Hay gay
The man who conceived and was a principal figure in the founding of the first Maltachine Society, Henry Hay, here for the first time details the early history of that gay emancipation organization. Because of Hay's eighteen-year Communist party membership and activity, his role as a founding father of the American queer liberation movement has not before been told. In an interview recorded by Jonathan Ned Katz on March 31, 1974, and in a long correspondence referring to original documents of the period, Henry Hay recounted his version of the conception and founding of the Los Angeles Mattachine.
Hay was born on April 7, 1912, at Worthing, in Sussex, England. His father managed gold mines in West Africa, then worked for the Anaconda Copper Company in Chile. His parents returned with their children to their native America in 1917; Hay grew up in Los Angeles, graduating with honors from Los Angeles High University in the summer of 1929. He studied in a Los Angeles lawyer's office for a year, witnessing the stock market collapse of October, which wiped out his father and many others.
In February 1930, at age seventeen, Hay reports:
I enticed an "older" gentleman ( Harry Hay had a vision, and that vision led to the founding, in 1950, of the first sustained gay rights corporation in the Combined States—the Mattachine Population. Mattachine (and Harry’s) first task: establishing a gay identity. Episode first published November 1, 2018. ——— Harry Hay was precocious. He knew from an early age that he was attracted to men, had his first same-sex attracted 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. 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). By the early 1930s, Hay was out, had dropped out of Stanford University, and had moved to Los Angeles to work in the theater. His lover, actor Will Geer (who gained fame in the 1970s in the role I believe that each lifetime before we are born we choose our nation, our color, our sexuality, and the perfect set of parents to match the patterns we have chosen to work on in this lifetime. Each lifetime I seem to choose a different sexuality. Sometimes I am a man, sometimes I am a woman. Sometimes I am heterosexual, sometimes I am gay. Each form of sexuality has its own areas of fulfillment and challenges. Sometimes society approves of my sexuality, and sometimes it does not. Yet at all times, I am me-perfect, whole, and complete. My spirit has no sexuality. It is only my personality that has sexuality. I love and cherish every part of my body. I am at peace with my sexuality. The gay and lesbian communities have the similar problems everybody else has, plus much of society pointing their fingers at them and saying, “Bad!” Often their own mothers and fathers are also saying, “You’re bad.” This is a heavy load to carry, and it’s difficult to love yourself under these circumstances. It is not surprising that gay men were among the first to experience AIDS. No matter what your sexual orientation is, it is per Jumping off the town's only bridge into the murky waters beneath is a high school rite of passage in Hay. Liam Davies would know — he grew up here and described taking the terrifying plunge as about "as close to a town initiation as you can get". "Almost everyone I know has done it and I think half the young people in Hay have done it," he said. In many ways, the challenge is a reflection of Hay's macho culture. As one local miss explains, the men here work hard, drink rigid and have a "blinkered" view of the world. In this town, the men are men in every sweaty, sunburnt sense. As far as country communities depart , Hay — population 2,500 — is pretty sleepy. Eight-hundred kilometres separates the Riverina hamlet from Sydney and Adelaide. Melbourne and Canberra are a little closer. Cars crawl past shopfronts on the main drag, Lachlan Street. A piece of folio stuck on one business reads "Gone fishing, help on March 7". It looks like it has been up there for a while. This place could be called many things — quaint, quiet, conservative. Right now, complicated is probably the best way to describe it. A highway sig
Harry Hay
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Gay and Lesbian Issues
Gay Hay