Harry Hay
Henry Hay Jr. was an American gay rights activist, communist, and labor advocate. He cofounded 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. Hay has been described as "the Founder of the Modern Gay Movement" and "the father of gay liberation".
Acknowledging both his same-sex sexual attraction and an interest in Marxism from an early age, Hay eventually worked as a professional actor in Los Angeles, where he joined the Communist Party USA, becoming a committed labor activist. He ended his 1938 marriage to a Party activist after recognizing he remained homosexual, establishing the Mattachine Society in 1950.
Hay increasingly stood against the assimilationism and subversive infiltration tactics advocated by the majority of gay rights campaigners. Organizing to subvert the social and political marginalization of gay people, he cofounded the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay Liberation Front in 1969. After moving to New Mexico in 1970 with his longtime partner John Burnside, Native American religions influenced the couple to cofound the Radical Faeries in 1979 with Don Kilhefner and Mitchell L. Walker.
After returning to Los Angeles, Hay remained involved in an array of activist causes throughout his life, and became a well-known, albeit controversial, elder statesman within the country's gay community. In his later years, Hay was an active supporter of the pedophile advocacy organization North American Man/Boy Love Association, speaking on panels and sessions at several of the group's annual meetings. Hay protested the group being expelled from Pride parades, including his boycott of the 1994 New York Pride March.
Early life
Youth: 1912 to 1929
Hay was born in the coastal town of Worthing in Sussex, south-east England, on April 7, 1912. Raised in an upper middle class American family, he was named after his father, Harry Hay, Sr., a mining engineer who had been working for Cecil Rhodes first in Witwatersrand, South Africa, and then in Tarkwa, Ghana. His mother, Margaret Hay, a Catholic, had been raised in a wealthy family among American expatriates in Johannesburg, South Africa, prior to her marriage in April 1911. Hay Sr. was raised a Presbyterian but converted to her religion on their marriage, and their children were brought up Catholic. Harry Hay Jr.'s aunt took him to an Episcopal church and later he would join First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles.Their second child, Margaret "Peggy" Caroline Hay, was born in February 1914, but following the outbreak of the First World War, the family moved to Northern Chile, where Hay Sr. had been offered a job managing a copper mine in Chuquicamata by the Guggenheim family's Anaconda Company.
In Chile, Hay Jr. contracted bronchial pneumonia, resulting in permanent scar tissue damage to his lungs. In May 1916, his brother John "Jack" William was born. In June 1916, Hay Sr. was involved in an industrial accident, resulting in the amputation of a leg. As a result, he resigned from his position and the family relocated to California in the United States. In February 1919, they moved to 149 Kingsley Drive in Los Angeles, with Hay Sr. purchasing a 30-acre citrus farm in Covina, also investing heavily in the stock market. Despite his wealth, Hay Sr. did not spoil his son, and made him work on the farm. Hay had a strained relationship with his father, whom he labelled "tyrannical". Hay Sr. would beat his son for perceived transgressions, with Hay later suspecting that his father disliked him for having effeminate traits. He was particularly influenced on one occasion when he noted that his father had made a factual error: "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."
Hay was enrolled at Cahuenga Elementary School, where he excelled at his studies but was bullied. He began experimenting with his sexuality, and aged nine took part in sexual activity with a twelve-year-old neighbour boy. At the same time he developed an early love of the natural world and became a keen outdoorsman through walks in the wilderness around the city. Aged ten he was enrolled at Virgil Junior High School, and soon after joined a boys' club known as the Western Rangers, through which he developed an interest in Native American Cultures, specifically the Hopi and the Sioux. Becoming a voracious reader, in 1923 he began to volunteer at a public library, where he discovered a copy of Edward Carpenter's book The Intermediate Sex. Reading it, he discovered the word homosexual for the first time and came to recognize that he was gay. Aged twelve he enrolled at Los Angeles High School, where he continued to be studious and developed a love of theater. Coming to reject Catholicism, he remained at the school for three mandatory years before deciding to remain for a further two. In this period, he took part in the school's poetry group, became State President of the California Scholarship Federation and President of the school's debating and dramatic society, and competed in the Southern California Oratorical Society's Contest, as well as joining the Reserve Officers' Training Corps.
