Harry Hay - College, Acting and Politicization

College, Acting and Politicization

Hay graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1929 and went to work at a law firm. At around this time he discovered the cruising scene in Pershing Square, where he met a man who told him about the Society for Human Rights, a homosexual rights group that had existed briefly in Chicago in the 1920s (although Hay would later deny that he had any knowledge of previous LGBT activism). In 1930 Hay enrolled in Stanford University, and in 1931 he came out as "temperamental" (then a code word for "homosexual") to friends and classmates. A severe sinus infection led Hay to drop out in 1932 and he was financially unable to return to college.

Relocating to San Francisco, Hay quickly fell in with the city's theatrical and artistic circles. He relocated again, to Hollywood, finding work as a stunt rider in B movies. Unable to secure steady employment in films, Hay joined an agitprop theatre group that entertained at strikes and demonstrations. Many of his associates in the theatre group were members of the Communist Party and Hay joined the Party in 1934. From the time he joined the Party until leaving it in the early 1950s, Hay taught courses in subjects ranging from Marxist theory to folk music at the "People's Educational Center" in Hollywood and later throughout the Los Angeles area.

Also in 1934, Hay joined the cast of the Tony Pastor Theatre. There he met and became lovers with fellow actor Will Geer, whom Hay credited as his political mentor. Hay and Geer participated in a milk strike in Los Angeles, where Hay was first exposed to radical gay activism in the person of "Clarabelle", a drag queen who held court in the Bunker Hill neighborhood, who hid Hay from police. Later that year, Hay and Geer performed in support of the San Francisco General Strike. Hay witnessed police firing on demonstrators and this cemented his commitment to social change.

Hay, along with Roger Barlow and LeRoy Robbins, directed a short film Even As You and I (1937) featuring Hay, Barlow, and filmmaker Hy Hirsh.

Hay began Jungian analysis in 1937. He was, he later said, "misled" by his psychiatrist, who suggested that Hay find himself a "boyish girl". In 1938, Hay confided to his fellow Party members that he was homosexual. Like his therapist, they encouraged him not to act on his feelings and suggested that he get married. He did, later that same year, to Party member Anna Platky. The couple adopted two daughters, Hannah Margaret in 1943 and Kate Neall in 1945. Hay realized by 1941 that his therapist had been wrong and that he was not going to become heterosexual through marriage. He continued having relationships with men throughout his marriage and the couple divorced in 1951.