Harry Hay
1912-2002
Harry Hay was a Communist political organizer, a musicologist, an actor, a social science researcher, and many more things. He was also one of the earliest and most prominent gay rights activists. Today, Hay remains one of the most complex figures in the American history of gay rights.
As a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, Hay became involved with the small gay communities around him and the Marxist political movement. He eventually worked as an artist in San Francisco where he joined the Communist Party USA. Hay struggled to define his place in the LGBTQ community. Hay claimed that a psychiatrist misled him into believing that through marriage to a woman, he could become heterosexual. After confiding with fellow Party members that he was homosexual, they too urged Hay to marry a woman, adhering to the party line that same-sex attraction was a symptom of bourgeoise decadence and degeneracy. In 1938 Hay married Anna Platky, a Marxist Party member from a working-class Jewish family.
In 1950, Hay and friends held the first meeting of a society that would grow into one of the first LGBTQ civil rights groups in the United States. Formed in Los Angeles, they first called it the Society of Fools”. The next year, they changed the name to the “Mattachine Society,” based on stories of medieval French societies of anonymous men who gathered to critique rulers. (Hay’s involvement with the Mattachine Society was one of the factors that led to his divorce from Platky.) Chapters of the Mattachine Society soon began to form in major cities across the country.
Hay argued gay communities were a minority culture. He often argued loudly and passionately against assimilation, believing that gay culture should remain fundamentally opposed to the mainstream.
Later in his life, Hay helped found the Radical Faeries. This was a loosely-defined countercultural group reacting against assimilationism championed by other gay activists. Hay and his associates drew upon modern Paganism, American Indian beliefs, secular spirituality, environmentalism, Marxism, and an often-passionate sense of individualism. Hay’s outspokenness and challenging views made him a controversial figure.