The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement

by Stuart Timmons

Book by Timmons, Stuart

Genres: LGBT, Biography, History, Queer, Nonfiction, Gay, Autobiography

317 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very dense book that gives great prespective about the life of a very complex person within Gay history. Simmon's overall focuses heavily on the the chronoligical history of Hay's life, meanwhile, I feel, not focusing as much on his philosphy. Nevertheless, builds up some ideas of Hay's motivations, struggles and history in context of the Mattachine Society, Radical Faeries and Harry's other involvement in social movement. Further, does not censor Hay's Marxist roots in activism and his membership within the communist party, which I find many other modern work about Hay, stay away from.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Searching biography of Harry Hay, the Los Angeles activist who spearheaded the American gay rights movement by co-founding the Mattachine Society in 1950, only to drift in more radical, iconoclastic directions. Timmons shows Hay working as a writer and actor in Los Angeles, drifting around the fringes of Hollywood and the gay underground (his lovers included poet James Broughton and actor Will Geer), becoming involved in radical Left politics and fighting corrupt police, repressive corporations and Nazi Bundists in '30s and '40s L.A. After a failed marriage, activism in Henry Wallace's Progressive Party and much attendant psychological torment, Hay joined a like-minded coterie of gay and lesbian activists to form Mattachine, a "homophile" organization that challenged the sexually, politically conformist '50s. Timmons' portrait of Hay is admiring but not uncritical; for all his courage and intellect, his irreverence and ambition struck many, from political allies to romantic partners, as flippant, abrasive and selfish. Over time, Hay alienated many allies and largely broke with the mainstream gay rights movement, forming a group called the Radical Faeries that advocated queer separatism with hippie communism and a quasi-Eastern mystic philosophy. However eccentric and flawed Hay often seems, it's hard not to admire a man so far ahead of his time in his courage and vision.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new updated biography of Harry Hay, a colorful character, and landmark veteran of the homophile movement, a founder of The Mattachine Society in 1950, extending through the origins of the Radical Faeries. The book helps to affirm Hay's place in the modern Gay movement, and rightly so.

[Joey]

A very detailed biography of Harry Hay, often called "the founder of the modern gay movement".

Starting with Hay's early family life, Timmons (who was close with Hay, which resulted in an obvious pro-Hay bias when assessing the gray or problematic areas of Hay's life) explores among other things:
   - Hay's time in the Communist Party of the USA
   - his hearing with the House Un-American Activities Committee
   - the founding and heyday of the Mattachine Society
   - and his later years founding and struggling to steer the Radical Faeries.

This was as invaluable as a window into the lives of American gay men and lesbians in the 1930s-50s as it was into the life of Hay himself.

Harry Hay was certainly a character, and I gather that he could be very charming or very infuriating, depending on your relationship to him. But his contribution to gay liberation was and is wonderful and essential, and I'm grateful to this book for chronicling his life and impact.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timmons' book looks at the life of Harry Hay an important early organizer for queer identity. It is a fascinating biography that places Hay's contributions to queer culture in historical context.

The year 1948, when Hay first attempted to organize gays, was ‘a very painful time for homosexuals,’ said Quincy Troupe, a poet and friend of James Baldwin. Troupe emphasized, ‘you weren't just in the closet, you were in the basement. Under the basement floor.’ 15

As soon as the librarian left, Harry Took the key from the place he had spied her hiding it, unlocked the case, and made a beeline for The Intermediate Sex. He found no naked men in it, but he did find something equally, mysteriously provocative-the word ‘homosexual.’ When he went to the dictionary to learn its meaning, it was not listed. Still it had an impact. 'as soon as I saw it, I knew it was me. So I wasn't the only one of my kind in the whole world after all, and we weren't necessarily weird or freaks or perverted. There were others, the book said so [Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Sappho, Whitman] and even name someone who believed in comradeship and being everything to each other. Maybe, someday, I could cross the sea and meet another one.’ 49

