Henry "Harry" Hay is regarded by many as the father of the gay rights movement. One of the first to assert that homosexuals were an oppressed minority, Hay started the earliest long-

standing U.S. homophile group, the Mattachine Society, and later founded the Radical Faeries.

Hay was born on April 7, 1912, in Worthing, England. His father worked as a mining engineer in South Africa and Chile, but moved the family to Los Angeles when Harry was a young boy. Having always regarded himself as different, Hay got his first exposure to homosexuality as an adolescent through reading Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex (1906). As a teenager, Hay began having same-sex relationships, including one with a sailor. He studied drama and music at Stanford University, but left to pursue an acting career.

In the early 1930s, Hay became lovers with Will Geer (best known as "Grandpa" on the television series The Waltons). The two men traveled north to participate in the San Francisco General Strike in 1934. During one rally, National Guard troops fired on the crowd and killed two workers. The experience radicalized Hay and led him to join the Communist Party. He later became a teacher of music and Marxist theory at the California Labor School. But the Communist Party did not accept his homosexuality. Under the influence of the party—and a psychiatrist who encouraged him to seek out a "boyish girl"—Hay married fellow radical Anita Platsky, and the couple adopted two daughters.

Although he remained married for 13 years, Hay continued to be attracted to men and increasingly established ties with gay circles. In 1948, while working on the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, Hay got the idea to start a gay organization. He wrote a manifesto declaring that homosexuals were an "androgynous minority" that made unique contributions to society. At the time, most prospective members found Hay’s ideas too risky. Two years later, however, Hay met Rudi Gernreich (later famous for designing a topless women’s bathing suit), who became his lover and the first to sign on to his plan to create "Bachelors Anonymous."

Hay and Gernreich canvassed cruising beaches seeking signatures on a petition opposing the Korean War and broaching the idea of a gay organization. "If a guy’s eyes would shine a little bit more than usual, we would ask him to have coffee with us," Hay later recalled. "Then we would show him a call to an underground society." On November 11, 1950, Hay, Gernreich, Bob Hull (one of Hay’s students), and two of Hull’s friends, Dale Jennings and Chuck Rowlands, gathered at Hay’s Silver Lake home and set about forming the group Hay had envisioned. The following April, the men formally established the Mattachine Society, named after a French Renaissance guild of unmarried men who performed masked rituals.

In 1952, the Mattachine Society successfully fought lewd conduct charges against Jennings as a result of police entrapment, and the victory led to an influx of new members with more conservative political views. By this time, Hay and the other founders had left the Communist Party, but the new members felt their leftist ties remained a liability. At a conference the following year, the founders all resigned and turned the organization over to new leadership.

After leaving Mattachine, Hay continued his work with progressive causes. In October 1963, following a difficult 10-year involvement with a Danish hatmaker, Hay began an enduring relationship with John Burnside, an inventor who ran a kaleidoscope factory. Soon after helping organize a Los Angeles chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, the couple moved to New Mexico in 1970. Learning about the Native American berdache, or "two spirit" people, solidified Hay’s view that homosexuals were a "third gender" with special gifts. "We differ most from heterosexuals in how we perceive the world," Hay once said. "That ability to offer insights and solutions is our contribution to humanity, and why our people keep reappearing over the millennia." Hay’s notions of a unique gay consciousness and queer spirituality led him and others to found the Radical Faeries in 1979.

Hay’s role in the gay movement was not widely recognized until the publication of Jonathan Ned Katz’s 1976 book, Gay American History. While Hay was lauded as a pioneer in his later years, he continued to generate controversy with his uncompromising ideas and combative personality. He opposed what he saw as the increasing assimilationism of the gay movement, and spoke out against same-sex marriage. He was often not inclusive of lesbians—whom he saw as a distinct group from gay men—and hostile to bisexuals, but, according to Eric Slade (who produced the 2002 biographical documentary Hope Along the Wind), "He once told me, ‘Everyone, even heterosexual people, all have the potential to have that faerie spirit.’"

In 1999, Hay and Burnside moved from West Hollywood to San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, where Hay—suffering from lung cancer and increasingly frail—was attended by a dedicated circle of Radical Faerie caregivers. Hay died at the age of 90 on October 24, 2002.