Radically Gay.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Brief Article

Although Harry Hay is the founder of gay liberation, his name meant nothing to me. I had assumed the Stonewall riot in 1969 was the instant when gay people first insisted in loud voices that their sexuality was beautiful. Then, last year, I began to hear about Hay, who had been noisily proclaiming the beauty of his sexuality for twenty years prior to Stonewall. In l 950 he started the first modern gay-rights organization, the Mattachine Society.

In October, Hay himself came to Madison. Ornamented in a cascading pearl necklace and one dangling earring (one ear, he informed us, was "for hearing, the other for decoration"), he read aloud some of the more controversial passages from his new book, Radically Gay (Beacon). Then Hay attempted to start a discussion of his ideas, in the style of the consciousness-raising forums he had introduced to the Mattachine Society.

Members of the audience resisted Hay's efforts to rile them into political talk. They seemed to prefer tamer, more distant subjects like, "What was life like before Mattachine?" But Hay is anything but an artifact. He is one eighty-six-year-old activist who will not sit still.

Indeed, although Radically Gay is in some ways a historical document--the book is a collection of political writings spanning nearly five decades of Hay's activism--it also intends to move us toward action.

Hay got his political start in the Communist Party and the visionary coalition politics of the Popular Front, when the Communists aligned themselves with civil-rights and labor organizations in an attempt to fend off fascism in Europe and to support Roosevelt's New Deal. Hay borrowed easily from Communism to...