Reassured, Matt told Harry that they were members of a ‘silent brotherhood’ that reached round the world. ‘Someday,’ he explained, ‘you will have wandered to a strange and far away place. You'll not know who any of the people are there, or whether they mean you good or ill; you'll not hear a single word or a sound you can recognize. And then suddenly, in that frightening an alien place, you'll look across the square and you'll see a pair of eyes open and glow at you. You'll look back at him, and, at that moment, in the lock of two pairs of eyes, you are borne and you are safe!’ They slept in a lifeboat on board the steamer that night, and Matt gave Harry more tips about how to take care of himself in the world that lay beyond family in school. These ideas-that there was a culture of ‘people like us’ in many cities of the world and that they shared signals by which to recognize each other-inspired Harry almost as vividly as the erotic memory of Matt.
When in later years he told this favourite coming out story, he referred to it ironically as his ‘Child molestation speech,’ to make the point of how sharply gay life differs from heterosexual norms. ‘as a child,’ he explained, ‘I'm molested an adult until I found out what I needed to know.’ He recalled that Matt's promise of a New World and a future served as a life raft during the isolated period of high school. Far from being an experience of ‘molestation,’ Harry always described it as ‘the most beautiful gift that a fourteen year old ever got from his first love!’ 60

The euphemisms made up a veritable gay language. Men under twenty-eight years old were called ‘belles.’ Up to thirty-five, one was a ‘Queen’; anyone older was an ‘aunt.’ The words ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ were not used; ‘sophisticated,’ ‘temperamental’, and ‘that way’ were. 69

In 1933, when Prohibition was repealed, speakeasies turned into nightclubs. ‘Before 1933, these places were raided, the patrons books, shamed, and publicized because of the Volstead Act. After 1933, in our places, the same routine continued because it was queer! Freddie’s had a new opening about six times a year. It was Freddie’s and Jimmie’s and Johnny’s and Tessie’s and Bessie’s. More established places like Maxwell’s downtown would get knocked over and close down but pay off the cos and not one out.’ 94

Harry liked to analyze the gay social scene then. ‘Gay life was not so much a Life as an aggregate of cliques,’ he observed, cliques which he found insular and isolated. Several times, when he introduced friends to a favourite bar, they met coworkers there whose homosexuality they had never suspected, despite long work days together. ‘The Little pockets existed,’ he explained, ‘and either you were lucky enough to fall into them or you could go your whole life and not know about them. The closedown, the terror, was so complete that people could remain ignorant, unsocialized and undeveloped. ‘communities’ were the little groups that formed by accident. And with lots of restrictions. Tiresome bitchiness and boasting predominated. To find someone who sensibility was more wide ranging was relatively rare.’ 121

His friend James Kepner concurred: ‘In the forties, for many gays who wanted to be socially productive, marriage was a necessity. It seemed inescapable.’ This extended, even, to the realm of gay politics. Kepner thought that if he himself wanted to educate and organize for gay rights he'd have to look neutral-‘and that meant getting married.’138

‘The Post war reaction, the shutting down of open communication, was already of concern to many of us progressives. I knew the government was going to look for a new enemy, a new scapegoat. It was a predictable. But blacks were beginning to organize and the horror of the holocaust was too recent to put the Jews in this position. The natural scapegoat would be us, the Queers. They were the one group of disenfranchise people who did not even know they were a group because they had never formed as a group. They-we-had to get started. It was high time.’ 188-189

This second, much more elaborate paper, based in a Marxist perspective, forged a principle that Hay had struggled years to formulate: that homosexuals were a minority, which he temporarily dubbed, ‘the Androgynous Minority.’ Since 1941, Harry had taught Stalin four principles of a minority; these were a common language, a common territory, a common economy, and a common psychology and culture.
“I felt we had two of the four, the language and the culture, so we clearly were a social minority.’ This concept of homosexuals as a minority would be the contribution of which Hay was proudest-and one of his greatest struggles was to convince others of its validity. 189

Martin Block, a New Yorker who later became involved in a Mattachine leadership, recalled that ‘you always heard that there should be a gay organization.’ He heard it in New York, mostly from older refugees who remembered Hirschfeld, though there was little printed information available about that movement. Officially there was a wall of silence. 200

