November 29, 2002
By Thom Fowler
Harry Hay
This weeks OFF THE RADAR pays tribute to a force that helped make a show like WILL AND GRACE possible. As social attitudes relax, television and films can reflect a truer portrait of humanity. These things don’t happen all on their own. If early American slaves waited for evolution to enlighten the minds of their captors, they’d still be in chains today. Harry Hay helped get the ball rolling to bring American homosexuals out of the closet. Television shows featuring gays and lesbians, both real and scripted are just one more expression of a society finally coming to grips with reality.
The Mattachine Society
Harry Hay, who died on October 24th at the age of 90 was a kind of poet of purpose. In 1950, Senator Wherry was quoted as saying in the New York Post, “You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives ... A man of low morality is a menace to the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.” That same year, Hay and seven others took a bold step to help organize the first known Gay Liberation group called The Mattachine Society. Long before Stonewall, The Village People or N Sync were bringing Gays and Lesbians into the mainstream consciousness, Hay was reaching out to others who needed the support and camaraderie to understand their sexuality and begin the long, arduous work of carving out a place for themselves in society.
In the Middle Ages, The Mattachines were troupes of men who traveled from village to village, taking up the cause of social justice in their ballads and dramas. The Mattachine Society thought that if gays and lesbians were able to find each other and talk about their experiences they would have a simple, yet powerful mechanism for building community. That community could then be better organized around the issues that affect it and exert social and political pressure to further the acceptance of non-heterosexualites in society. In the 1950s. Mattachine chapter spread throughout the U.S. and would gather secretly in apartments across the U.S. for discussion meetings.
Tens of thousands of people were meeting and starting to build a grass-roots movement to confront a homophobic society. Hay saw the emerging gay community as a parallel to the struggles for acceptance and equality that the Black, Mexican and Jewish communities were engaged in. Eventually Gay Lib became allied with the Women’s Liberation Movement, The Civil Rights Movement and then all that coalesced into the Anti-War Movement, the Environmental Movement and the Counter-Cultural Movement of the late 60’s which became the vast body politic known today to advertising agencies as the “cultural creative.”
In FAR FROM HEAVAN, which opened this past weekend, Dennis Quaid plays the kind of man Hay was thinking about when he formed the Mattachine Society. Set in the late 1950’s, Quaid plays Frank who comes out to his wife Kathy (Julianne Moore) and the fabric of their respectable suburban lives rapidly unwinds. Alonso Duralde, Arts Editor for the national gay magazine, THE ADVOCATE, interviewed Quaid in the October issue about his role. Quaid, who has a ten year old son, said, “If a child of mine turned out to be gay or whatever, it wouldn’t change the way I love him.” Kathy struggles to help Frank keep his secret while trying to figure out what’s left for her as a divorcee who’s falling in love with her Black gardener. All shocking stuff for 1958.
Hay just started saying, “This doesn’t need to be a secret. This isn’t shameful and it shouldn’t be shocking.” And he kept saying it for the next 55 years. We are nowhere near “there” yet but we have made remarkable progress towards a just and peaceful society.
So you may never have heard of Harry Hay, but I can assure you that WILL AND GRACE, Gay characters on DAWSON’S CREEK, and a Lesbian Witch who hangs out with a Vampire Slayer all exist in part because of the work Hay did.
The Radical Faeries
On Labor Day Weekend in 1979, Hay helped found what has become a large, informal group of gay men called The Radical Faeries. Radical Faeries are hard to describe since all you have to do to be one is to call yourself one. In general, the Radical Faeries are a fairly anarchic group with a loosely defined spirituality. The first "Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries" was held at the site of Sri Ram Ashram in Arizona, with over two hundred men attending. Stuart Timmons writes in THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY HAY "A spontaneous theme of paganism emerged. Invocations were offered to spirits . . . [Hay] called on the crowd to 'throw off the ugly green frogskin of hetero-imitation to find the shining Faerie prince beneath.”
Hay is not universally praised as the liberator of homosexuals in the gay community. The Mattachine Society ousted Hay in 1953 when the other members wanted the organization to be more democratic and Hay insisted on maintaining dicatatorial control. Hay’s belief that gay men were practically their own species is the underlying spirit of the Radical Faeries. It is an empowering message but one that is over-romanticized and over-simplified. In 1940, I can see how Hay needed to find an angle to bring homosexuality out of the closet. Today, non-heterosexualities don’t need to be justified because most people accept that there is more going on under the sheets than boys and girls humping in the missionary position. And I say, God bless everyone’s pursuit of orgasm.
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