“Who are we?

Where do we come from?

What are we for?”

questions posed by Harry to founding members of Mattachine

compiled by Will Roscoe for Radically Gay: The Life & Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay, September 27-30, 2012

“Someday you will have wandered to a strange and faraway

place. You’ll not know who any of the people are there. And

then suddenly, in that frightening and alien place, you’ll look

across the square and you’ll see a pair of eyes open and glow at

you. You’ll look back at him, and, at that moment, in the lock of two pairs of eyes, you are home and you are safe!”

The Trouble with Harry Hay

advice from his first lover, a sailor named Matt 1926

“In that long-ago fantasy, he whom I would reach out in love to

was indeed projected as being another me. . . . He’d be standing

just before dawn on a golden velvet hillside . . . he’d hold out his

hand for me to catch hold of, and then we would run away to the

top of the hill to see the sunrise, and we would never have to come back again because we would now have each other.”

“A Separate People Whose Time Has Come”

“The golden boy has to be one who sees as I see; he

has to be somebody who is not afraid of the strike

line; he has to be somebody where we can walk

shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand and he’s not

afraid to be beaten up. And if I’m beaten, he won’t be worried about me; he’ll carry on.”

Bohemian Los Angeles

“If my father could be wrong, then the teacher

could be wrong. And if the teacher could be

wrong, then the priest could be wrong. And if the

priest could be wrong, then maybe even God could be wrong.”

The Trouble with Harry Hay

1920s

“…and if they got that wrong…

what else did they get wrong?”

response to scholars, politicians, religious leaders, and indigenous spokespeople who deny the presence of queers

“The commitment was not an intellectual one to

start with. It was purely emotional, a gut thing.

You couldn’t have been a part of that and not have your life completely changed.”

Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities

recalling the San Francisco General Strike

1934

“Organizing the Mattachine was a call

to me deeper than the innermost

reaches of spirit, a vision-quest more important than life.”

Gay American History

“It was obvious McCarthy was setting up the

pattern for a new scapegoat, and it was going

to be us —Gays. We had to organize, we had to move, we had to get started.”

Gay American History

“Almost from the very first

moment of our meeting, we were in

love with each other and with each other’s ideas.”

Radically Gay

on meeting Rudy Gernreich 1950

“To earn for ourselves any place in the sun, we must

with perseverance and self-discipline work collectively

for the full first-class citizenship participation of Minorities everywhere, including ourselves.”

“Preliminary Concepts” (prospectus for Mattachine)

1950

“We figured that, if we insisted on calling

ourselves by a term they didn’t understand, the

media would have to ask us what it meant; and

we—then—would be able to define and characterize ourselves, for a change.”

Gay American History

on the use of the term “homophile”

“The Mattachine Foundation’s inventory was

strictly for the birds! Atomically powered by a

dream about to be born, its reserves were . . . total

allegiance to high purposes, tenacity of vision,

irrevocable resolve, a compassion as enfolding as faith, and above all else . . . audacity.”

“Epilogue: In Memory of the Mattachine Foundation,” in Homosexuals Today

1956

“Throw off the ugly green frog-skin

of Hetero-imitation!”

Opening comments, Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies, 1979

1979

“Why do the shoes of middle-class respectability

and conformity never seem to fit?”

Western Homophile Conference Keynote Address; “A Separate People Whose Time has Come”

“After all, we aren’t heteros. And when we do imitate

them, we usually do it badly—we either overdo or we underdo. Mostly, to be perfectly candid, we overdo.”

1970/1987

“Did you ever ask the girls back then if they thought you

threw a ball like them? They’d have straightened you out

in nothing flat! They’d have told you that you didn’t throw a ball like a girl, but like something other.”

“Toward the New Frontiers of Fairy Vision…subject-SUBJECT Consciousness”

1980

“Sexual Orientation isn’t the only difference

between Us and the Heteros. As a result of the way

we had been malignantly demeaned and diminished

over the centuries, it is the only difference LEFT between US and the Heteros.”

“Remarks on Third Gender”

1994

“Rather than being merely a sexual variation of them,

in all other senses exactly the same as they, we are a

Separate People with, in several measurable respects,

a rather different window on the world, a different

consciousness, which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality.”

“Radical Faerie Proposals to the ‘March on Washington’ Organizing Meeting”

1986

“We are maximizing the differences between us and

them as an act of love, a love for ourselves and a love

for the society in which we belong. Because I am not

suggesting at any time that we separate out and forget it entirely. We need them, they need us.”

“A Call for Fairy Sanctuaries,” Vortex 1

1980

“We Queers, having won our autonomy with no help from

anybody, shall continue to maintain that autonomy. We

shall be happy to walk with any group so long as we and

they remain in a loving-sharing consensus. But the moment the consensus breaks—we Faeries vanish!”

“What Gay Consciousness Brings, and Has Brought, to the Hetero Left!”

