Harry Hay Dead

[MindAphid@xxxxxxx]

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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