During the summer holidays, Hay's father sent him to work on his cousin's cattle ranch in Smith Valley, Nevada. Here he was introduced to Marxism by fellow ranch hands who were members of the Industrial Workers of the World. They gave him books and pamphlets written by Karl Marx, leading to his adoption of socialism. He learned of men having sex with other men through stories passed around by ranch hands, telling him of violent assaults on miners who attempted to touch men with whom they shared quarters. 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. However, Wovoka, as a well-known spiritual leader, led a well-documented life, and Hay's story does not line up with his activities and whereabouts during the time in question. However, Hay's family did have an actual, documented, blood connection to Wovoka and the Ghost Dance movement. In 1890, a misinterpretation of the Ghost Dance ritual as a war dance by Indian agents led to the Wounded Knee Massacre. Hay's great-uncle, Francis Hardie, carried the Third Cavalry flag at Wounded Knee.
In 1926, at the end of the summer, 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 to work his way back to Los Angeles. After an unloading at Monterey Bay, the 14-year-old Hay met and had sex with a 25-year-old merchant-sailor named Matt, who introduced him to the idea of gay men as a global "secret brotherhood". Hay would later build on this idea, in combination with a Stalinist definition of nationalist identity, to argue that homosexuals constituted a "cultural minority".
Stanford University and the Communist Party: 1929 to 1938
Graduating from school in 1929, Hay hoped to study paleontology, but was forbidden from doing so by his father, who insisted that he pursue law. Hay Sr. obtained an entry-level job for his son at his friend's legal firm, Haas and Dunnigan. While working at the firm, Hay discovered the gay cruising scene in Pershing Square, where he developed a sexual relationship with a man who taught him about the underground gay culture. It has been claimed that here he learned about the Chicago-based gay rights group the Society for Human Rights, although Hay would later deny having any knowledge of previous LGBT activism.In 1930, Hay enrolled at Stanford University to study international relations, taking independent study courses in English, history, and political science. There, he became increasingly interested in acting and also wrote poetry, some of which was published in university magazines. He 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. He had a number of sexual and romantic trysts with various men; one biographer asserts that these included a one-night stand with Prince George, Duke of Kent, and a brief affair with James Broughton. In 1931, he came out as gay to some people he knew at Stanford, and while he did not face any vehement backlash, some friends and associates, including a number who were gay, chose not to be seen with him from then on. A severe sinus infection led Hay to drop out in 1932, and he returned to his cousin's Nevada ranch to recuperate; he would never return to university.
Relocating to Los Angeles, Hay moved back in with his parents. He 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. Becoming a professional voice actor, he obtained a minor role in a radio adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities performed by George K. Arthur's International Group Players for the Hollywood Playhouse. They were impressed with his talent, and gave him a job as a permanent understudy. He supplemented this income as a screen extra, usually as a stunt rider in B movies, and also worked as a freelance dialogue coach for expat aristocrats in Hollywood. Through a friendship with George Oppenheimer he was able to get work screen-writing as a ghost-writer. Immersing himself in the Hollywood gay scene, he claimed to have had brief flings with Willy Wakewell, Philip Ahn, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, and Richard Cromwell. Having met the Thelemite high priestess Regina Kahl on a play that they were both working on, he agreed to play the organ for the public performances of the Gnostic Mass given by Agape Lodge, the Hollywood branch of Ordo Templi Orientis.
While working on a play, Hay met actor Will Geer, with whom he entered into a relationship. Geer was a committed leftist, with Hay later describing him as his political mentor. Geer introduced Hay to Los Angeles' leftist community, and together they took part in activism, joining demonstrations for laborers' rights and the unemployed, and on one occasion handcuffed themselves to lamposts outside UCLA to hand out leaflets for the American League Against War and Fascism. Other groups whose activities he joined in with included End Poverty in California, Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Mobilization for Democracy, and Workers Alliance of America. Hay and Geer spent a weekend in San Francisco during the city's 1934 General Strike, where they witnessed police open fire on protesters, killing two; this event further committed Hay to societal change. 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.
After Hay had become increasingly politicized, Geer introduced him to the Communist Party USA ; however, from the beginning, Hay was perturbed at the Party's hostility to homosexuals and its view that same-sex attraction was a deviance resulting from bourgeois society. Although he joined the Party in 1934, his involvement was largely restricted to attending fundraisers until 1936. In late 1937, 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. From the time he joined the Party until leaving it in the early 1950s, Hay taught courses in subjects ranging from Marxist theory to folk music at the "People's Educational Center" in Hollywood and later throughout the Los Angeles area. Hay, along with Roger Barlow and LeRoy Robbins, directed the 1937 short film Even As You and I, featuring Hay, Barlow, and filmmaker Hy Hirsh, in which they spoofed surrealism. In early 1937, Hay Sr. was partly paralysed following a stroke, leaving Hay to take on many of his family duties.