1991

“The whole point about gay rights is an illusion, because

when you come right down to it, we can buy a legislator, but

they can buy him back twice as fast—and they do. There are

ways and means by which we can relate to the political

process, and we can do them beautifully: We can give them—the parent society—some of our courage.”

“A Call for Fairy Sanctuaries,” Vortex 1

1981

“When the parent society begins to appreciate

what it is we contribute—and recognize that their

law is in our way against further contributions— they will change that law to their advantage.”

“A Call for Fairy Sanctuaries, Vortex 1

1994

“Insofar as child molestation is concerned, the

most common, yet unrecognized, form is the

sexual coercion of Gay and Lesbian youth into heterosexual identities and behaviors.”

“Our Beloved Gay/Lesbian Movement at a Crossroads”

1994

“When we stumble upon recorded or

secondary evidences of permissiveness

towards Homophilia in a given archaic culture

we must simultaneously search for the institution that permitted it because it used it.”

Radically Gay

1959

“Ritual and magic are usable only on a group

level, and serve to promote unity, to maintain

identity, and even to offer the collective security needed to continue the struggle for survival.”

Radically Gay

ca. 1946

“The Fool . . . as protestant (with a small ‘p’) . . . as

communal teacher . . . as Master of ceremonies as festive

rituals . . . as leader of the dance . . . as mime and glee-man

. . . as wizard or deputy to the wise woman with the

second sight . . . was a beloved and cherished phenomena.”

“Epilogue: In Memory of the Mattachine Foundation,” in Homosexuals Today

1956

“In the Berdache we see arise the great social

division of labor which becomes the

groundwork of industry as we know it today—the artisan and the cultural craftsman.”

“The Homosexual and History . . . An Invitation to Further Study,” Radically Gay

1953

“To all of history and to two-thirds of the world today,

music is a language, an encyclopedia of patterns, a

science—of organization. A method of communicating,

organizing, educating, mobilizing in ways beyond the scope of language or static illustration.”

“Music—Barometer of Class Struggle”

1955

“Karl Marx had a marvelous concept of a self-

maintaining political process in socialism, but

what he didn’t know was that the shining

promise of socialism could not be fulfilled through subject-object consciousness.”

Gay Soul

1980

“Science has had to move from the Aristotelian-

Cartesian logics of Binary-analytical-classifying objective

thought to “analog” thought, from formula-type thinking

in categories to modular thinking, from two-dimensional

inter-processes of Dialectical thinking to three-dimensional or triangulational thinking.”

“Gay Liberation: Chapter Two”

1976

“Whereas the BINARY, or digital, computer studying a given problem

functions in terms of opposites—in terms of Go/No-Go, true or false, yes

or no, add or subtract, A or B, man or woman, with nothing in between

according to the Aristotelian ‘Law of the excluded Middle’—the ANALOG

computer, in studying a given problem, essays to become the problem, by becoming a three dimensional map or model of the problem.”

“Gay Liberation: Chapter Two”

1976

“Humanity must expand its experience to thinking

of another, that other, not as object—to be used, to be

manipulated, to be mastered, to be consumed—but as

subject, as another like him/her self, another self to be respected, to be appreciated, to be cherished.”

“Gay Liberation: Chapter Two”

1976

“As adults, some of us may be a combination of both hetero

masculine and hetero feminine, but mostly we a combination of

neither. It is from this spiritual neitherness, evident in our

capacity to fly free from historical conformities and prejudices,

evident in our capacity to invent in the very teeth of nullifying rules and regulations, that our contributions come.”

“Toward the New Frontiers of Fairy Vision . . . subject-SUBJECT Consciousness”

1980

“When I was looking for a word to represent neither 

masculine or feminine, I used the word the hetero bully boys

had used to describe me as they saw me all those years ago.

‘Fairy,’ they called me, ‘not-masculine/not-feminine—fairy.’

Only now that I’m gown up and have become a proper queer, I gussy up the spelling to make it f a e r i e.‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ‑ ”

“A Separate People Whose Time Has Come”

1987

“How might we apply subject-subject

consciousness to gay sexual sharing?

For starters, we might try enjoying each

other’s enjoyment.”

“A Separate People Whose Time Has Come”

1987

“Yeah, I just went out and ran down an

old lady and I feel much better.”

The Trouble with Harry Hay

comment after storming out of a Mattachine meeting ca. 1952

“I had a rush of brains to the head…”

“A circle has no head or foot …”

“Honey, queens don’t follow, they lead…”

“. . . straight men never were my type. I

always thought they had a certain smell . . .”

“This is our job now: We must begin to define

ourselves to them as we wish to be defined, we must

begin to show ourselves as we wish to be seen, and we must begin to speak as we wish to be heard.”

Gay Soul

1994

“What happens to a dreamer is that

his dream never comes to an end—it

just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

Gay Soul

1994