Hay, Harry (1912-2002)

Harry Hay (April 7, 1912-October 24, 2002) was one of the most important and influential activists in the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) movements. He devoted his lifelong activity to the rights of gay people and the community. Often ahead of his time, he advocated the idea of gay people as a minority group—an initiative that seems obvious today though it was unthinkable in the 1950s.

Hay was a controversial person for his period, overcoming social and cultural norms and taboos. He was influenced by Marxist philosophy, which he first encountered in 1933. Soon afterward, he joined the Communist Party USA and became one of its most prominent figures. He soon found that there would not be support for him as a homosexual man; thus, he yielded to general expectations and married Anita Platky in 1938. However, the wound remained unhealed. Finally in 1948, Hay decided to break his silence and actively fight for the rights of homosexuals. That year, while working for the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, he started expressing the idea of homosexuals as an oppressed minority. The breakthrough moment came in 1950 in Los Angeles, when, together with a group of friends, he founded the Mattachine Society. Soon after that, he divorced and left the Communist Party. In 1953, he and other founders left the organization when it became dominated by much more conservative ideas and his Communist roots became problematic for some members.

It took almost 20 years for a homophile movement to develop and transform itself into the next stage. The Stonewall riots, which symbolically opened up the next chapter in gay liberation, brought onto the agenda the strategies that Hay introduced in the 1950s. The idea of homosexuals forming a separate and distinctive culture quickly spread and dominated gay politics in the 1970s. On the wave of this enthusiasm, he joined the California chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. However, he soon became disappointed. By the mid-1970s, he was already looking for another, new quality for the gay community. Feeling that the gay liberation movement had lost its spirit—the key word for the next stage of his activity—he set up the first Spiritual Conference of Radical Faeries in Arizona, in 1979. From that moment, Hay dedicated his life to political work for the gay community and to the idea of spiritual renewal through neo-pagan and New Age practices embraced in the notion of the Radical Faerie.