Not only had Kinsey been published in 1948, but a slew of novels from critically praised young writers drew public awareness to homosexuality. These books included Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. James Barr’s Quatrefoil, one of the first gay novels to end on a hopeful note was published in 1950. Few publishers in this period would consider a play or novel for publication unless a gay protagonist came to a bad end. i.e. was killed, committed suicide, or was branded as fallen and outcast for life. 201

‘Talking about gay sex with something you just didn't do.’ Those early meetings, which continued through the winter and into the spring of 1951, probed topics such as the homosexual personality and society as well as sex. Chief among their challenges was overcoming the negative, cynical mentality about gay life-epitomized by the cuttingly bitchy language of bar talk-so prevalent in homosexual gathering places… described it as a ‘glorious shock’ simply to sit in a room with other gay men ‘and suddenly find one another good, and find ourselves so at home and ‘in family,’ perhaps for the first time in our lives.’203

‘If you weren't living in that era,’ Jim Gruber stressed, ‘you would have a hard time understanding this. There was a prevalent attitude that there wasn't a middle ground. You were either straight or a screaming faggot and mentally unstable. A healthy acceptance of oneself as a gay man was just an unheard of idea.’
This void in homosexual semantics was assumed to become a major concern of Harry’s. The term ‘homosexual’ itself was invented by Austrian Karl Maria Kurtbeny in 1869 in a tract pleading for social tolerance, and other contemporary attempts to define gaze were created and lost, including ‘contrary sexual sensitivity’ and ‘spiritual hermaphrodism.’ …
By the mid Twentieth century, the predominant term, ‘homosexual,’ had developed such clinical and pathological connotations that Harry and some of his friends were determined to find a new word…. They finally settled on was ‘homophile.’ The term was derived from the new Latin philia, meaning ‘friendship,’ which was in turn from the Greek Philos, which means ‘loving.’ 205

The resulting publication, ONE magazine: The Homosexual Viewpoint, became the first widely distributed gay publication in America and is the forbear of the modern gay press. By the mid 1950s thousands of copies of each issue were in circulation, often pass from friend to friend; in the film Before Stonewall, Allenn Ginsburg mentions reading it during the Beat period. 235

One guild even called for a loyalty oath denouncing communism as a condition format Mattachine membership. Harry termed this attitude ‘the middle-class mentality more concerned with respectability than self-respect.’ In his view, the organization was growing with the wrong people. 238

Within a few years of the convention, Hal Call had made San Francisco the new centre of all things Mattachine and started Pan Graphic Press, a printing company that published the newsletter Mattachine Review. 242-243

In May of 1954 Confidential had labelled Hay a ‘pinko’ under the lurid headline ‘America on Guard-Homosexuals Inc!’ 248

The modern Harry used for his study was the berdache. A French term applied to cross-dressing Indians found by the European colonists in the New World, berdache sometimes referred simply to an Indian who committed ‘the abominable vice’ of homosexual. But to Harry, it meant a cultural role. He became aware of the term from V.R. Calverton’s The Making of Man, an anthropology compendium published in 1931. 262

In trying to express himself, however, he faced a familiar frustration-‘the lack of words, the lack of language and the lack of idea-forms to describe who we had been throughout the ages.’ Harry spoke of assessing gay history as decoding a language from a different universe, or as trying to built a temple out of splinters. Another obstacle was his own dense writing style, often laden with esoteric vocabulary and lengthy asides.’ 265

A compulsive reader an invertebrate pack-rat, Kepner eventually amassed the largest collection of gay and lesbian material in the world, known today as the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. 273

The two spent much of their time discussing a magazine they envisioned as a gay version of The New Yorker crossed with Playboy-they were boycotting ONE, as would many others. Not until 1966 were two issues published by Kepner, under the name Pursuit and Symposium, to reflect the erotic and cerebral poles of the gay life cycle. 275

