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"Homosexuals are different... but... we believe they have the right to be. We believe
that the civil rights and human dignity of homosexuals are as precious as
those of any other citizen... we believe that the homosexual has the right
to live, work, and participate in a free society." |
The Mattachine Society is one of the earliest LGBT organizations founded in the United States. Founded in 1950, Harry Hay (one of the key people in the society) and some other Los Angeles men came together to help improve the rights of gay men (not yet women).
The idea of creating a gay activist group first came to Harry Hay's mind in 1948. Hay spoke with other gay men at a party about forming a gay support organization for him called "Bachelors for Wallace". Wallace was Henry A. Wallace the founder of the Progressive Party. Hay received a very positive response and as a result, wrote the organizing principles that night, wrote a document he referred to as "The Call". However, the men who had been interested forming the group were much less enthusiastic after reading what Hay had come up with.
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| Harry Hay |
Over the next two years, Hay improved on his ideas, finally coming up with the idea for an international order that would serve as "a service and welfare organization devoted to the protection and improvement of Society's Androgynous Minority". He planned to call this organization "Bachelors Anonymous". In 1950 Hay met Rudi Gernreich and the two became partners. Hay showed Gernreich "The Call" (the document he had written). Gernreich declared the document "the most dangerous thing he had ever read", and then became a big financial supporter of the group, except he did not lend his name to it (instead went by the initial "R"). Finally, on November 11, 1950, Hay, along with Gernreich and other friends, held the first meeting of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles, under the name Society of Fools. Later on, in April of 1951, the group changed its name to Mattachine Society, a name suggested by Gruber and chosen by Hay, after Medieval French secret societies of masked men who, through their anonymity, were empowered to criticize ruling monarchs with impunity.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattachine_Society
https://complicatingqueertheory.wordpress.com/a-queer-ethnography-of-counter-culture-in-the-20th-century/mattachine-society/
This is a very interesting post, which makes very clear the process by which one of the first LGBT organizations in the country was founded. An immense amount of courage was required in order for Harry Hay to take action for a cause which many people felt so strongly against, as homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Also, Hay had been a member of the communist party for two decades by the time he founded the Mattachine Society, which added onto the risks he was taking in trying to start this movement. During this period, McCarthyism was causing most people to keep completely quiet about beliefs that were not commonly accepted, as paranoia about communism pervaded the country, and there were major consequences for those labelled communists. The fact that Hay and other men were able to establish this organization to advocate for the rights of gay men illustrates the beginning of a shift in mindset and that many people seemed to be experiencing, regarding a variety of causes, as the times changed to the 1960s, a decade after the Mattachine Society was first founded.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mattachine:_Radical_Roots_of_the_Gay_Movement
This was a very interesting and insightful post about how Harry Hay beat the odds to start an LGBT activist group. Another instrumental figure in the founding of the society was Dale Jennings. In 1950, Jennings was arrested and charged with indecent behavior in Griffith Park. The jury's acquittal of Jennings marked the first acquittal in California's history of a homosexual person on this type of charge. After that, Jennings became the Rosa Parks of the gay rights movement, and he cofounded the Mattachine Society.
ReplyDeletehttp://articles.latimes.com/2000/may/19/local/me-31714