Gay Dad

The New York Times
Originally Published December 18, 2002
By Armistead Maupin

On his 90th birthday, the father of the modern gay movement was honored at the new Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center in San Francisco. The ''campus'' of the facility had recently been named for the late Chuck Holmes, the city's leading producer of gay male pornography -- an unapologetic pairing of sex and social justice that Harry Hay must have reveled in. For well over half a century, taking his cues from both Marx and Kinsey, he chased a dream of a ''golden brotherhood,'' and that night, sporting an oxygen tube and a crown of purple pansies, the original pinko-Commie-queer seemed the very picture of a dream achieved as a man in naughty nurse drag wheeled him out to greet the crowd.

We remember him largely for the Mattachine Society, a group of seven gay men who began secretly assembling in a Los Angeles basement about the time that ''I Love Lucy'' entered the American consciousness. Named for the medieval jesters who wore masks while stirring rebellion against the monarchy, the society was committed to the daring notion that ''no boy or girl approaching the maelstrom of deviation need make that crossing alone.'' Its guiding precept -- Harry's precept -- was that homosexuals were not just lone degenerates without recourse but were a clearly definable minority capable of achieving change through solidarity.

Back then in California, it was illegal for more than two queers to gather in one place at the same time, so the original Mattachine members took an oath of secrecy that effectively remained unbroken for a quarter of a century. The society was modeled on a Communist cell, a unit that Harry knew well. In the mid-30's, he had fallen in love with a charismatic young actor named Will Geer and followed him into the party. But the man who would one day be known as television's Grandpa Walton just didn't understand his lover's growing obsession with homosexual organizing, and most of Harry's straight comrades were openly aghast at his shamelessness. They finally bullied him into choosing a bride, though neither she nor the children they adopted could turn the tide of Harry's desires. By mid-century he had parted ways with both family and party to pursue his oddball vision of men loving men without fear.

His chief ally in this was a new lover, Rudi Gernreich, a designer who would eventually give the 60's its most leeringly hetero novelty item: the topless swimsuit. Though the other five Mattachine members had been part of Harry's Marxist circle, egalitarianism seldom prevailed. Harry, in fact, seems to have been something of an autocrat, judging from a new documentary film about his life, in which Harry's fellow pioneers recall him as a ''benevolent dictator'' and ''intellectual bully.'' No one, however, denied the power of his ideas or the feeling of safety and purpose afforded by their underground brotherhood.

It was not to last. As the Mattachine Society spread to other cities, younger members began to reject the secrecy and paranoia of the old order. What's more, the rise of McCarthyism had made Harry's Commie origins as embarrassing to these new queers as his queerness had been to the Commies. He was ousted from the Mattachines and once again set adrift in the world.

He would not find vindication until the late 60's, when groups like the Gay Liberation Front began to regard the Mattachines as weak-kneed traditionalists. By then, however, Harry was already seeking answers elsewhere. Living in New Mexico, he began to study berdachism, the Native American practice of raising ''third gender'' children as spiritual intermediaries between the sexes. By the 70's he had begun to wonder if all gay people weren't meant to serve such a purpose and if, in fact, the desperate new drive for assimilation wasn't missing the point entirely.

The result was the Radical Faeries, a group devoted to gay spirituality that Harry co-founded in 1979. At its first meeting, Harry, now in his late 60's, exhorted some 200 men to ''throw off the ugly green frogskin of hetero-imitation to find the shining Faerie prince beneath.'' This sensual pagan regimen, characterized by mud baths and ecstatic dance rituals, would serve Harry well as his last Utopia. Several of his Faerie brothers were present when he died in San Francisco on Oct. 24. And that cranky but courtly bossiness never left him. ''He had dying wishes,'' said Eric Slade, the director of the new film. ''In fact, several guys received lists of instructions.''

Armistead Maupin is the author of ''The Night Listener.''


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