56 Facts About Harry Hay

1.

Harry Hay was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States, as well as the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated gay spiritual movement.

2.

Harry Hay's developing belief in the cultural minority status of homosexuals led him to take a stand against the assimilationism advocated by the majority of gay rights campaigners.

3.

Harry Hay subsequently became a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay Liberation Front in 1969, although in 1970 he moved to New Mexico with his longtime partner John Burnside.

4.

Harry Hay has been described as "the Founder of the Modern Gay Movement" and "the father of gay liberation".

5.

Harry Hay protested the group being banned from Pride parades, wearing a sign protesting the banning during the 1986 Los Angeles Pride, and boycotting New York Pride in 1994 for their refusal to include NAMBLA.

6.

Harry Hay spoke out in support of relationships between adult men and boys as young as thirteen, and spoke at several NAMBLA meetings, including panels in 1984 and 1986, and another in 1994 about helping the group strategize a name change to help with their public image.

7.

Harry Hay was born in the coastal town of Worthing in Sussex, south-east England, on April 7,1912.

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8.

Harry Hay had a strained relationship with his father, whom he labelled "tyrannical".

9.

Harry Hay was enrolled at Cahuenga Elementary School, where he excelled at his studies but was bullied.

10.

Harry Hay often told a tall tale that in 1925 he was invited to a local gathering of Natives, where he claimed to have met Wovoka, the Paiute religious leader who revived the Ghost Dance movement, and that Wovoka had recognized him in some way.

11.

However, Harry Hay's family did have an actual, documented, bloody connection to Wovoka and the Ghost Dance movement.

12.

At fourteen Harry Hay took his union card to a hiring hall in San Francisco, convinced the union officials he was 21, and got a job on a cargo ship.

13.

In 1930 Harry Hay enrolled at Stanford University to study international relations, taking independent study courses in English, history, and political science.

14.

Harry Hay came to frequent the gay scene in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, attending parties where men danced with men, women danced with women, people cross-dressed, and alcohol was consumed, all of which was illegal.

15.

Harry Hay associated with artistic and theatrical circles, befriending composer John Cage and his lover Don Sample, with the former getting Hay to perform vocals at one of his concerts in November 1932.

16.

Harry Hay supplemented this income as a screen extra, usually as a stunt rider in B movies, and worked as a freelance dialogue coach for expat aristocrats in Hollywood.

17.

Geer was a committed leftist, with Harry Hay later describing him as his political mentor.

18.

Harry Hay joined an agitprop theatre group that entertained at strikes and demonstrations; their performance of Waiting for Lefty in 1935 led to attacks from the fascist Friends of New Germany group.

19.

In late 1937, Harry Hay attended further classes in Marxist theory at which he came to fully understand and embrace the ideology, becoming a fully committed member of the Party.

20.

Harry Hay later claimed that the psychiatrist "misled" him into believing that through marriage to a woman, he could become heterosexual; the psychiatrist suggested that Hay find himself a "boyish girl".

21.

Harry Hay maintained that he loved her, and was happy to have a companion with whom he could share his political pursuits; he got along well with her family.

22.

The couple moved to Manhattan, New York City, where Harry Hay went through a series of unsteady and low-paid jobs, including as a scriptwriter, a service manager in Macy's toy department, and a marketing strategy planner.

23.

The couple involved themselves with the city's Communist Party branch, with Harry Hay becoming a party functionary in the Theater Arts Committee for Peace and Democracy, and in 1941 he was appointed interim head of the New Theatre League, responsible for organising trade union theatre groups and teaching acting classes, for which he adopted the Konstantin Stanislavski 'system'.

24.

Harry Hay was not conscripted into the armed forces following the outbreak of World War II due to his work with Avion Aircraft, which was deemed essential for the country's war effort.

25.

Harry Hay spent much time teaching lessons in Marxism across the Los Angeles Bay Area, for which he read widely in anthropology and sociology, but faced problems due to the increased anti-communist repression being exerted by the government through the Smith Act and the subsequent creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

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26.

Harry Hay was a caring parent, and encouraged his children's interests in music and dance.

27.

In 1945, Harry Hay was diagnosed with hypoglycemia, and the following year began to suffer intense mental anxiety and repeated nightmares as he realised that he was still homosexual and that his marriage had been a serious mistake.

28.

