XPost: sac.politics, alt.fan.sean-hannity, free.racist.maxine.waters
XPost: alt.journalism.newspapers

Six decades ago, Harry Hay founded a secret organization called
the Mattachine Society. Its name was derived from a medieval
French term for male dancers who sometimes satirized social
customs while dressed only in masks. Harry was a visionary; he
sought to organize American homosexuals around the notion that
they were an oppressed cultural minority, like black people, who
should agitate for homosexual rights. He began in Los Angeles in
1950, at a time when virtually no one identified himself
publicly as homosexual and at a time when the American
Psychiatric Association defined homosexuality as a mental
illness.

In 1948, Harry Hay was middle-aged and living with his wife,
Anita Platsky, whom he had married to conceal his homosexuality,
and their two adopted daughters, when he was seized by the
vision of a secret society for homosexuals. Harry was an ardent
Communist, an aspiring actor and a disaffected Catholic. One
summer night in ’48 he attended an all-male party in L.A. and
ruminated aloud about whether the Progressive Party candidate
for president, Henry Wallace, might include a sexual privacy
plank in his platform in return for the support of homosexuals.
That night, while his wife and daughters slept, Harry scribbled
the gay movement’s first political manifesto with its organizing
principle that gays were an oppressed minority. Harry’s first
chose to call his group Bachelors Anonymous. It took him more
than two years to recruit four other male homosexuals. Two of
them had been Communist Party members; the third, Dale Jennings,
was arrested the following year for soliciting sex from a
policeman. The fourth man was Harry’s lover, a Viennese
immigrant named Rudi Gernreich, who would later become renowned
(notorious?) as the designer of the topless bathing suit for
women. Harry’s Mattachine Society hired a lawyer to defend Dale
Jennings against the solicitation charge, claiming police
entrapment, and won an acquittal.

As the Mattachine Society added chapters across America, it grew
wary of Harry’s Communist Party affiliation and forced him out.
The communists rejected Harry’s homosexuality after he divorced
his wife in the late 1950s. More than two decades later, Harry
formed the Radical Faeries, who were given to gay spirituality,
mud baths and ecstatic dance rituals.

The New York Times published an obituary of Harry Hay on October
25, 2002 that ran for 35 column inches. This was followed by a
glowing article about Harry on October 30th and yet another in
the choice Sunday magazine section of the Times on December
29th. The Times couldn’t tell us enough about Harry Hay, the
founder of gay liberation, who had died at age 90. These fawning
articles pretty much covered Harry’s entire life, including his
anti-draft and anti-war activities and his work with Native
American activists. The Times even made mention of Harry’s
participation in the Communist Party agitation that led to a
union strike that closed the Port of San Francisco in 1934. So
it’s mighty peculiar that the New York Times, the newspaper of
record, the paper all the other papers and all the television
networks look to for direction, somehow never got around to
mentioning that Harry Hay was an enthusiastic supporter of
NAMBLA, The North American Man-Boy Love Association, which
advocates the abolition of all age-of-consent laws. Yup, Harry
was an advocate of pedophile rights, which he believed was an
organic dimension of gay rights.

Harry Hay wore a sign proclaiming "NAMBLA walks with me" as he
participated in a 1986 gay pride march in Los Angeles.

Harry Hay and Rep. Nancy Pelosi both marched in same SF Pride
parade back in 2001.

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