I first encountered Harry Hay in the late 1970s during an informal gay liberation meeting held in a public park in Los Angeles.
We met again, a few years later on the campus of the University of California where I was a student. He was there speaking about his theories on gay consciousness. After his talk, I showed him a watercolor at a show I had done at a nearby gallery. Timidly, I explained that I called it “Can’t Sleep” because of its homoerotic content.
He looked at me and wryly said, “Well, I figured it wasn’t because of indigestion.”
So began a complex friendship that lasted until his death at age ninety on October 24, 2002. By complex I mean, at turns, thorny, inspirational, exasperating and educational. Let’s just say it ran the gamut of human emotions.
After graduating from UCLA in May 1983 I began a career as a freelance journalist—among other pursuits in social activism. In due time it became apparent to both Harry and me that I would be the one to write the long over-due biography about the great man; the person generally acknowledged as “the father of the modern gay movement.”
I’ll never forget the day we formally began work. I went to the bungalow on La Cresta Court in east Hollywood, which he shared with his longtime life partner John Burnside and was ceremoniously ushered inside to conduct the first interview.
Within minutes Harry was throwing me out!
“Oh, no,” I grimly thought. The project of the biography was crumbling before it even began.
He flung his ancient finger at me. Then at the door he shouted, “I can see it in his eyes. He’s an FBI agent!” While I thought he was ending the relationship, in truth he was having a paranoid episode. It was only through the intervention of John that I was saved from oblivion.
I didn’t know what to do. It seemed like the book idea was over. But somehow I was able to prevail, save the biography and continue my research. This book, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement, was finally published in 1990 by Sasha Alyson and restored to print over two decades later by White Crane Books. Through the long course of its writing, I learned many surprising things. Stories about Harry I never felt comfortable to reveal until now, a decade after his death.
I vividly remember the day Harry told me about Rudi Gernreich, the famous fashion designer who had helped him clandestinely start the Mattachine Society in 1950, the nation’s first sustained gay organization. “I will only tell you this story once,” he said, and then began almost weeping as he recalled the love of his life.
Many years later, Hay and Burnside visited Gernreich and his current lover, but the old affair-of-the-heart had long been over between the two activists. He had tried once before to reunite with Gernreich—but it was just too late. By now, Rudi had a life-long partner, as did Harry.
One time during the writing of the biography, Hay’s younger brother, Jack, got drunk before the interview with me. He said that Harry was such a genius at everything he would “stumble around,” i.e., Harry was so good at every task he did he could never settle down to do just one thing expertly. I don’t think Jack could ever face the fact that his brother was gay. After all, Harry had married.
Harry blamed the marriage on the psychoanalytic trends and fashions of the time. Like a lot of gay men of his generation, Harry, convinced that it was essential to his mental well-being, had indeed married a woman. What is not widely known is Anita Platky Hay was an intersexed individual (a person born with both male and female genitalia). Someone who knew her intimately later confirmed this fact to me personally.
Hay was a man of infinite scope. His eldest daughter, whom he had not spoken to for many years, described him to me as “a very determined individual.” I interviewed countless people in writing this biography. And, in fact, Harry was a complex and determined individual—everyone said that without exception. Certainly he was no less so in my own life.
Yet, I will always love Harry Hay for those very reasons.
— Stuart Timmons, Los Angeles, 2011