Today in Gay History

HAPPY 99^th BIRTHDAY APRIL 7TH
Harry Hay

(April 7, 1912 – October 24, 2002)

Chief Founder of the Mattachine Society and Radical Faeries.

"We pulled the ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity over us, and that's how we got through school with a full set of teeth," Hay once explained. "We know how to live through their eyes. 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."

For a great deal more, see previous post here:

Today in Gay History

First Mattachine Society meeting

Members of the Mattachine Society in a rare group photograph.

Pictured are Harry Hay (upper left),
then (l-r) Konrad Stevens, Dale Jennings, Rudi Gernreich,
Stan Witt, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland (in glasses),
Paul Bernard. Photo by Jim Gruber.

On November 11, 1950, at Harry Hay's home in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, a group of gay men met as a group to assert their common societal interests as gay men. Harry hay had been promoting the idea of such a society for several years prior, as he envisioned, to be "a service and welfare organization devoted to the protection and improvement of Society's Androgynous Minority."

Subsequent meetings of the group resulted in the formation of the Mattachine Society. Of the original Mattachine founders, Chuck Rowland, Bob Hull, Dale Jennings pre-deceased Hay; Konrad Stevens and John Gruber are the last surviving members of the founding group.

"Mattachine" took its name from a group of medieval dancers who appeared publicly only in mask, a device well understood by homosexuals of the 1950s. Hay devised its secret cell structure (based on the Masonic order) to protect individual gays and the nascent gay network. Officially co-gender, the group was largely male; the Daughters of Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization, formed independently in San Francisco in 1956. Though some criticized the Mattachine movement as insular, it grew to include thousands of members in dozens of chapters, which formed from Berkeley to Buffalo, and created a lasting national framework for gay organizing. Mattachine laid the ground for rapid civil rights gains following 1969's Stonewall riots in New York City.

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Lead-Up to Stonewall's 40th Anniversary

Today in Gay History


BEFORE STONEWALL

The much admired Stephen
@ Band of Thebes
pointedly demonstrates that, the
event of the Stonewall riots, while
important, was not seminal:

. . .Harry Hay, ONE, Phyllis & Del, Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society, ECHO, the picketing of the White House and Philadelphia's City Hall, or any other gay history prior to 1969 [are often overlooked because of the attention given to the Stonewall riots. Stonewall is an essential, explosive midpoint in the timeline of gay rights, but . . .it [is] a crushing injustice . . .[to] cast it as the birth of the movement.

For seventeen years before the riots, organized gay groups fought for gay equality, published gay magazines, won Supreme Court cases (1958), held national gay conferences (1960), successfully lobbied state legislatures to rescind their sodomy laws (1962), and promoted gay visibility, protesting publicly against anti-gay discrimination (1965). To erase these landmark achievements by claiming that the gay rights movement began with a bar brawl is to disgrace those pioneers and history itself. God knows bravery wears many outfits and symbols are powerful, but the drag queens and Stonewall regulars fighting police and doing chorus line kicks while singing, "We are the Village girls, we wear our hair in curls," mustn't obliterate their less cinematic, more scholarly forerunners.

The Lead-up to Stonewall: A Retrospective~~~

Click here for a recent interview with Frank Kameny and pictorial retrospective of pre-Stonewall picket signs

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Today in Gay History

HAPPY BIRTHDAY APRIL 7TH
Harry Hay

(April 7, 1912 – October 24, 2002)

HARRY HAY was a leading figure in the dawn of gay liberation, and as a Communist Party organizer in America - and like the early gay activist Edward Carpenter before him - he connected homosexual freedom with a possible Utopia; freedom from the rest of the capitalist hegemony. But one of the more remarkable aspects of this extraordinary proponent of American radicalism is the fact that he was actually born in Worthing in Sussex. --From Hay's Obit in London's The Independent, 2002

from wiki>>Harry Hay (April 7, 1912 – October 24, 2002) was the earliest prominent leader in the gay rights movement in the United States, known for founding the Mattachine Society in 1950 and the Radical Færies in 1979, and partner of inventor John Burnside for 40 years, from 1962 until Hay's death.

Hay is listed in histories of the American gay movement as first in applying the term "minority" to homosexuals. A communist early in his life, and an uncompromising radical for his 90 year life, he easily dismissed "the heteros," and never rested from challenging the status quo, including within the gay community. Due to the pervasive homophobia of his times (it was illegal for more than two homosexuals to congregate in California during the 1950s) Hay and his colleagues took an oath of anonymity that lasted a quarter century until Jonathan Ned Katz interviewed Hay for the ground-breaking book Gay American History. Countless researchers subsequently sought him out; in recent years, Hay became the subject of a biography, a PBS-funded documentary, and an anthology of his own writings.
His most enduring legacy is the Radical Færie movement, which fosters a queer identity based on a blending of rural settings, and spiritual nods to Native American and New Age cultural memes. He and his longest life-partner, John Burnside, truly lived the Radical Færie lifestyle in Arizona for many years, until lung cancer made independent living in the desert environs too difficult for them.

The invitation he sent out to the first Radical Faerie gathering stated its purpose:

"To share new insights about ourselves,
To dance in the moonlight,
To renew oaths against patriarchy,
corporations and racism,
To hold, protect, nurture and
caress one another,
To talk about the politics of gay enspiritment
and the enspiritment of gay politics,
To find healing space inside our hearts,
To become the inspirer and the listener as we share new breakthroughs in how we perceive gay consciousness,
To soar like an eagle,
To rediscover and reinvent our myths,
To talk about gay living and loving alternatives,
To experience the groundedness of the calamus root,
To share our gay visions,
To sing, sing, sing,
To evoke a great fairy circle."


Harry, right in later years

In 1999 Burnside moved Hay, who was suffering from lung cancer, to San Francisco's Castro district, where he was cared for by hospice nurses and care-taking members of the Radical Faeries. At the same period Hay arranged for his personal papers to be donated to the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library.

Harry Hay died on October 24, 2002. At his side were John Burnside, with whom he had registered as domestic partners only weeks before, and his care givers from the Radical Faeries, who laid Hay out and sprinkled rose petals over him.

Biographer Timmons had visited Hay a few weeks before, at which time Hay had given him a message: "Tell my people I want them to be happy and strong. And free. And contributive. And to fly."

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