Harry Hay - Nominee

“The assimilationist movement is running us into the ground.”

– Harry Hay

Harry Hay was born in England on the day the Titanic sank. As a boy he received periodic abuse at the hands of his father who disapproved of his “sissified” son’s behavior.  His family moved to Los Angeles in 1919 and it was there in 1934 that he met Will Geer aka Grandpa Walton from The Walton's TV show, who became his lover for many years. Geer introduced Hay to the Communist Party where he became an active trade unionist and later put those organizational skills to good use as an advocate for gay rights. Since the Communist Party disapproved of homosexuals, Hay married Anita Platky in 1938 and they adopted two daughters. In 1950 he co-founded “The Mattachine Society” with his then-lover, Rudi Gernreich, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, and Dale Jennings. Inspired by an incendiary manifesto Hay had drafted, most historians mark the founding of Mattachine as the beginning of an organized gay movement in the U.S. When he went public with his involvement in the organization, Platky divorced him. Then, deemed a security risk, he was expelled from the Communist Party, shortly before being ejected by Mattachine for being a communist. Despite all these rejections, Hay continued pressing for gay rights and was one of the first to link gay support with voting when he publicly suggested to vice-presidential candidate Henry Wallace that the Progressive Party would get the homosexual vote if they backed the sexual privacy law. Hay never advocated that gays assimilate, believing instead that society must change and accept homosexuals as full individuals on their own terms as part of a distinct “Sexual Minority” – a provocative viewpoint that was decades ahead of its time. During the 1950s he worked fearlessly with the Citizen’s Committee to Outlaw Entrapment. Shortly after the Stonewall Riot in 1969 he was elected the first Chair of the Southern California Gay Liberation Front; and in 1979 he co-founded The Radical Faeries. Harry Hay spent the latter years of his life exploring the “TwoSpirit” people of Native American societies.  He died of lung cancer on October 24, 2002 at the age of 90. He remains one of the most influential and iconic gay activists ever to have lived.