Nowhere was this more evident than in the life of Harry Hay, longtime Communist Party USA (CPUSA) activist, trade union militant, and founder in 1950 of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights groups in U.S. history. But Harry’s situation was in many ways more complicated than activists like Paul Robeson in the U.S. or Alexandra Kollontai in Czarist Russia – those who combined the struggle for socialism with the interdependent but not subservient liberation of oppressed minorities and women.

Unlike racism or even sexism, there was no ideology of gay equality or rights to draw from, no definition of cultural pluralism for gay men and lesbians. Homophobia was “normal” across the political spectrum then (as it still is for the Right). Gay men and lesbians were compelled to live a closeted existence, facing possible prison sentences, certain blacklisting, and likely isolation from friends and family if they were exposed.

Most progressives and liberals at the time saw homosexuality as a “medical problem,” despite the path-breaking Kinsey Report of the late 1940s which showed homosexual conduct to be both widespread and hard to distinguish in terms of personality from heterosexual conduct. Virtually all political groups, including the Communist Party, rejected open homosexuals as members, although the sexual orientations of Harry Hay and other gay party members were known and, in the language of the time, “tolerated,” by fellow comrades who treated them as equals because of their work as activists and organizers.

In such an atmosphere, the task of pioneering a path toward what eventually became known as “gay liberation” fell to Harry Hay.

Harry Hay was born in England in 1912, supposedly on the day, he liked to remember, that the Titanic sank. Eventually, his family settled in Southern California, where Harry, who became aware of his sexual orientation at a fairly early age, began to work in Los Angeles theater and movie projects in the early 1930s. As a young man, he was influenced by the writings of Edward Carpenter, a British homosexual and socialist, who saw gay people as an oppressed group with their own distinct culture and needs.

It was in Los Angeles in 1934 that Harry met Will Geer, a gay actor, singer, and CPUSA activist, who was to become his lover. After joining Geer in doing support work for the ILWU-led San Francisco General Strike of that year, Hay followed Geer into the Communist Party. Seeing the funeral procession of 40,000 people filing down Market Street to honor workers shot by police during the strike, Harry was to later tell historian John D’Emilio he was taken by the “siren song of Revolution” that day. “You couldn’t have been a part of that,” he recalled, “and not have your life completely changed.” From then, he used his substantial talents as an organizer, his theatricality, and his humor to become a very effective party activist.

Hay was open and philosophical about his sexual orientation, seeing it simultaneously as both a part of himself and an unfortunate handicap to his larger work. He once told a psychiatrist that he found party meetings very dull because there were no “flower-faced Marxist boys to stand with me in the class struggle against oppression.” In 1938, on the advice of the same psychiatrist, he married Anita Platky, a party comrade, in a union that was to last 13 years.

Harry continued his party and left work through the late 1940s, organizing in California a group of progressive gay men, Bachelors Anonymous, to support Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party presidential campaign in 1948. During the campaign, Harry worked among gays and actually helped to carry a precinct with a large gay population for Wallace. He also raised the issue of the Progressive Party supporting a sexual privacy law in exchange for gay votes – perhaps the first time in U.S. history that anyone had defined gays as a voting constituency with specific political needs.

At a time when the CPUSA was facing unprecedented political persecution on all fronts and losing tens of thousands of members, Harry Hay remained a dedicated and committed party member, an activist in the best sense. He reached a point, however, where he saw his work as first and foremost as being with the struggle for gay liberation, which, as a Communist, he identified with the struggles of oppressed people throughout the world. With the defeat of fascism and the collapse of colonialism, he saw a new opening of possibilities for gay liberation.

The Communist Party leadership in California respected his contributions, but as with almost all organizations, the dominant ideology of the times kept the CPUSA from accepting open homosexuals as party members. The argument that party functionaries passively accepted was essentially the same one used to purge homosexual men from the federal government – that gays would be subject to blackmail and thus could be used to betray the organization.

Faced with this, Hay went to the party leadership and asked to be expelled in 1951. At first, they refused. Finally, Hay worked out a compromise with the California CP leadership, in which he would be dropped from membership as a “security risk,” but not for being a homosexual. In the larger society, during the depths of the Cold War, being fired from a job as a “security risk” was not something Communists were ashamed of.

In a tragicomic expression of the situation, the Communist Party issued a formal statement praising Harry Hay and gave him a farewell testimonial dinner, perhaps the only one of its kind ever held. In its statement, the party proclaimed Harry Hay to be “a lifelong friend of the people,” certainly bizarre language to describe someone whose membership was being revoked. It would be several decades before Harry’s party caught up to him in being fully committed to LGBTQ equality.

Harry reluctantly left the Communist Party because its leadership was not yet ready to grasp the possibilities and significance of a homosexual liberation movement. He did not, however, leave the struggle for social change.

Harry kept on fighting, though, using the Leninist tactics and strategies that he had first learned in the 1930s – relying on the development of a broad, inclusive people’s front to advance the struggle. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1955, he stood up to his interrogators, treating them with the contempt they richly deserved. Fearful, perhaps, of making him into a martyr, HUAC declined to cite him for contempt and send him to prison, which it had previously done with the Hollywood Ten and others.

In the 1960s, Harry joined Women’s Strike for Peace, a left peace activist group and sought to develop coalitions of the emerging gay movement with anti-war and women’s rights movements. He also became an activist and supporter of Native Americans in their struggle to reclaim their cultural heritage. It 1963, he began to share his life with John Burnside, developing with John a partnership that would last the rest of his days.

To his last day, Harry rejected the hatred that ruling circles fomented against gay men and lesbians, as they do against all other oppressed minority groups as a means of divide and conquer. He also always challenged expressions of self-hatred within, which for the LGBTQ community is perhaps more intense than for any other oppressed group. He would fight in an underground struggle if necessary, but he would never live in a closet.

Harry Hay is today rightly praised by a wide variety of LGBTQ activists and organizations as a pioneer in the struggle for freedom and liberation. It is important also to remember him as a Communist who both preached and practiced the ideological militancy and tactical flexibility that produced great victories for the working class and oppressed minorities on many fronts in the past, and which can and will do so in the future. (IPA Service)