Harry Hay.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Gay activist - Interview - Cover Story

Harry Hay is the founder of gay liberation. In 1950, he started the underground Mattachine Society, the first modern gay-rights organization. It took its name from a dance, les Mattachines, that groups of unmarried men performed in France during the Renaissance. According to Hay's 1996 book, Radically Gay, the performances of these fraternities satirized religious and political power.

Harry Hay was one of the first to insist that lesbians and gay men deserve equality. And he placed their fight in the context of a wider political movement. "In order to earn for ourselves any place m the sun, we must with perseverance and self-discipline work collectively ... for the first-class citizenship of Minorities everywhere, including ourselves," he wrote in 1950.

At first, Hay could not find anyone who would join him in forming a political organization for homosexuals. He spent two years wandering among the gay men he knew in Los Angeles. Although some expressed interest in a group, all were too fearful to join a gay organization that had only one member. But drawing on his years as a labor organizer, Hay persisted.

Then he met Rudi Gernreich, later famous as the inventor of unisex fashion and the topless swimsuit. Gernreich became Hay's lover and eagerly joined his quest for a gay political movement.

About a month after they met, Hay and Gernreich combed the gay beaches of Malibu and the Pacific Palisades looking for Mattachine members. They brought along copies of the Stockholm Peace Petition, which called for a withdrawal of troops from Korea. They mistakenly believed that the peace petition was so radical it would make the new gay organization seem mild by comparison. Nearly 500 people signed the petition. No one signed up for Mattachine.

Still, the effort eventually took hold, and at its largest, the Mattachine society had 5,000 members.

But the membership of the Mattachine Society grew too conservative for its founders. In 1953, the group's new leaders attacked Hay and the other founders of Mattachine, all of whom had ties to the Communist Party. The founders all resigned, Mattachines' grassroots base declined, and Hay retreated from most gay activism until the rise of a more radical lesbian and gay movement in the early 1970s.

Today, Hay, eighty-six, fears the radical right has taken such hold in the United States that it could soon overturn gay-rights protections in the few states that have them. His experience as a Communist Party member in the United States during the 1950s gives him reason to worry, he says. He remains preoccupied with the speed at which tolerance can shift into persecution.

I spoke with Hay in the small stucco house he rents in West Hollywood. John Burnside, his lover of thirty-five years, was busy repairing Hay's glasses. Burnside is best known as the inventor of the teleidoscope, which creates kaleidoscope-like patterns out of mirrored reflections of the world. He also founded, with Hay, a group called the Radical Fairies during the 1970s when the two of them decided the gay movement was once again growing too conservative.

Hay, who is nicknamed The Duchess, held forth for several hours, occasionally tilting back in his chair with a long creak, and whispering for emphasis.

Q: What was it like coming out in the twenties and thirties?

Harry Hay: You're talking about coming out to yourself and coming out to one or two other people. But it's not coming out to the people on the street you live on. It's simply coming into consciousness. Which is the same thing you did as a Red.

Because you could be recruited, for example, into the autoworkers' union. And the union is underground. And it's illegal. If your supervisor or even your foreman found out that you were now a member of the union, you could be fired. And you knew it. Once you were fired, you wouldn't be able to get a job in the industry again. They'd get all that information--your name, your address, your phone number--and you'd be fingered. Everybody would know.

That was also going on if you were homosexual. You were threatened in the same way: with the loss of your livelihood. So you were wiped out either way. The only difference was that probably all your comrades in the auto factory also would cut you dead because you're one of those perverts.

In that time, you aren't a gay person, you aren't a homosexual person, you're a degenerate. And what you were suffering from was what was known as ostracism. Ostracism means you don't exist at all. And that's a very difficult situation to live with. As gay people, we had been chasing ostracism by that point for probably 300 years. You just knew that you should have dropped into your black hole.

Q: Did you feel those things?

Hay: I knew I was there, but I didn't believe what they said. I never believed what they said. I've always felt I carried a golden secret, a wonderful secret. Every time I thought about it, it made me feel warm inside and good.

One of the big problems you run into--and you in your generation are involved with that--is you are very much concerned about what your neighbors think, and you are very much concerned about what your buddies think at work. And that's really ostracism you've come to. Because if they think of you as a dirty pervert, and you hear that day in and day out, and that's your only feeling about yourself--which is what happens to very many people--then you carry that stuff around, and you think of yourself as a dirty person. That's all you know. I never believed it.

Q: How did you think of yourself?

Hay: Up until I was eleven years old, I thought I was the only one of my kind in the world. I couldn't find anybody else who felt as I did.

There was a book by somebody called Edward Carpenter, Intermediate Sex. I'm reading about Michelangelo and Alexander the Great, who were "homosexual"--a very long word. I don't know what that word means. So I go to look it up in the dictionary, and it isn't there.

Q: "Homosexual" was not...