Harry Hay

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, Oct. 25, 2002

Harry Hay, 90, Early Proponent of Gay Rights, Is Dead
By DUDLEY CLENDINEN

Harry Hay, who founded a secret organization six decades ago that proved 
to be the catalyst for the American gay rights movement, died early 
Thursday morning at his home in San Francisco. He was 90.

Although little known in the broader national culture over the years, 
Mr. Hay's contribution was to do what no one else had done before: plant 
the idea among American homosexuals that they formed an oppressed 
cultural minority of their own, like blacks, and to create a lasting 
organization in which homosexuals could come together to socialize and 
to pursue what was, at the beginning, the very radical concept of 
homosexual rights.

The group Mr. Hay founded — one that exists in remnants today — was the 
Mattachine Society. Its name was taken from a medieval French term for 
male dancers who performed in public, sometimes satirizing social 
customs, but only wearing masks.

Starting in Los Angeles in 1950, Mr. Hay formed his secret society with 
a handful of others. Virtually no men or women in the country then 
identified themselves publicly as homosexual. The law in California and 
other states made it illegal for homosexuals to assemble in public. The 
American Psychiatric Association defined homosexuality as a mental illness.

The term gay rights would not come into general use until 1969, after 
the New York City police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in 
Greenwich Village, and its patrons staged a violent uprising against the 
arrests.

But by then, the political organizing and public expression of gay 
consciousness begun by Mr. Hay was long established in many cities 
across the country, and had matured for a generation.

In 1948, Mr. Hay was a restless, middle-aged man living with his wife 
and two daughters when he was struck one August night by the idea for a 
new kind of group. The impulse came out of a brew of other identities 
and allegiances that mingled in him, all of them described by his 
biographer, Stuart Timmons, in "The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of 
the Modern Gay Movement" (Alyson Publications, 1990). He was an ardent 
American Communist, a romantic homosexual, an amateur musician and 
aspiring actor, a disaffected Roman Catholic, a sometime labor organizer 
and a man of secretive nature. It was an array of opposing values that 
would put him in a state of conflict and tension for most of his life — 
and would cast him out of the Communist Party and his own Mattachine 
Society before the 1950's were half over.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/25/obituaries/25HAY.html

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