WHO THE HELL IS HARRY HAY?
|
Harry (Henry) Hay (aka Eann MacDonald) founded the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries and has been credited as being the founder of the modern gay liberation movement. Harry Hay, died at 90 years of age on October 24, 2002. He was always way ahead of his time. |
Harry was born April 7, 1912 in England to well-to-do American parents. He moved with his parents to Los Angeles in 1917 where he grew up and graduated with honors from Los Angeles High School.
Harry became interested in organizing gay men on the occasion of his first gay sexual experience at age 17. He went to Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, a notorious cruise area for gays in the 1920's and 1930's, and seduced a man (Champ Simmons) who was at least twice Harry's age at the time. Champ was devastated to later learn that Harry was not only a virgin, but also "jail-bait", but Champ told how he had been brought out by member of the Chicago Society for Human Rights (1924-1925). The idea of gay men getting together, even to just socialize was a radical idea. Although intrigued by the notion of organizing gay men, Harry put aside the idea on Champ's advice that it was much too dangerous.
After a year at Stanford University, in 1931 Harry took the radical and unheard of step of declaring himself gay to all of his friends, classmates, fraternity, clubs, and organizations in which he was a member.
Harry's first gay organization was conceived at a beer bust at USC in August of 1948. Harry sat up all night writing out the prospectus of the group to be called "Bachelors for Wallace" (a presidential candidate). When he called the men at the beer bust to discuss the prospectus, none of them remembered discussing it and when he tried to recruit other homosexuals into the group they thought he was mad to attempt anything so daring as organizing homosexuals.
The anti-communist witch hunts were in operation and it was clear to Harry Hay that Senator Joseph McCarthy was intending to use gays as scapegoats to bring in fascism. Harry knew gays had to organize, but struggled to get gays and sponsors interested or brave enough to participate.
In his third prospectus written July7, 1950, Harry described the organization as a service and welfare fraternal organization. He refers to gays as "the androgynous minority". Among the reasons for the group's formation:
At the time he wrote this prospectus Harry was a teacher at the commumist run California Labor School and a sought-after speaker in the Communist Party. Without knowing for sure if they were gay or not, Hay presented his prospectus to three men at the school, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, and Dale Jennings. All three showed up at his home and began a series of discussion that resulted in The Missions and Purposes of the Mattachine Society, a California Corporation, ratified on July 20, 1951. This document outlined the purpose of the organization:
In an interview with Jonathan Katz in Gay American History (1976) Harry Hay says, "about the fall of 1951 I decided that organizing the Mattachine was a call to me deeper than the innermost reaches of spirit, a vision-quest more important than life. I went to the communist party and discussed this 'total call' upon me, recommending to them my expulsion." Instead of expulsion, they dropped him as 'a security risk.
On March 12, 1953, Paul Coates, a columnist for the Los Angeles Mirror reported that a pressure group claiming to represent the homosexual voters of Los Angeles was vigorously shopping for campaign promies. In the article he associated the Mattachine Society with Fred M. Snider, an unfriendly witness at the House Un-American Activities Committee Hearings. Middle class gay members of the Mattachine Foundation were outraged at being painted un-American and moved to take control by making it a democratic organization instead of a private organization.
A convention of delegates was held on April 11, 1953 at the First Univeralist Church at Ninth and Crenshaw in Los Angeles. 500 delegates show up for the convention at a time when gay men rarely dared to be seen in even small groups. Each of the delegates represented at least ten other men. This was the first gathering of such size and importance anywhere in the United States. Harry Hay addressed the convention and his speech was published anonymously the following month in ONE Magazine. In his speech Hay reiterated that the Mattachine Foundation was non-partisan and non-political in its objective and operations and that it's goal was to stir up debate.
The following day, word came to Hay that a Congressional Investigating Committee was headed West. All four of the original organizers and founders of the Mattachine Foundation knew they could be associated with the Communist Party. April 12, 1953 was Harry Hay's last day of involvement in the Mattachine and the beginning of Jim Kepner's long activity in the gay rights movement. This turning point in the organization led to a new concern for legal change and an image of respectability by seeking prestigious people and professional leaders.
In May of 1954 the scandal periodical Confidential, (the same one that outed Liberace) published an article about the Mattachine Foundation with the headline "America, On Guard! HOMOSEXUALS, INC." The sub-title read, "Don't sell the twisted twerps short! Once they met in secret. Today, the've organized as the 'Mattachines,' with a goal of a million members and a $6,000,000 bankroll!"
The Confidential article associated Hay with the Communist Party and the Mattachine Foundation, so he assumed the House Un-American Activites Committee (HUAC) knew about his gay organizing.
On a Saturday in July of 1955 Harry Hay was called to testify before HUAC and fully expected that in addition to the question of his communist affiliation he would be asked if he was gay.
