Harry Hay
Harry Hay is the widely acknowledge founder and and progenitor of the activist homosexual agenda in the United States. Hay has been likened to Thomas Jefferson, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Parks among liberal advocates of gay rights. Hay joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1934. [1]
The originator of the Mattachine Society, the first “successful” gay organization in the U.S., had as his first lover a person who had been in contact with the Chicago-based Society for Human Rights. Though Henry Hay says he was only influenced “indirectly” by that knowledge of the previous attempt, it is obvious that the idea of an organization for gays was planted, even if only by way of negative example.
The original founders of the Mattachine Society were all either former CPUSA members or fellow travellers. The first step Hay took in organizing the Mattachine Society was to recommend to the Communist Party USA that he be expelled in 1951 after eighteen years as a member. Rather than do that in light of his years of service to the party and work as a teacher at the California Labor School, [2] they released him as “a security risk but a life-long friend of the people.” Hay and his comrades took the first public action in an anti-war petition gathering effort against the Korean War at a gay beach in Los Angeles; some of the contacts they gained in this way were later organized into their first study and discussion groups. The first months produced hundreds of members.
See also
References
- ↑ The Boston Phoenix, The real Harry Hay, Michael Bronski, October 31 - November 7, 2002.
- ↑ In Partial Payment Class Struggle, Sexuality and Gay Liberation (1978), by A. Rausch. Retrieved from Urgent Tasks #7, Sojourner Truth Organization Digital Archive , 10 May 2007.