Harry Hay - Early Life

Early Life

Hay was born April 7, 1912 to Americans Margaret (née Neall) and Harry Hay, Sr. in the coastal town of Worthing, Sussex, England. His father was a mining engineer who had worked for Cecil Rhodes and the Guggenheim family. Hay was raised Catholic, in deference to his mother Margaret's family as a condition for the marriage. While Harry Sr. was negotiating his Guggenheim contract, Margaret gave birth to their second child, Margaret Caroline (nicknamed "Peggy") in February 1914. Hay's family moved to Chuquicamata, Chile in 1914, where his father managed an Anaconda Copper mine. In May 1916, Hay's brother John William (nicknamed "Jack") was born in Chile. Harry Sr. managed the mine until an accident in June 1916 cost him a leg. The family moved to the United States and settled in California where Harry Sr. bought and ran several commercial citrus farms. The Hay family moved to Los Angeles in 1919. Hay became an avid outdoorsman.

Hay had a strained relationship with his father, whom Hay believed had unconsciously realized that Hay was, if not homosexual, at least "sissified". Harry Sr. repeatedly punished Hay, including boxing his ears so often that Hay suffered permanent hearing loss. In an incident Hay recalled as being at the root of his later lack of guilt over his sexuality, Harry Sr. made a statement about Egypt over an evening meal and Hay, knowing him to be wrong, tried to correct him. Harry Sr. flew into a rage, beating his son with a razor strop in a futile attempt to get the boy to recant. After later confirming that he was indeed correct, Hay realized, "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." Hay's mother, on the other hand, was devoted to Hay, making no secret of the fact that he was her favorite. She encouraged his early interest in and talent for music, spending hours playing the piano and singing with him and arranging for piano and dance lessons. Hay became an accomplished pianist and organist and a professional-caliber ballroom dancer. When his dance instructor suggested he take ballet, Harry Sr. put a stop to the lessons.

In 1922, Hay joined a boys' club called the Western Rangers. Through the Rangers, Hay was first exposed to Native American spirituality when he witnessed members of the Hopi tribe performing rituals and, later, performing traditional dances for the group.

In 1923, at age 11, Hay first realized that there were others who had the same sorts of feelings for other boys as he did, when he discovered a copy of Edward Carpenter's book The Intermediate Sex. Sneaking a look at the volume at the public library, Hay encountered for the first time the word homosexual. He looked it up in a dictionary, where it was not listed. Still, he somehow realized that this word applied to him, and the volume listed several people who shared his feelings. "As soon as I saw it, I knew it was me," Hay said. "So I wasn't the only one of my kind in the whole world, and we weren't necessarily weird or freaks or perverted... the book... even named some who believed in comradeship and being everything to each other. Maybe, someday, I could... meet another one."

Hay spent summers growing up working on cattle ranches, where he was introduced to the tenets of Marxism by fellow ranch hands who were members of the Industrial Workers of the World ("Wobblies"). They taught him Marxist philosophy and gave him books and pamphlets written by Karl Marx. He learned of men having sex with other men, through stories passed around by ranch hands, telling him of violent assaults on miners who attempted to touch men with whom they shared quarters.

In 1925, Hay attended a feast day celebration at the invitation of a Native American co-worker, where he met the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka. Wovoka blessed Hay, saying that Hay would one day be a great friend to the Native American people. Hay took his union card to a hiring hall in San Francisco, convinced the union officials he was 21, and got a job on a cargo ship. In 1926, after an unloading at Monterey Bay, he met and had sex with a sailor named Matt. Through Matt, a decade his senior, he was introduced to the concept of homosexual men as a world-wide "secret brotherhood". Hay would later build on this idea, in combination with a Stalinist definition of nationalist identity, to argue that homosexuals constituted a "cultural minority".