HARRY HAY
Radical Faerie
Written & Photographed by CRAIG CALMAN
Harry Hay, who ushered in the modern gay movement in the 1950s with the bold and groundbreaking organization known as The Mattachine Society, is the subject of a new book, Radically Gay, by San Francisco anthropologist and historian Will Roscoe, the author of The Zuni Man- Woman and Queer Spirits: A Gay Men's Myth Book. "The book is a retrospective of my writings and articles and how my thinking started and developed," says Hay, vital and energetic at eighty-four, during a recent interview at his home in West Hollywood.
Radically Gay should prove a fascinating study as Harry Hay's life and concerns are a chronicle of the evolution and maturation of modern gay consciousness throughout virtually the entire twentieth century. Born in England in 1912, Hay's earliest years were spent in the Chilean Andes where his father managed a copper mine. After a tragic accident maimed his father and ended his mining career, the family relocated to southern California where Harry has spent most of his life. "I first thought of the idea of The Mattachine Society in 1948 and I had to wait until 1950 to find one person, one recruit who would stand with me against the heterosexual outside, so great was the terror because we were surrounded by stool pigeons. Not just cops, but blackmailers who would turn you in for five- hundred bucks. Oh, we lived through hell in that period."
This first recruit was one Rudy Gernreich, later to become famous as the creator of the topless bathing suit in the 1960s. Harry Hay was close to more than one celebrity during his formative years. Will Geer, better known as TV's "Grandpa Walton," was Harry's lover in the 1930s. A radical leftist, Geer was the significant influence in the formation of young Hay's political beliefs and activist passions. Hay realized early on the similarities between an oppressed labor force and its exploitative bosses with that of the gay minority and the restrictive, oppressive society that ruthlessly scapegoats gays.
Although today's society is much more tolerant than it was before Stonewall, Hay is far from complacent. "Custom is much more powerful than the law ever was. It hasn't changed a great deal. If custom had changed, Gingrich could not make the statements he does and Jesse Helms could not make the statements he does. This is the kind of terror that you can return to in the 1990s. This is what happened in Nazi Germany -- the terror of being a scapegoat is enough to turn your neighbor against you to keep from being scapegoats themselves. It could work as well in this society today as it did thirty years ago or fifty years ago or one hundred years ago."
Yet even in the brutal climate of persecution and political blackmail, the Mattachine Society flourished. "By 1953 we had about five thousand people in the state of California alone who were involved in our society with the golden promise of brotherhood. It was just heady. It was the kind of thing where you couldn't wait to go to another meeting to discover what we all had in common, things that we never guessed in a million years we'd ever share with anybody else. There was a growing principle of love and brotherhood and affection among people. It was just phenomenal. Somebody said it was like a bright light in the snake pit."
Unfortunately, even the bright light had a dark side. Harry Hay and his "left of center" founders were ousted from their own organization by "opportunists" who wanted to assimilate the Mattachine Society. "We were just overwhelmed by these people and all of us radicals got thrown out; we were just inundated and swept out of office. The assimilation was from 1954 until about 1966 or 1967, when all of a sudden we began to move towards liberation. And what was interesting was that I got thrown out in 1953 for insisting that we were a cultural minority, and they, the opportunists, didn't want that. By 1969, when Stonewall broke out, everybody assumed that we had always known we were a cultural minority since day one. But in 1953, I got thrown out for even suggesting it."
Harry Hay thrived on the new radicalism of the early gay liberation movement, but by 1974 the gay movement had once again become, to Harry's distaste, decidedly conservative, wherein, among other changes, voting had replaced consensus. In the late 1970s the Radical Faeries emerged, a natural result of Hay's exploration of Native American tribal life and years spent in northern New Mexico with his longtime companion John Burnside. Faerie Circles and yearly gatherings in bucolic settings are now a worldwide phenomenon. "We come again to bringing consensus. We bring affection, we bring a love for one another; it's a brotherhood. We are a very different people. We have not only a subject- to-subject consciousness, but we have a new type of consciousness to suggest to the whole society based on consensus, a loving and sharing consensus."
Hay believes that gays and lesbians' true role in society is that of mediator. "The mediator is tremendously important because the mediator finds ways in which opposites can meet each other. We have been priests, we have been spiritual healers. Music and dance and poetry can bring forms of spiritual healing where nothing else can. It's a spiritual way of a laying on of hands. We don't make judgments, we don't compete, we have other ways of operating; you keep widening the areas of agreement, not narrowing it. Our work is to be able to sense the difference between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen. We know how to bring the unseen into visibility."
Hays thinks securing our grassroots movement is of crucial importance because the Chairperson of the State Assembly has made the statement that one of his first objectives in office is to re-criminalize sodomy in the State of California. "The State's 547 law has never been rescinded -- it's still on the books just as it was when I started the gay movement back in 1950. A couple of the clauses in it have been expunged or rescinded, but they're still on the books and all you have to do is look through that little recision and bring the letters back up again and the law is just as powerful as it was in 1950. Atascadero, which is the state prison hospital, gave you a choice of cures: lobotomy or castration. And lots of our brothers had to walk that route. You guys don't have any idea of how to manage your personal affairs under that kind of a cloud."
Harry Hay has devoted his life to getting and keeping his brothers out from under "that kind of a cloud" by way of his tireless and passionate activism as well as his theoretical writings, and the literary fruits of his life's effort will soon become available to us all.