His feelings were not so warm toward the slowly growing homophile movement. He was in fact ‘appalled’ by its increasingly assimilationist direction. The yearly conventions of nationwide Mattachine chapters did ‘nothing but rewrite their own constitutions,’ he complained…
In 1965, Harry founded the Circle of Loving Companions, a gay collective that was to remain a part of their lives for decades to come. The Circle was often politically active and Harry stressed that the name symbolized how all gay relationships could be conducted on the Whitmanesque ideal of the inclusive ‘love of comrades.’ 287

The spoils, however, did seem worth the fight. Since the 1950s, ONE had published three periodicals; its flagship, ONE Magazines, had been existence for eleven years, and inspired a Canadian counterpart called TWO…291

Dino De Simone, a member of the original Mattachine West Side Discussion Group in New York, quickly decided its members were “Sissy-Mary-Nit-Pickers. the most bureaucratic old ladies I’d ever met.” The homophiles’ strategies were executed through white gloves: to educate instead of confront; to use ‘experts’ to explain (and sometimes even condemn) homosexuality; even to refuse to identify as a homosexual group…
The struggle of reforming the homophile movement was shared by such people as Franklin Kameny, who in 1962 had founded Mattachine Society in Washington, and Guy Straight, who started the League for Civil Education in San Francisco that same year…
In February 1966, at the first meeting of the North American Conference of Homophile Organization (NACHO) in Kansas City, a nationwide day of protest was planned with events scheduled for San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. 295

By August of 1966, the newly formed North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, convened in San Francisco. 298

Easterners, he sensed, were overridingly conservative and assimilationist, while activists in the West seemed more radical. (Harry felt their politics were more ‘truly gay’). A resolution passed at another conference recommended that street people (the voluntary dropouts of a more generous economic era) be included in the liberation efforts-a contentious issues then and one thus far frowned upon by the white-glove homophiles. The resolution proposed by Jim Kepner begins, ‘Since the homosexual has no image to lose…’ and Harry quoted it frequently in his exhortations for gay people to develop the unique identities still latent within them. 299

Harry commented on how suddenly ‘the individual gay identity we had first postulated in Mattachine in 1950 had become a collective gay identity; the gay movement had moved from ‘I’ to ‘We’.’ 305

Harry had his own very different reasons for dismissing the new gay wave. ‘I wasn’t impressed by Stonewall, because of all the open gay projects we had done throughout the Sixties in Los Angeles. As far as we were concerned, Stonewall meant that the East Coast was finally catching up.’ 306

In December of 1969 the southern California Gay Liberation Front was formed, one of many regional counterparts to the militant New York organization that had formed after Stonewall. The earliest meetings were held at Don Slater’s Tangents Office, though GLF wandered through dozens of facilities-including the Cal Kal kaleidoscope factory and a heterosexual disco known as Satan’s (complete with pentagrams in the decor) on Sunset Boulevard. Free, freaky and vital, the GLF suddenly overshadowed ONE. Gay hippies in college students were at the forefront of the new organization, and many of the homophile generation followed in fascination. The following June Gay Liberation Fronts nationwide led parade to commemorate Stonewall; in Los Angeles, Tinkerbell on a crucifix was carried down Hollywood Boulevard. 307

The Faeries’ positive, aerial aesthetic of bells and skirts seem to predestined compliment to the leather jackets of AIDS activists. 332

In 1969, in a speech commemorating the 150th birthday of Walt Whitman, he wrestled with the old problem of a lack of language to describe who gays were instead of who they were not.
He wrote, ‘what had bedevilled Gays and Lesbians in particular was that, from the very first days of the reinvention of ‘Gay Identity,’ we kept trying to explain in STRAIGHT language…. And it kept coming out all wrong… which is the Butch and which is the femme?….332

The following year, in his keynote address to the Western Homophile Conference on February 14, 1970 Harry coined a new phrase to explain gay people in new terms. ‘We are a minority of a common spirituality,’ he said ‘[and] the shared commonality of outlook is a world view totally unfamiliar to the accrued experience of our parent society. It is a view of the life experience through a different window!’ The term he soon settled on-and with which he deliberately sprinkled his discourse-was ‘Gay Window.’ At the end of that address, he slipped in the word ‘faerie’ as a positive description of gay people. 333

