![]() ![]() Todd White’s Pre-Gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights and James T. For a more in-depth look at the early days of the Mattachine Society, check out C. Read more about Harry Hay in his San Francisco Chronicle obituary. Credit: Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Radical Faerie sanctuaries and gatherings exist to this day. The anti-assimilationist group, which drew inspiration from Marxism, paganism, anarchism, and Native American spirituality, was also co-founded by John Burnside, who was Hay’s partner from 1963 until Hay’s death in 2002. Hay’s gay rights activism didn’t end with his Mattachine ouster, however: in 1966 he co-founded the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) and in 1979 the Radical Faeries, a “mixture of a political alternative, a counter-culture, and a spirituality movement,” in the words of Hay’s biographer Stuart Timmons. In 1953, Hay-and the other leaders of the Mattachine Society, including Chuck Rowland (featured in a Season One MGH episode) -was ousted in part because his Communist affiliation, which was deemed a liability by an insurgent group of more conservative members of the organization, including Hal Call (featured in a Season Two MGH episode). While the Mattachine Foundation (later the Mattachine Society) was not the first gay rights organization in the U.S., it was the first to last and spread across the country, albeit under different leadership.Īs Harry Hay’s 2002 obituary in the New York Times stated, “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.” Credit: AF Archive/Alamy.Īnti-Communist sentiment at the time taught Hay much about guarding the anonymity of his fellow Reds-lessons he would carry to his other activist cause: gay rights and the establishment of the Mattachine Foundation in 1950. Publicity photo showing the cast of “The Waltons,” a popular television drama broadcast by CBS for nine seasons, beginning in 1971. Together they performed agitprop street theater meant to incite people to protest against Jim Crow, anti-Semitism, and other societal ills, and they demonstrated for the right to unionize. His lover, actor Will Geer (who gained fame in the 1970s in the role of Grandpa Walton on the very popular television series, “ The Waltons ”), recruited him into the Communist Party. ![]() Credit: Photo by Hazel Kalarney, courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.īy the early 1930s, Hay was out, had dropped out of Stanford University, and had moved to Los Angeles to work in the theater. 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). He knew from an early age that he was attracted to men, had his first gay 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. Credit: Photo by Robert Giard ©Jonathan Silin, courtesy of The New York Public Library.
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