Harry Hay planned to call this organization "Bachelors Anonymous" and envisioned it serving a similar function and purpose as Alcoholics Anonymous.

29.

Harry Hay met Rudi Gernreich in July 1950, with the pair soon entering a relationship.

30.

Harry Hay became an enthusiastic financial supporter of the venture, although not lending his name, going instead by the initial "R".

31.

Harry Hay continued to send half his paycheck to Anita for twelve years, meanwhile cutting out most of his friends from that social milieu.

32.

Harry Hay informed the Communist Party of the news, recommending that he be expelled; the Party forbade homosexuals from being members.

33.

Harry Hay was distraught at Mattachine's change in direction, having an emotional breakdown as a result.

34.

Kamgren permitted Harry Hay to spend three nights a week in study, which the latter spent reading anthropological and historical texts to learn more about the role of gay people in society, becoming particularly interested in the berdache of Native American communities.

35.

In doing so, Hay was annoyed that Marxist scholars like V Gordon Childe and George Derwent Thomson evaded the subject in their works.

36.

Meanwhile, in May 1955 Harry Hay was called to testify before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee that was investigating Communist Party activity in Southern California.

37.

Harry Hay was elected its first chairperson, organising pickets of homophobic establishments, holding a one-day "Gay-In" in Griffith Park and "funky dances" at Troupers Hall to challenge the legal restrictions on same-sex dancing.

38.

In New Mexico, Harry Hay took part in activism; he volunteered for a radical newspaper, El Grito, which aimed at a Chicano readership.

39.

Harry Hay organised the publication of literature on the subject, forming an umbrella activist group, and building it into a national campaign through the Nation-Wide Friends of the Rio Grande.

40.

Harry Hay's fame had begun to grow across the US, and at this time he was contacted by the historians Jonathan Ned Katz and John D'Emilio over the course of their independent research projects into the nation's LGBT history.

41.

In 1978, Hay teamed up with Don Kilhefner and Mitchell L Walker to co-host a workshop on "New Breakthroughs in the Nature of How We Perceive Gay Consciousness" at the annual conference of the Gay Academic Union, held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

42.

In organizing the event, Harry Hay handled the political issues, Burnside the logistics and mechanics, Kilhefner the budgetary and administrative side, and Walker was to be its spiritual leader.

43.

Harry Hay gave a welcoming speech in which he outlined his ideas regarding Subject-SUBJECT consciousness, calling on those assembled to "throw off the ugly green frogskin of hetero-imitation to find the shining Faerie prince beneath".

44.

Harry Hay decided to found a Faerie circle in Los Angeles that met at their house, which became known as "Faerie Central", devoting half their time to serious discussion and the other half to recreation, in particular English circle dancing.

45.

The group began to discuss what the Faerie movement was developing into; Harry Hay encouraged them to embark on political activism, using Marxism and his Subject-SUBJECT consciousness theory as a framework for bringing about societal change.

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46.

Harry Hay himself continued to be welcomed at gatherings, coming to be seen as an elder statesman in the movement.

47.

Harry Hay came to be viewed as an elder statesman within the gay community, and was regularly invited to give speeches to LGBT activist and student groups.

48.

Harry Hay was the featured speaker at the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade in 1982, and Grand Marshal of the Long Beach Gay Pride Parade in 1986.

49.

Harry Hay continued to protest NAMBLA being banned from Pride parades, in 1994 protesting the Stonewall 25 events exclusion of NAMBLA, on the grounds that such exclusions "pandered to heterosexual-dominated society".

50.

Harry Hay believed that by adopting these tactics and attitudes, ACT UP was shrinking the space available for diversity of gender roles for gay men, with the gentle and the effeminate discarded in their favor.

51.

Harry Hay went so far as to condemn the group while at a June 1989 rally in New York's Central Park where he shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg and Joan Nestle.

52.

In 1994, Harry Hay refused to participate in the official parade in New York City commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots because it refused NAMBLA a place in the event.

53.

Harry Hay served as the grand marshal of the San Francisco gay pride parade that same year.

54.

Harry Hay's ashes, mingled with those of his partner John Burnside, were scattered in Nomenus Faerie Sanctuary, Wolf Creek, Oregon.

55.

The 2002 documentary film Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay, directed by Eric Slade, garnered critical acclaim.

56.

Harry Hay appeared in other documentaries, including Word Is Out, appearing with his partner Burnside.