Meanwhile, the gay public, from which Harry had retreated, was evolving. The counterculture wave of the 1960s, with its open minded spirit, hit gay people in the 1970s and the emerging gay community became a bubbling laboratory of names and identities. Long familiar words such as ‘queer’ and ‘Queen’ were tried out, along with newer ones like ‘groovy guy.’ The most enduring proof to be ‘gay,’ although in some regions, the militant ‘faggot’ was a close second.
Sometimes there was an air of competition; in San Francisco, gays known as the Sissies professed distain for those they called STIFS-straight identified faggots. Genderfuck, an outrageous form of costume combining exaggerated signals from male and female-such as a beard, bouffant hairdo and glittering kabuki eye makeup all on one person-was employed as a cultural gorilla attack on Richard sexual rules. As the decade turned, gender-fuck groups like The Cockettes and the Angels of Light spoofed political events with camp, conscious raising spectaculars in both San Francisco and New York.
At the same time, popular interest in non-western spirituality was growing, as epitomized by the Beatles’ pilgrimage to the Maharishi. This cultural drift affected gays too, and in 1976, writer Arthur Evans mingled radical politics and pagan models to begin ‘the faery circle’ in his Haight Street apartment in San Francisco, where a dozen men explored the Dionysian tradition of ‘the magic of nature and the creative sexuality of gay men.’ The faery circle was part of Evans’ research into the spiritual history of gay men, which he published a several articles in the gay journals Out and Fag Rag and in the book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978).
As the Seventies wore on, ‘gay ghettos’ sprouted in cities across America. These rapidly expanding gay neighbourhoods were quickly seized upon by an army of entrepreneurs; both gay owned and straight owned ventures sought to exploit the new territory. The gay community became the gay market. So many businesses eventually formed that gay business councils formed around them. 333-334

One of the most long lasting was the RFD collective, founded in Iowa in 1974. When the countercultural Mother Earth News refused to run an ad with a gay reference, this seven member group began a home fund publication that sold for fifty cents: RFD: A Magazine for Country Faggots. While protesting the ‘adamant heterosexuality’ of existing rural magazines, RFD also provided recipes, poetry, farming information and pictures for isolated gay people living on the land. 335

[Alvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough investigation of a fascinating character living through fascinating times. The book is marred only by the peculiar decision to spend as much time on the dull and irrelevant ups and downs of Hay's youthful romances as his historic work in the founding of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries.

[Danyell Aston · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with a lot of historical non-fiction, there were a few slow bits and I put the book down for a while but upon coming back to it I was happy to read a seemingly unbiased portrayal of such a contentious figure. Having spent some time with the Faeries I'd heard all kinds of unattractive stories about Hay, and while I can't exactly discount them as untrue, it was good to read more on why he's an important figure in the context of gay rights.
The book mostly focuses on two periods of Hay's life; the "straight" years dedicated to the communist party, and the gay ones that focus on trying to outline a place for homosexuality in modern society, largely by examining their place in past cultures such as Native Americans. Interestingly enough, the more salacious accounts of Hay's sexuality seem to happen in the former, but that's likely in part to his age at the respective time periods.
Timmons colors Hay in the way that most that knew him seem to; complicated. I believe that most of the accounts were based from interviews with people from his life, and it seems he wasn't always an easy person to be around but he certainly is important in terms of what he helped to pave for the history of queers to come.

[Vincent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book and I really enjoyed how the author didn’t shy away from showing Hay’s triumphs and his downfalls. I will say I gotta give it a 3 because there were several sections that could have been cut out and I wouldn’t have missed them. I also wish there was better presentation of Hay’s life because I was bored through several parts of the book

[Frank Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating account of the life of the founder of the Mattachine Society, the first modern gay organization in the USA. Well-written and very interesting. Highly recommended to any person with an interest in LGBTQ history.