Hay recalls the situation, "What happened was the attorney for the committee got a little confused with all my gab and asked me if I were a member of the party. I said no. That's when the shit hit the fan. This committee member (he wasn't a big man, but he was a very chunky sort of man) he got apoplectic looking, and he stood up (he was holding on to the edge of his desk) and he stood up in such a way that he pushed this huge oak desk over on it's face. Clunk! He looked to me like the comandante from Don Giovanni rising up out of the floor. He was apoplectic. And he spits out, 'When did you quit, out in the hall before you came in?" He was purple and swelling at the neck, out of his tight collar. That was when I let off my crack: 'I'm not in the habit of confiding in stool pigeons or their buddies.' Now 'their buddies', of course was the committee, and that could have put me in contempt. Everybody was aksing everybody else, 'What did he say??? Did you catch wat he said??' They couldn't make me repeat it, and the poor little closet queen who was transcribing couldn't find it in the reams of paper ribbon jumbled up on the floor around him. My attorney had just about gone through the floor. He said, 'My God, I can't get you out of this one. I just hope to God they don't find the transcript.' The people in the court room were doubling up with laughter. Finally, one of the committee members said, 'I think we know what the witness meant by his remarks, and I suggest tht we dismiss him." And that was it. It turned out they didn't know about it [Mattachine Foundation]. What I hadn't known was that the committee's information was more than five years old. ...I was prepared to handle the Gay question and handle it well. I was sorry that they didn't ask." (1)
Harry's goal in life was to change society rather than to join it. It was likely Harry Hay's activities in the Communist Party that gave him the skills to organize gays in the face of fear and repression.
A biography of Harry Hay by Stuart Timmons titled The Trouble With Harry Hay was published in 1990 and, another book by Will Roscoe entitled Radically Gay included Hay's writings and printed articles . Gay American History, written by Jonathan Katz and published in 1976 and 1985 includes anecdotes of many of the political activities and an informative interview of Harry Hay.
Through Harry's interest in Native American tribal life and his years spent in New Mexico, the Radical Faeries group came into being. It began as an annual gathering of gays, who found spiritual brotherhood through music, dance, poetry, and a "laying on of hands." Rivalry in leadership, direction, and vision split the Radical Faeries into smaller factions.
Despite that Harry became aware he was gay in his teens, he married a woman he met at a Communist Party meeting. They adopted two baby girls whom Harry loved dearly. After many years of putting on appearances, Harry divorced his wife in order to actualize his gayness and enjoy male companionship. John Burnside, who left his wife to become Harry's latest lover, has been with him for over 30 years.
(1) Jonathan Katz, Gay American History, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1976, 1985, pages 105-109.
By Angela Watercutter
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 24, 2002
SAN
FRANCISCO
Harry Hay, a pioneering activist in the gay rights movement, died Thursday, according to family members who said he had suffered from lung cancer. He was 90.
Hay, among the first to argue that gays represented a cultural minority, devoted his life to progressive politics and in 1950 founded the secret network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society.
"What we haven't been doing in the 20th century is discovering what we bring with us to contribute, which the United States needs, but doesn't necessarily have," Hay told The Associated Press in a recent interview. "Then our cultural minority appears in order to serve a purpose, instead of spending all our effort, time and money finding sex because it is the one thing that's been denied to us."
Hay's contribution to the American political landscape can be traced to his involvement in the Communist Party and the labor movement in the 1930s.
He was an actor living in Los Angeles in 1934 when he first became active in left-wing politics. Hay quickly realized he needed to do similar organizing in the gay community.
Hay and his partner of 39 years, John Burnside, moved to San Francisco three years ago after a lifetime in Los Angeles. Hay was diagnosed several weeks ago with lung cancer and died peacefully in his sleep at his San Francisco home early Thursday morning, family members said in a statement.
"Harry Hay's determined, visionary activism significantly lifted gays out of oppression," said Stuart Timmons, who published a biography of Hay in 1990.
"All gay people continue to benefit from his fierce affirmation of gays as a people."
Hay formed the Mattachine Society in 1949. Based in Los Angeles, it was the first sustained homosexual rights organization in the United States.
But at the height of the investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Mattachine members feared investigation. They decided to make the group public and purge it of any Communist influence, including Hay.
Hay was called before the committee in 1955, but refused to testify. The committee considered him insignificant and he was dismissed.
Throughout the 1960s, Mattachine grew and Hay was a step ahead when patrons at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, clashed with police in 1969 in an incident considered the birth of the modern gay rights movement.
"The importance of Stonewall is that it changed the pronoun from 'I' to 'We,'" Hay told The AP. "When I told them at Stonewall that I had been thrown out of the Mattachine Society because I insisted that we were a cultural minority and not individuals, they couldn't believe that. By the time of Stonewall they thought we had always been a cultural minority."
Hay is survived by Burnside and his adopted daughters, Kate Berman and Hannah Muldaven.