Bullied in school, Harry Hay went on to start one of the first gay rights groups in America
He devoted his life to bravely, brazenly being himself
“We pulled ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity over us, and that’s how we got through school with a full set of teeth,” said Harry Hay, who is often called the father of gay liberation. As a young person, Hay was frequently bullied, and knowing how to pass as straight was essential. “We know how to live through their eyes,” he said. “We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you’re going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you.”
Born in Sussex, England in 1912, Hay grew up in Los Angeles. In school, he routinely faced pressure to be more like other kids. While Hay knew assimilation could be an important survival strategy, he also soon discovered that conforming can be a soul-draining proposition. Instead, he devoted his life to bravely, brazenly being himself — and in the process inspired legions of others to do the same.
During high school in L.A., Hay’s deep interest in academics, art, and performance was enlivened by a growing commitment to social justice. While working his teenage summers as a ranch hand on a relative’s Nevada cattle farm, Hay met some “Wobblies” (members of the labor organization International Workers of the World) and was introduced to Marxism. That worldview immediately made sense to Hay — it was an encounter that would change his life, inspiring decades of dedication to leftist politics and organizing.
For a time, Hay attended Stanford, where he studied international relations, wrote poetry, and pursued acting. Starting in 1933, he began attending Communist party meetings. By then, he’d moved back to Los Angeles, where he found work as an actor and screenwriter and fell in with a group of leftist actors and creatives. It was in that group that he met Will Geer, with whom he had a romantic relationship. Hay joined the Communist Party in 1934, and gave his time and energy to a number of leftist organizations. At the People’s Education Center in downtown L.A., Hays taught courses with titles like “Music, the Barometer of Class Struggle.”
At the urging of fellow Communist Party members and his psychoanalyst, Hay married a woman and fellow activist, Anna Platky, in 1938, and the couple went on to adopt two daughters. Hay enjoyed his wife’s companionship and loved his children, but he wasn’t being his true self. Eventually, he and his wife divorced.
Once he had dropped the mask of heterosexual marriage, Hay embarked on perhaps the most significant chapter of his life as an activist and as a person. A good 20 years before gay rights were a visible issue on the national scene, Hay started the Mattachine Society, an underground gay fellowship. It reportedly took two years for him to find a single other man willing to join the group, as aligning oneself with homosexuality could still mean social death and even jail time. When an interviewer later asked whether gay men saw themselves as “second-class citizens,” Hay answered, “I don’t think they even thought in those terms. We thought of ourselves as being illegal. The idea of self respect didn’t exist.”
The Mattachine Society, which worked to advance the civil rights of gay men, mostly operated clandestinely (as many members were security risks and likely already had FBI files, particularly as McCarthyism gained ground). They had chapters in cities throughout the country. Hay recalled that in the early days, group members met “five to six days a week after work, often until one o’clock in the morning.” Though hugely important as one of the very first groups of its kind in the country, the society eventually disbanded, in part over a split between more assimilationist members focused on using respectability politics to gain entry into mainstream society and members like the radical, cross-dressing Hay, who wasn’t looking for anyone’s approval.
In the 1970s, along with friends Mitch Walker, Don Kilhefner, and Hay’s longtime companion John Burnside, Hay was also a founder of the Radical Faeries, a countercultural group expressly devoted to non-assimilationist queer self-expression. It was a response to what he perceived as a growing conformity among gay men. Gay culture was too often “an oppressive parody of straight culture,” Hay said, defining homonormativity before its time. Hay’s house in Los Angeles became known as “Faerie Central” and served as a hub for the burgeoning faerie movement, which emphasized the formation of caring bonds and was influenced by Hay’s interest in Paganism and Native American ritual and spirituality. The group still hosts communal gatherings in rural locales.
At the core of Hay’s activism — and the movement it helped spawn — were radical ideas about gay self-acceptance. In his mind, there was absolutely nothing deficient or deviant about love or desire between any combination of persons. This sometimes led him down a very questionable path, as when he supported the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in the 1980s, arguing that older men could offer young men valuable guidance. He also criticized the HIV/AIDS activism of the group ACT UP, claiming that the “machismo” at the heart of their work was assimilationist. These moves earned him many detractors.
But Hay’s thinking went even further than a positive message of gay self-respect and love. He said that this group was in fact essential to human civilization, and touted a special set of gay “gifts” to the world. In the words of his friend Mark Thompson, “He was the first to insist that we are a separate, distinct minority with certain traits and talents, mainly in the areas of teaching, healing, mediating opposites, and creating beauty.”
Later in life, Hay condemned the emphasis on consumerism he saw taking root in “lifestyle” publications and gay culture broadly. He ultimately settled with his partner John Burnside in San Francisco, where the two lived at the center of a robust, dynamic circle of loved ones, fellow faeries, and like-minded activists, continuing to preach into their 90s the doctrine of living fearlessly and authentically. Harry Hay died of lung cancer in 2002. According to the Radical Faeries website, he passed peacefully in his sleep with John Burnside by his side.
The Cove Avenue stairway in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles is dedicated to Hay. A plaque beside the stairs reads, “Harry Hay founded The Mattachine Society on this hillside in 1950.”
This story was created for Spirit Day, a GLAAD initiative. On October 19, 2017, millions will go purple to stand against bullying and in support of LGBTQ youth. Take the pledge to show LGBTQ youth you’ve got their backs!