[Atticus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really more of a biography than a look at his politics, which was disappointing but not surprising.

[Zefyr · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's one of my most heavily recommended books on West Coast queer history, not because of writing quality but because it is so information-rich and, due to the Timmons' aforementioned lack of writing quality, it's accidentally extremely unfiltered. Here's what I wrote when I first read it:


in the early mattachine days, after recieving minor newspaper publicity, some members voiced fear:

"They'll think we're activists! We'll all get into trouble."

---from stuart timmons' the trouble with harry hay

throughout the book you can almost hear timmons drooling over hay. it's a frustrating read, as hay alternately shows himself pushing radical ideas as well as being complicit with the mainstream (such as when sue-ellen jacobs and he met in new mexico—they connected when he kept calling sue and her companion 'you girls', sue called him on it, and he realized she was a feminist). it's particularly frustrating to see the formation of the radical faeries built so heavily around uniting men around goddesses specifically. i understand that this is based heavily on the old idea that gay men were women in men's bodies (this is the world where transwomen were generally considered simply gay men with a shiny new toy, an extension of the bachelors' world) but even though nowadays that's generally considered archaic thought it's still performed: consider the gay men who refer to each other as 'she' yet ignore females, or give them only passing acknowledgement (aaron, we've talked about this).

an interesting point for me, though, was how hay is constantly looking for the existence of gay men in history, particularly after taking the french term for a specific indigenous-north-american-mtf-shaman, and applying it to all men in any society who took on women's roles: According to Will Roscoe…"Harry attempted to make a historical materialist study of the emergence and development of gay roles. He saw, for example, that these men who did women's work were the first craft-specialists." To these specially trained homosexuals, Harry applied the general term "berdache." as pointed out already, hay was aware of feminism but it could hardly be said that he had a feminist mindset; therefore his apparent missing entirely the far more likely reason it was men and not women who became craft specialists is hardly surprising.

the issue, in the end, is that hay was desperately trying to create a unified theory of homosexuality. by doing what he could to define a group of people who existed as a group simply to define those who were not them, he isolated other queers who did not fit his idea of The Homophile and turned his interpretation of homosexuality into a religion, one that prayed to goddesses and praised phalluses.

mmm, appropriation rampant.

that said, i still have plenty of respect for his willingness to criticize queer activism that he saw as too assimilationist, despite that often really meaning too heteronormative—criticizing non-flamboyant gay men for not being flamboyant, that sort of thing.

[Eli · Rating 3 out of 5]

The trouble with Harry Hay is the trouble of history itself. Hay was, as are we all, a product of his time and place. When he was starting Mattachine in the early '50s, there was less of a sense of all "isms" being interconnected. The struggles of gays and those of racial minorities were not seen as linked, and the struggles of gay men were not seen as being the same as those of lesbians. Similiarly, the Radical Faeries were born at a time when we were less aware of the damage caused by cultural appropriation. So faulting Hay because Mattachine was made mostly of white gay men and because the Faeries because they borrowed so heavily from American Indian traditions makes an unfair assertion that he should have approached organizing in his time with the consciousness of our time. At the same time, neither would it be prudent of us to use Hay's model as the ultimate blueprint for gay organizing, which some still seem to want to do. Hay's quest for a unified theory of homosexuals both excluded many in the community and promoted the conformity he'd so long fought against in straight society. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, if we have seen farther than others, it is because we were standing on the shoulders of giants. In The Trouble with Harry Hay, Stuart Timmons does a very good job of showing us what a giant Hay was, and how broad were his shoulders; however, once we're standing on them, we can clearly see how much farther there is to go.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't recall thinking this was a particularly well-written book, but it was nonetheless an interesting biography about Harry Hay, a man who took lessons learned from unionism, and used them to organize gay men and women during the Mattachine movement of the 1950s. This was also the book that launched my Will Geer obsession (which is now, thankfully, in remission).

[Jessica Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great life, with many great stories that shine through despite the lousy editing.

[Frank Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Detailed, intriguing, satisfying.