LibGuides: LGBTQIA+ Pride Month: Harry Hay

Overview

Communism/Marxism
essentialism
gay spirituality
homophile movement
radical faeries
Mattachine society

Harry Hay was a visionary and social activist. Marxist student of folklore and music, teacher and seeker, he helped create two of the most important institutions of modern American gay life, the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries. Considered an essentialist, he believed gay people have a spiritual purpose in helping heal the planet.

Harry Hay was the visionary founder of two groups crucial to the growth of gay liberation and spirituality in the United States. The Mattachine Society began as a five‐man study group and became a national network. The Radical Faeries is a group of mostly gay men seeking healing based on two‐spirit traditions in North American indigenous cultures.

Source:

Hay, Henry “Harry,” Jr. (1912–2002)

https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/wileyhs/hay_henry_harry_jr_1912_2002/0

Links

Harry Hay, Early Proponent of Gay Rights, Dies at 90 Harry Hay, who founded a secret organization six decades ago that proved to be the catalyst for the American gay rights movement. Mr. Hay's contribution was to do what no one else had done before: plant the idea among American homosexuals that they formed an oppressed cultural minority of their own, like blacks, and to create a lasting organization in which homosexuals could come together to socialize and to pursue what was, at the beginning, the very radical concept of homosexual rights.
Harry Hay, the Mattachine Society, and Musicology’s Role in the early U.S. Gay Rights Movement June is LGBTQ Pride Month, an ideal occasion to think about the intersections of musicology and the long, ongoing struggle for queer and trans liberation. We are used to thinking of musicology as having come late to queer studies, but if we expand our definition beyond the academy, we see that musicology — that is, researching and teaching music history — played a small but important role in the origins of the modern American gay rights movement. Musicology, it turns out, helped inspire the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, the first gay rights (or in the parlance of the time, homophile) organization in the United States after WWII. This musicology took place in the adult education programs of the American Communist Party, and specifically in a course at the Los Angeles People’s Educational Center taught by Harry Hay. In order to design the course, which was to take a materialist approach to music history, Hay had to conduct substantial research. This led him to the historical Feast of Fools and sociétés mattachines of Renaissance France. Hay saw the Fool in these societies as a model for a new role gay men could fulfill in the modern world. Enriched by his background in music performance and continuing work on folk music, this revelation inspired key elements of the Mattachine Society’s organization and became the foundation for Hay’s evolving vision for the future of society and gay men’s role in it.
Harry Hay | Profile Harry Hay (1912-2002) is best known as the founder of the U.S. gay movement but is increasingly known as a pioneer of gay spirituality. He started the Mattachine Society in 1950 and launched the Radical Faerie movement in 1979. Behind both efforts, he hoped to recover and affirm the nature of homosexuals as "separate people" with a consciousness that distinguished them from heterosexuals even more than their sexuality.
How Harry Hay Became a Pioneer of the Gay Rights Movement A homosexual, Socialist, writer, spiritualist and activist, Harry Hay would cofound a secret organization in 1950 that would become the origin of the American gay rights movement, and help shape and expound the notion that gay people were an oppressed, cultural minority whose unification would only create greater awareness and understanding.

Video/Audio

Harry Hay gathered a group of gay men together in Los Angeles in 1950. They called themselves the Mattachine Society. (1:20 min.)

LGBTQIA+ Pride Month: Harry Hay

Overview

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Video/Audio

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