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Henry Hay Jr. (April 7, – October 24, ) was an American gay rights activist, communist, and labor advocate. He cofounded the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States, as well as the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated gay spiritual movement. Harry Hay (born April 7, , Worthing, Sussex, England—died October 24, , San Francisco, California, U.S.) was an American gay rights activist who believed that homosexuals should see themselves as an oppressed minority entitled to equal rights.

The first sustained gay rights group in the U.S.—the Mattachine Society—sprang directly from the mind of Harry Hay in Harry was the gay rights pioneer who paved the way for everything that came after. Throughout the s Harry Hay pursed original research into history, literature and anthropology to find the suppressed and hidden history of gay people. His research into the Native American "berdache" laid the groundwork for later studies and the emergence of a Native American Two Spirit movement.

Hay himself was a wholly original character who looked past the gay-straight divide to the multiplicities of contemporary queer culture. Early gay-rights advances depended heavily on the. Harry Hay is best known as the founder of the U. He started the Mattachine Society in and launched the Radical Faerie movement in Behind both efforts, he hoped to recover and affirm the nature of homosexuals as "separate people" with a consciousness that distinguished them from heterosexuals even more than their sexuality.

Born on the same day the Titanic sank, Harry often said, "when one queen goes down another comes up. Like many gay men of his time, Harry married.

He and his wife, Anita Platky, adopted two daughters: Hannah born in and Kate in The couple divorced in He wrote his original "call to action" in , and two years later, he joined with Rudi Gernreich, Chuck Rowland, and a few others to found the Mattachine Society. The Society formed discussion groups and fought for basic rights.

Their spin-off organization, ONE Incorporated, published a national gay magazine throughout the s. Hay is widely credited with applying the term "minority" to homosexuals--though many resisted that concept in In its first years, Hay viewed the Mattachine movement as a "sacred brotherhood" and the dedication of the society's original members was described as "evangelical.

Harry was fascinated with the questions of why gays exist and researched extensively to understand: Who are we? Where have we been in history? What is our purpose? Hay's studies suggested that gay nature was neither male nor female; he adhered to the theory that GLBT people form a third sex and serve as a bridge between the masculine and the feminine.

He based these thoughts on the historical, anthropological studies of Native American and other two-spirited people who lived trans-gendered roles integrated into tribal life. He sought through faerie gatherings to encourage the concepts of "gay consciousness" and "subject-subject consciousness," based on the belief that, unlike heterosexuality, homosexual relationships had a deep potential due to the inherent similarity of same-sex partners.

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For some years he and Burnside lived in a Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, where the couple built and sold kaleidoscopes. Even in jeans and a work shirt, he was never seen without pearls, insisting that he "never again wanted to be mistaken for a hetero. He served as the elder philosopher for a movement that spread internationally.

I say what we do in bed is the only place where we are the same. Thirteen of these took place during the next nine years. Using a process based on the Hopi circle and healing ritual, these workshops sought to integrate gay sexuality and emotional intimacy with spirituality. He rallied for several years and the couple remained in San Francisco under cared of a circle of friends.

He died six months after turning ninety, on October 24, The following poem is one expression of Hay's powerful vision of the gay gift: Out of history we emerge, A separate people whose time is at hand, Out of the mists of our long oppression, We bring love for ourselves and for each other, And love for the gifts we bear. So heavy and so painful the fashioning of them, So long the road given us to travel to bring them.

A separate people, We bring a gift to celebrate each other; Tis a gift to be gay! Feel the pride of it! A separate people, We bring the gift of our consciousness to everyone, That all together we may heal our planet! Share the magic of it!