”
New York Heritage of Pride invited Harry to address the 1989 Gay Pride Parade in Manhattan, which proved a great adventure as well as a special honor; the occasion marked the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall riot. In Manhattan, Harry and John stayed with Jonathan Ned Katz. On their second night in New York, Harry went to an oral history presentation called Stonewall Revisited, featuring eyewitnesses to the riot. The existence of the New York Mattachine Society and its part in the action was mentioned, and, recalled Katz, “Someone said, “What’s the Mattachine?” I said, ‘He’s here, he’s here.’ It was very dramatic.” Harry was introduced to the crowd as the man who had laid the foundations of gay activism two decades before Stonewall. He received a standing ovation and after the presentation dozens of people approached him. He recalled that “several came up and pressed my hand and said, ‘Thank you for my life.’ This was so unexpected and touching that I was suddenly at the point of tears.”
Saturday, June 24, 1989 at a rally on the Great Lawn in Central Park, a huge crowd assembled to hear guest speakers, including poet Allen Ginsberg, writer Joan Nestle and activist Harry Hay. The sun-drenched crowd of several thousand went wild as ACT UP of New York led a contingent of nonpermitted marchers from the Village onto the lawn. “I sensed more militance than in recent years, more receptiveness to the militant messages we heard later,” said Shane Que-Hee, a longtime friend of Hay’s.
Harry grated the audience with criticism of ACT UP’s “hetero-imitative” confrontation tactics. (“Very Hay-ish!” commented Que-Hee.) A lengthy historical introduction as only Harry could give it further ruffled the crowd. But, dressed in the latest Faerie fashion—a tutu of crinoline and army camouflage—Harry gained his listeners’ favor as he proposed the Radical Faerie approach of “askance” tactics, as exemplified by his costume. His remarks received sustained applause and were reprinted in three lesbian and gay newspapers around the country.
Que-Hee felt, upon seeing Harry onstage, that he physically summarized the years of the lesbian and gay movement in the United States. He noted that “age did not bring resignation except for those physical things that age demands as its due; the mind would never bow to anyone.”
In the next day’s parade Harry marched with the Radical Faeries, who ran through the streets of Manhattan with a vigor and color uncommon even for them. This followed Harry’s curt (and rather shocking to those who had extended the invitation) refusal to march in the founders’ section of the parade. It was not uncommon for Harry to decline just such well-intentioned civilities; he once sent a friend into convulsions of laughter by complaining that “the kids” in the movement were looking at him as “the Dinosaur Duchess.” In a 1983 letter to a friend, he complained that he was “already scheduled to be a dinosaur for a gay gerontology conference, and now San Francisco Gay Pride has asked me to come up and be a dinosaur”—the same week! He requested to march in a different group.
Through the years Harry remained true to his Marxist politics, never once becoming anti-Communist despite his own painful experience. As upheavals began in the Soviet Union, he was fascinated with Gorbachev’s perestroika and intently watched as reforms swept Eastern Europe at the turn of the decade. “I was delighted and felt it was long overdue,” he said. “And I was thunderstruck by the revelations of what had been suppressed by the bureaucracy and by the primitiveness of the U.S.S.R. It brought back memories of the absolutely wonderful experience between 1938 and 1942 where we were actively exploring theory and practice, with regular six month evaluations and adjustments. We’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we lived in the Soviet Union and could do this every day?’ It turned out that it wouldn’t have been.”
It saddened Hay to see people “throwing out the baby with the bath water” in completely denouncing Communism, and pronouncements of the decline of Marxism, he insisted, were premature. “Marxism needs to be revised, based on new scientific knowledge, particularly of human behavior,” he said. “The underlying methodology will be proved sound.” Harry was pleased in 1990 to be working with an advisory council to help facilitate that revision.
As they passed their twenty-fifth year of “walking hand in hand together,” as Hay often described their relationship, the loving companions Hay and Burnside looked ever more like a couple, alike yet complementary, supportive in a thousand details by practiced instinct. Their ongoing dialogue continued with as much excitement as ever, and the vivacity and hardiness of both astonished their friends. It was their union, Harry once told a television interviewer that gave him the will to keep going. “I had to wait until I was fifty to find out what my life was all about. And since then, it’s been the most sumptuous life you can imagine.”3
In the spaces between their togetherness, Harry spent long nights scanning newspapers for political and scientific information, firing off letters filled with news, insights and his ever-present opinions. Often he bent over his typewriter until dawn; depriving himself of sleep seemed only more agreeable to Harry as he grew older. As he prepared remarks for his frequent speaking engagements he increasingly wove stories from his own life into his speeches, looking down from, as Black Elk called it, the mountain of old age. Harry recounted scenes from the Mattachine, from demonstrations in the 1930s, from his days on his uncle’s ranch, all to illustrate points about freedom and community.
Even in his old age Harry sometimes marched alone—and with substantial impact. One solo protest started innocuously but ended up among his most newsworthy feats. It began at the 1986 Gay Pride Parade in Los Angeles, a march sponsored by Christopher Street West (CSW), in honor of the street where the Stonewall riot took place in 1969.
