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1 Mattachine (1948–52) It would not be too much of a stretch to see the Mattachine’s Harry Hay as a visionary, perhaps even a prophet. —Bert Archer, The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality) The Harry Hay of the ’50s had all the humor of Moses striding down the mountain with that dratted Decalogue. —Dale Jennings (as quoted in Hansen, A Few Doors West of Hope) It would seem that today’s lesbian and gay rights movement, commonly referred to as the LGBT or LGBTQ movement since it came to include the rights of bisexual, transgendered, and queer people, began in 1950 largely through the efforts of one man, Harry Hay. More has been written about Hay, often lauded as the “father” of the gay rights movement, than about any other pioneer of the Los Angeles homosexual movement. Henry “Harry” Hay was born on April 7, 1912, in Sussex, England, and raised in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles. His first sexual encounter was with a sailor named Matt, whom he met on a steamship bound for Los Angeles, when he was fourteen. After their encounter, the sailor gave Hay a bit of prophetic advice that Hay later claimed was “the most beautiful gift that any older man ever gave a younger man”: “Someday you’re going to come to a port, and you won’t understand a word that’s said around you, 12 . pre-gay l.a. and you won’t see a face, you won’t get a smell that’s familiar to you at all and you’ll be frightened, and terrified, and afraid. And all of the sudden across this room, because you’re a tall boy, you’ll see a pair of eyes open and glow, at you, as you lift your eyes open and glowing at him. At that moment of eye lock you are home, and you are safe, and you are free. This is my gift.”1 From this experience, Hay came to believe that homosexual men comprised a secret, sacred brotherhood, with an imperative to “protect each other’s anonymity with [their] lives”: “Over the centuries, this is how we have managed to stay alive and this is how we have managed to prevail: we have always guarded each other’s anonymity as if it were our own, because if I guard you, you in turn will guard me and that’s the only safety we’ve got. I’ve never forgotten this; it is something that was embedded in my very young mind and I’ve remembered this many, many times.”2 An active and articulate scholar through high school, Hay graduated with honors in 1929 and then spent the next year working for an attorney in a downtown office (Licata 1978, 105). During this time, he discovered “cruising” in nearby Pershing Square and had a sexual encounter there with an older man called “Champ,” who was probably in his early thirties (Licata 1978, 106). In 1931, Hay left Los Angeles to matriculate at Stanford University, but he did not complete a degree. In the fall of 1932, after having an affair with James Broughton and coming out to his classmates as “temperamental,” he moved back to Los Angeles. The next February, Hay became an actor for the Antonio Pastor Theatre, performing character and comedy roles. He soon began dating Will Geer, the theater’s lead actor, who would later become famous as Grandpa Walton (Hay 1996, 356; Slade 2001). Hay was first drawn to social activism in 1934 when he witnessed a Vshaped wedge of mounted police force their way through a crowd of people gathered before the Los Angeles City Hall, demonstrating for milk. As described by Licata, Hay “grew furious” with what he saw. “Hay hurled a rock, which hit the lead policeman, knocking him from his horse. He was saved from arrest when a friendly Mexican-American pulled him into a maze of humble dwellings that scaled the nearby hill” (1978, 107). Hay later told Will Roscoe that a well-known drag queen named Clarabelle helped usher him to safety as he escaped into Bunker Hill (Hay 1996, 356; Roscoe 1996b, 37). Later that year, a second event was to make a life-changing impression on him. He had traveled with Geer to San Francisco to participate in the longshoremen’s strike of 1934. When the National Guard opened fire on the crowd, Hay heard bullets whizzing past his...

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