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Harry Hay
Episode Notes
Harry Hay had a vision, and that vision led to the founding, in 1950, of the first sustained gay rights group in the Combined States—the Mattachine World. Mattachine (and Harry’s) first task: establishing a gay identity.
Episode first published November 1, 2018.
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Harry Hay was precocious. He knew from an early age that he was attracted to men, had his first queer sexual experience when he was nine, and developed an interest in union organizing in his early teens while working on an uncle’s farm in Nevada. Born to an upper middle-class family and raised in California, Hay was sent to the farm by his father to toughen up, but what he learned working side by side with migrant laborers was first and foremost ideological, as many of his fellow workers were “Wobblies,” members of the International Workers of the World (IWW).
By the early 1930s, Hay was out, had dropped out of Stanford University, and had moved to Los Angeles to work in the theater. His lover, actor Will Geer (who gained fame in the 1970s in the role of
about ToM
When we talk about advances in civil and gay rights, we often talk in terms of famous firsts: Los Angeles’ first Black Mayor Tom Bradley or the state’s first openly gay elected official, San Francisco’s Harvey Milk. Yet, the struggles of average folk lay the groundwork for these larger victories and it is their stories that rarely get told. In 1975, one obscure Southern California gay man fought the good fight and in doing so achieved a triumph that would bring new rights and job opportunities for lesbian men and women across the U.S.
Forty years ago, Rancho Palos Verdes resident and computer defense systems analyst Otis Francis Tabler challenged both the federal government’s security clearance system and California state rule banning sodomy and “perversion” winning what observers described as an unprecedented victory from the Department of Defense when he became the first openly lgbtq+ man to receive a secret security clearance from the Industrial Security Clearance Review Office. In a year in which the Supreme Court declared marriage equality the law of the land, Tabler’s story deserves to be told.(1)
The Military a A homosexual, Socialist, writer, spiritualist and activist, Harry Hay would cofound a secret organization in 1950 that would become the source of the American gay rights movement, and help shape and expound the notion that homosexual people were an oppressed, cultural minority whose unification would only create greater awareness and understanding. Born Henry Hay Jr. on April 7, 1912, in Worthing, England, Hay’s father was a mining engineer who moved the family to Los Angeles in 1919 where Hay would attend high university. Entering Stanford University in 1930, he soon abandoned lectures to return to Los Angeles and pursue a career in acting. It was during this period he met and formed a relationship with the actor Will Greer, who would proceed on to national fame in the role of Grandpa in the 1970s television series The Waltons. Greer helped to introduce Hay to the concept of radical politics and Communist organizing. He encouraged him in his interest in Marxist theory, which led to Hay’s adoption of Socialism, and in which he hoped to find support for homosexuality. Whil Harry Hay is the founder of homosexual liberation. This lovely interview with Hay by Anne-Marie Cusac was published in the September 1998 issue of The Progressive magazine. Then-editor Matt Rothschild called Hay "a hero of ours," writing that he should be a domestic name. He wrote: "This courageous and visionary male launched the modern gay-rights movement even in the teeth of McCarthyism." In 1950 Hay started the first modern gay-rights management, the underground Mattachine Society, which took its name from a dance performed by masked, unmarried peasant men in Renaissance France, often to protest oppressive landlords. According to Hay's 1996 guide, Radically Gay, the performances of these fraternities satirized religious and political power. Harry Hay was one of the first to insist that lesbians and gay men warrant equality. And he placed their fight in the context of a wider political movement. "In organize to earn for ourselves any place in the sun, we must with perseverance and self-discipline labor collectively . . . for the first-class citizenship of Minorities everywhere, including ourselves," he wrote in 1950. Manuscripts, notes, published research sources, correspondence, interviews, clippings, financial and employment records, legal papers, photographs, posters, original and reproduced graphic material, flyers, memorabilia and other material documenting the life of Harry Hay. Hay conceptualized and was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society (1950), the first organization to advocate defense of the civil rights of gays and lesbians on the grounds that they were an oppressed minority. He would remain active in the gay movement as a writer and speaker throughout his life.The collection documents Hay's writing and research related to same-sex attracted history and identity, his engagement with left and progressive politics dating from the mid-1930s, his involvement in the 1970s and 1980s with researchers exploring the roots of the gay liberation movement, his personal finances and serve history, and his personal relationships. View this description in WorldCat.
How Harry Hay Became a Pioneer of the Gay Rights Movement
Hay gravitated towards revolutionary politics as a young adult
Meet Pioneer of Gay Rights, Harry Hay
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