# Harry Hay Born April 7, 1912 in Worthing, England; died October 24, 2002 in San Francisco. American communist and labor organizer who founded the **[[Mattachine Society]]** in Los Angeles on November 11, 1950 — the first sustained gay-rights organization in U.S. history. Hay has been variously described as "the founder of the modern American gay movement" and "the father of gay liberation." ## Communist Roots Hay was a member of the **Communist Party USA** from 1934 to 1951. The framework he brought to Mattachine — that gay people constituted a **"cultural minority"** with shared interests analogous to other oppressed minorities, requiring collective political organization — was directly imported from his Marxist training. This was a radical departure from the pre-Mattachine framing of homosexuality as an individual psychological condition. When the Mattachine Society purged Hay and the other communist founders in 1953 in response to McCarthyism pressure, Hay personally accepted the exclusion to protect the organization — a decision he later described with both regret and pride. The Mattachine that survived him was less radical, more assimilationist, and considerably more durable as a result. ## Radical Faeries In 1979, Hay co-founded the **Radical Faeries**, a loosely organized gay spiritual movement combining elements of paganism, environmentalism, anarcho-communism, and gay liberation. The Radical Faeries remain active today as a network of gatherings, intentional-community houses ("sanctuaries"), and political organizing — one of the longest-lived continuous queer-spiritual organizations in U.S. history. ## Legacy Hay's 1996 book *Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder* is the closest thing to a primary-source autobiography of the early American homophile movement. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Mattachine Society]]