Harry Hay

April 7, 1912 (age 90)

Worthing, West Sussex, United Kingdom

Hay left Stanford without graduating and returned to a bohemian life in Los Angeles. For the next few years he held acting jobs in theaters and movies; wrote poetry and stories; worked as a ghostwriter; and, with two friends, made a surrealist film, Even - As You and I (1936). During this time, he became involved in leftist causes. Will Geer, one of Hay’s many lovers in the early to mid-1930s (and who later played the grandfather in the 1970s television drama The Wallons), initiated Hay into Los Angeles labor circles and the Communist Party. Together they participated in labor demonstrations and political theater. Hay described his experiences at the San Francisco general strike of 1934 - where the police shot dead two protesters - as a life-changing event. Like most gay men of his time, Hay married. A disaffected Roman Catholic, he married Anita Platky, a Jewish woman and fellow Communist Party member, in 1938. To their circle of progressive friends, the Hays seemed a model couple. They were active in Communist Party functions, both in New York (1939 - 1942) and after returning to Los Angeles. They adopted two girls. Hay taught Marxism and folk music history at leftist organizations and in 1948 landed a job as a production engineer at Leahy Manufacturing, where he worked until 1964. Hay continued to have gay dalliances. In 1948, following the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (which suggested that homosexuality was more prevalent than was previously thought), Hay began formulating an idea for a gay organization. At a time when gays were forbidden to assemble in public and were frequently harassed by police, Hay asserted that homosexuals constituted a cultural minority and, like racial and ethnic minorities, deserved equal civil rights with the majority. Hay found few sympathetic ears until 1950 when he met and began a two-year relationship with Rudi Gernreich, an Austrian refugee and fashion designer who would become famous in the 1960s and 1970s. With Gernreich and five others, Hay founded a secret organization based in Los Angeles that became known as the Mattachine Society (named after the all-male troupes of masked clowns in medieval France who mocked social conventions). The first significant and long-lasting gay rights organization in the country, the society held discussion groups and encouraged political action. In 1952 it won a historic legal victory when Dale Jennings, one of the Mattachine founders, was acquitted in a police-entrapment case. The society spun off satellite chapters and ONE Incorporated, which published ONE Magazine: The Homosexual Viewpoint, the first widely distributed gay publication in the United States. With his role in the fledging homophile movement (as this first wave of gay organizing activities is often called), Hay made a break from his former life. In 1951 he and Platky divorced, and he resigned from the Communist Party (although he remained a dedicated Marxist throughout his life and continued to fight for various oppressed groups). The anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s caught up with him in 1953. A faction of the Mattachine Society that favored adapting to the mainstream forced out the founders, citing their communist roots. In 1955 Hay made a short but dramatic appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. From 1952 to 1962 Hay was in a relationship with Jorn Kamgren, a Danish milliner who did not share his intellectual or political interests. Hay devoted this period to the study of gay anthropology and wrote voluminous notes on the roles of gay people in non-western cultures. In 1963 he met John Burnside, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. For the next ten years, Hay helped run a factory that manufactured a type of kaleidoscope that Burnside, an engineer, had invented. Although he remained politically active, Hay increasingly turned his attention to defining gay spirituality. He grew his hair long and wore colorful clothes and bold accessories. In 1965 Hay founded the Circle of Loving Companions, a small but enduring collective made up mostly of friends. The next year Hay helped organize the first gay protest parade in Los Angeles. In 1969 a more militant and visible chapter in the gay rights movement opened with the Stonewall riots in New York City, named after a Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, at which a routine police raid in June touched off riots when the bar’s patrons resisted arrest. Later that year, Hay was elected the first chair of the Gay Liberation Front of Los Angeles. In 1970 Hay and Burnside moved to San Juan Pueblo in northern New Mexico, where they stayed until 1979. During this time Hay continued his study of Indian culture, successfully led a campaign to stop a dam project on the Rio Grande, and developed a theory of gay consciousness that led to the first Radical Faerie conference in 1979. In settings ranging from small gatherings to large rural retreats, the Radical Faeries encouraged gay men to free themselves from the constraints of straight society and its "gay clones," and to redefine their relationships with one another, nature, and the spiritual world. Although internal strife marred Hay’s leadership in the growing movement, he stayed involved in the group, his Utopian vision of gay brotherhood. After moving back to Los Angeles with Burnside in 1979, Hay continued to lecture, organize, and protest in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999 the couple moved to San Francisco, where Hay died of lung cancer at age ninety. His body was cremated. Hay’s personal papers are housed in the San Francisco Public Library’s James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center. His major speeches, papers, and interviews are collected in Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (1996), ed. by Will Roscoe. Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (1990), is a detailed account of Hay’s life. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both 25 Oct. 2002). There is also a documentary film, Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay (2001), directed by Eric Slade.

