The Trouble with Harry Hay by Stuart Timmons

Author:Stuart Timmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay, queer, history, biography, mattachine, founder, radical faerie
Publisher: White Crane Books

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Rudi’s job in New York came to naught and in November he returned to resume his relationship with Harry and Mattachine. He found the Society had a major new project, turning the “concerned citizens” front group into a state registered, nonprofit corporation called the Mattachine Foundation. Harry’s mother agreed to be president of the board of directors and Konrad Stevens’s sister, Romayne Cox and his mother, Mrs. D. T. Campbell also served. Behind these figureheads the Society could control things; thus the gay people had a channel for dealing with the public and with officials, but at reduced risk. State incorporation papers were filed, but they were so slow in working their way through the state bureaucracy that the Foundation was never officially incorporated. The impartial Foundation broke no laws in its solicitous concern for “the welfare of the homosexual.”

Margaret Neall Hay stood beside her son and earned herself an FBI file. Not only did her address become perhaps the first publicly registered gay address in California, her name was identified with the budding movement in the newspapers. She opened the account for the Mattachine dues at her own bank, Security First National at Hollywood and Highland, and she observed board meetings, pouring tea, though her influence was so nominal that several Mattachine members don’t even remember her presence.

Harry never pretended that his mother completely understood or endorsed a gay organization, but he always honored her participation. Margaret seems to have regarded the Mattachine members as personal friends of her son (who, in her eyes, could do no wrong) and as such they were “fine boys.” Even when Harry was not there, members of various Mattachine guilds would sometimes stop by the Oakcrest Drive house and pour out their love problems. In a polite, intuitive manner, Margaret simply listened.

To bolster its image, the Fifth Order wanted professional and prestigious people on the Foundation board. Several were approached, and there was even an attempt to arrange a tea with Dr. Alfred Kinsey during his 1953 trip to Los Angeles, though he canceled at the last minute. In the spring of 1952, they did secure two such visitors, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist, and her friend Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist and screenwriter. Isherwood had been the lover of Konrad Stevens when both worked at MGM, and it was Stevens who secured the audience. Despite great excitement over their attendance at the meeting, neither of the professionals agreed to serve on the Foundation board.

Hooker, who was just starting her pioneering research in this controversial field of homosexuality, worried that membership in the Foundation might compromise her image of professional objectivity. Isherwood—who described himself as “not a joiner”—contributed money but not his name. Rudi Gernreich recalled in 1980 that Isherwood was “not too helpful.”

Harry took the lack of helpfulness personally. At every opportunity, he referred to Isherwood’s behavior to the Mattachine as “rude and sneering” and spoke disdainfully of the novelist. “Isherwood made no bones about his contempt for our socialist, mass-organization approach,” Harry explained.

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