What became known as the “Harry Hay Incident” was actually one aspect of the multifaceted “Valerie Terrigno Incident,” a complex political scenario involving the first mayor of West Hollywood, which was then ballyhooed as the world’s first gay-run city. Terrigno, an open lesbian, had resigned over a scandal that Harry felt involved a “wicked miscarriage of justice.” A story in the Los Angeles Times described the plan of CSW to block the appearance of former Mayor Terrigno in the upcoming festivity.
Harry’s reaction was that “any place I walk, Valerie walks with me.” Disdaining a “blatant or hetero-imitative type of confrontation,” he wanted a protest that was both Faerie and specific. The result was a sandwich-board sign made out of cardboard and muslin trimmed with pinking shears. On the front of what appeared almost to be a Donna Reed apron he wrote “Valerie Terrigno Walks With Me.”
Choosing another gay cause that had been cast out over contested morality, he added to the back, “NAMBLA Walks With Me,” thus bringing into the parade another taboo entity: the North American Man/Boy Love Association. NAMBLA, of which Hay has never been a member, advocates eliminating age-of-consent laws and has been barred from marching in the gay parades of several cities. When he learned that CSW refused to allow them to march, Harry was appalled by the hypocrisy of a self-appointed gay establishment that would declare a section of the gay community unrespectable. He could not contain his outrage.
The resulting confrontation resembled something out of a Frank Capra movie, gay community style. The septuagenarian gay movement founder was addressed by a policeman who informed him that CSW had to approve all signs in the parade, and threatened to escort Hay out of the parade unless he removed his unauthorized messages. Hay refused to back down. When it was apparent that he intended to keep his sign and to march, he found himself surrounded by four mounted policemen. CSW public-relations officers wrung their hands. The cops glared from their horses. Harry held his ground. The impasse was broken only when an impassioned Radical Faerie, who feared that Harry would be jailed, ripped the contested sign from his neck, shredded it and stomped on the pieces. Signless, Harry Hay marched. This episode however, was photographed and widely reported in the gay media, both locally and nationally.
CSW voted to reprimand Hay and accused him of cooking up the whole incident just to give them bad press. They shrilly (and unfathomably) compared Harry Hay to Jerry Falwell. Hay’s response to CSW, in his letter published in a local lesbian and gay paper called The News, was equally sharp: “Gay pride is long out of date. How long are we going to go around saying, ‘I’m proud I have blue eyes? San Francisco and Boston have been calling it Gay Freedom Day for years: maybe it’s time we had a Gay Freedom Day here too.” To those who self-righteously condemned his support of NAMBLA, he told the story of Matt, his twenty-five year old first love when he was only fourteen and pointed out that “having molested an adult when I was a child until I found out what I needed to know,” he had a different perspective on the issue.
The incident provides a quintessential glimpse into Hay’s character. The new gay establishment was rarely challenged at that time, but with his instinct to push the agenda and stretch the status quo, Harry double-dared the gay powers that be. On sheer principle, and with a strong reminder that he was not yet through kicking, he took on the most feared and despised issues within the community, issues no one else would touch.
Whatever crossed his path was subject to that change. When Harry was asked once to speak on a panel titled “Growing Old and Gay,” he refused to appear unless the name was changed. The panel in which Harry Hay participated was called “Growing Older and Gayer.”
1. Temenos is the Greek word for an area that is cut off or separated. Hay used it to refer to the “edge of the village” dwelling designated by ancient societies for gays. The Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Los Angeles adopted the term as the name of their youth outreach program.
2. Roscoe edited Living the Spirit, an anthology of gay American Indian writings, and his book, The Zuni Man-Woman, which chronicles the life of We’Wha, a Zuni berdache famous in the nineteenth century, is scheduled for publication by the University of New Mexico Press.
3. Beginning in 1990, Harry and John put out a Call for what they initially called “The Daisy Chain Workshop” and what became known as “SexMagick,” a week-long intensive, requiring a full commitment to staying through to the end, no exceptions. Harry called the Daisy Chain Workshop/SexMagick his “gift to the Faeries” and saw it as a major part of his legacy, to train a new generation of Faeries in a process of subject-Subject relations, Circle Process and consensus through self-revelation, self-examination and trust. For weeks at a time each summer, right up until the very end of his life, John and Harry would travel to Wolf Creek NOMENUS Sanctuary and conduct the SexMagick Workshop to invited participants who had to pass Harry’s strict gatekeeping. John, as always, managed the logistics and the kitchen. For a ten-day week, groups of Faeries ranging from a half dozen to as many as twenty or more, would sit under the walnut tree located just outside the Garden House at Wolf Creek and engage in the Circle Process and strive for complete consensus. The actual proceedings and the details of the workshops (called 101, 201 and 301, denoting “first year” “second year” etc.) remain secret. They continued to do these SexMagick Workshops until 2000 when Harry became to ill to travel. Since Harry’s passing, several participants have continued the Workshops at various Faerie Sanctuaries around the country.