Harry Hay Edit Profile

also known as Donald Webster Cory

activist Actor philosopher writer

Background

Harry Hay was born on April 7, 1912, in Worthing, West Sussex, United Kingdom, the day the Titanic sank. His father Harry Hay, Sr. worked as a mining engineer in South Africa and Chile, but the family settled in Southern California. His mother's name was Margaret Hay (née Neall).

Hay was the oldest of three children. After Hay’s father lost part of his right leg in an accident in 1916, the family moved to southern California and settled in Los Angeles in 1919. Tall and precocious, the young Hay rebelled against his status-conscious mother and especially his authoritarian father, who, in the summer of 1925, sent the thirteen-year-old boy to work on a Nevada ranch. During this time, ranch hands who were members of the Industrial Workers of the World introduced Hay to progressive politics. Also during this time, Hay, who had a lifelong fascination with American Indian culture, received a blessing from a Northern Paiute Indian elder.

Education

Harry Hay attended Cahuenga Elementary School, also at the age of ten, he enrolled in Virgil Junior High School. Later he attended Los Angeles High School.

Hay graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1929 and attended Stanford University from 1930 to 1932. While at Stanford, he discovered San Francisco’s gay society, had a series of affairs with men, and defied conventions of the time by declaring his homosexuality to his classmates. Hay left Stanford without graduating and returned to a bohemian life in Los Angeles.

Career

Hay left Stanford without graduating and returned to a bohemian life in Los Angeles. For the next few years he held acting jobs in theaters and movies; wrote poetry and stories; worked as a ghostwriter; and, with two friends, made a surrealist film, Even - As You and I (1936). During this time, he became involved in leftist causes. Will Geer, one of Hay’s many lovers in the early to mid-1930s (and who later played the grandfather in the 1970s television drama The Wallons), initiated Hay into Los Angeles labor circles and the Communist Party. Together they participated in labor demonstrations and political theater. Hay described his experiences at the San Francisco general strike of 1934 - where the police shot dead two protesters - as a life-changing event.

Like most gay men of his time, Hay married. A disaffected Roman Catholic, he married Anita Platky, a Jewish woman and fellow Communist Party member, in 1938. To their circle of progressive friends, the Hays seemed a model couple. They were active in Communist Party functions, both in New York (1939 - 1942) and after returning to Los Angeles. They adopted two girls. Hay taught Marxism and folk music history at leftist organizations and in 1948 landed a job as a production engineer at Leahy Manufacturing, where he worked until 1964.

Hay continued to have gay dalliances. In 1948, following the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (which suggested that homosexuality was more prevalent than was previously thought), Hay began formulating an idea for a gay organization. At a time when gays were forbidden to assemble in public and were frequently harassed by police, Hay asserted that homosexuals constituted a cultural minority and, like racial and ethnic minorities, deserved equal civil rights with the majority.

Hay found few sympathetic ears until 1950 when he met and began a two-year relationship with Rudi Gernreich, an Austrian refugee and fashion designer who would become famous in the 1960s and 1970s. With Gernreich and five others, Hay founded a secret organization based in Los Angeles that became known as the Mattachine Society (named after the all-male troupes of masked clowns in medieval France who mocked social conventions). The first significant and long-lasting gay rights organization in the country, the society held discussion groups and encouraged political action. In 1952 it won a historic legal victory when Dale Jennings, one of the Mattachine founders, was acquitted in a police-entrapment case. The society spun off satellite chapters and ONE Incorporated, which published ONE Magazine: The Homosexual Viewpoint, the first widely distributed gay publication in the United States.

With his role in the fledging homophile movement (as this first wave of gay organizing activities is often called), Hay made a break from his former life. In 1951 he and Platky divorced, and he resigned from the Communist Party (although he remained a dedicated Marxist throughout his life and continued to fight for various oppressed groups). The anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s caught up with him in 1953. A faction of the Mattachine Society that favored adapting to the mainstream forced out the founders, citing their communist roots. In 1955 Hay made a short but dramatic appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

From 1952 to 1962 Hay was in a relationship with Jorn Kamgren, a Danish milliner who did not share his intellectual or political interests. Hay devoted this period to the study of gay anthropology and wrote voluminous notes on the roles of gay people in non-western cultures.

In 1963 he met John Burnside, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. For the next ten years, Hay helped run a factory that manufactured a type of kaleidoscope that Burnside, an engineer, had invented. Although he remained politically active, Hay increasingly turned his attention to defining gay spirituality. He grew his hair long and wore colorful clothes and bold accessories. In 1965 Hay founded the Circle of Loving Companions, a small but enduring collective made up mostly of friends. The next year Hay helped organize the first gay protest parade in Los Angeles.

In 1969 a more militant and visible chapter in the gay rights movement opened with the Stonewall riots in New York City, named after a Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, at which a routine police raid in June touched off riots when the bar’s patrons resisted arrest. Later that year, Hay was elected the first chair of the Gay Liberation Front of Los Angeles. In 1970 Hay and Burnside moved to San Juan Pueblo in northern New Mexico, where they stayed until 1979. During this time Hay continued his study of Indian culture, successfully led a campaign to stop a dam project on the Rio Grande, and developed a theory of gay consciousness that led to the first Radical Faerie conference in 1979.

In settings ranging from small gatherings to large rural retreats, the Radical Faeries encouraged gay men to free themselves from the constraints of straight society and its "gay clones," and to redefine their relationships with one another, nature, and the spiritual world. Although internal strife marred Hay’s leadership in the growing movement, he stayed involved in the group, his Utopian vision of gay brotherhood. After moving back to Los Angeles with Burnside in 1979, Hay continued to lecture, organize, and protest in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999 the couple moved to San Francisco, where Hay died of lung cancer at age ninety. His body was cremated.

Hay’s personal papers are housed in the San Francisco Public Library’s James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center. His major speeches, papers, and interviews are collected in Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (1996), ed. by Will Roscoe. Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (1990), is a detailed account of Hay’s life. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both 25 Oct. 2002). There is also a documentary film, Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay (2001), directed by Eric Slade.

Achievements

Always known for his radical and controversial stances, Hay was one of the most prominent figures in the recognition and acknowledgment of homosexuality in the United States. Although the term "gay rights" was a part of the mainstream rhetoric by the time of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, he paved the way for its initial establishment through his constant political progressivism and social activism.

Harry Hay is today rightly praised by a wide variety of LGBTQ activists and organizations as a pioneer in the struggle for freedom and liberation. It is important also to remember him as a Communist who both preached and practiced the ideological militancy and tactical flexibility that produced great victories for the working class and oppressed minorities on many fronts in the past, and which can and will do so in the future.

Works

Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder

book
- Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder
  (This is the first collection of the words and speeches of...)
  1997

Religion

Harry Hay was raised in a Roman Catholic family.

After he discovered, that his father made an error, he thought: "If my father could be wrong, then the teacher could be wrong. And if the teacher could be wrong, then the priest could be wrong. And if the priest could be wrong, then maybe even God could be wrong."

Politics

In 1933 Harry Hay discovered Marxism, which he believed would support homosexuality under its principles. Hay was later introduced to the Communist Party (CPUSA).

Views

In the 1960s, Harry joined Women’s Strike for Peace, a left peace activist group, and sought to develop coalitions of the emerging gay movement with anti-war and women’s rights movements. He also became an activist and supporter of Native Americans in their struggle to reclaim their cultural heritage.

Quotations: "The post-war reaction, the shutting down of open communication, was already of concern to many of us progressives. I knew the government was going to look for a new enemy, a new scapegoat. It was predictable. But Blacks were beginning to organize and the horror of the holocaust was too recent to put the Jews in this position. The natural scapegoat would be us, the Queers. They were the one group of disenfranchised people who did not even know they were a group because they had never formed as a group. They - we - had to get started. It was high time."

"The little pockets existed and either you were lucky enough to fall into them or you could go your whole life and not know about them. The close-down, the terror, was so complete that people could remain ignorant, unsocialized, and undeveloped. 'Communities' were the little groups that formed by accident. And with lots of restrictions. Tiresome bitchiness and boasting predominated. To find someone whose sensibility was more wide-ranging was relatively rare."

"There were those who hated communists, and there were those who hated queers. If you were both a communist and a queer, then you were beyond the pale, by all means."

Personality

Hay was at times cantankerous, autocratic, and idealistic. Some of his core ideas, like his thesis that homosexuals are intrinsically different from heterosexuals and his insistence that the gay community does not exclude its fringe groups, were and remain controversial. Nonetheless, his ideas and actions drew a road map for gays and lesbians to realize their individual potential and exercise their collective power. In the process, Hay helped reshape the social and political landscape of twentieth-century America.

Connections

Harry Hay was married to a fellow Communist, Anita Platsky. They adopted two daughters, who survived him: Kate Berman and Hannah Muldaven, both of Los Angeles. Harry Hay is also survived by his partner of 40 years, John Burnside, with whom he registered as a domestic partner in California weeks before his death.