XPost: sac.politics, alt.fan.sean-hannity, free.racist.maxine.waters   
   XPost: alt.journalism.newspapers   
   From: fuck.joe.biden@dns-netz.com   
      
   Six decades ago, Harry Hay founded a secret organization called   
   the Mattachine Society. Its name was derived from a medieval   
   French term for male dancers who sometimes satirized social   
   customs while dressed only in masks. Harry was a visionary; he   
   sought to organize American homosexuals around the notion that   
   they were an oppressed cultural minority, like black people, who   
   should agitate for homosexual rights. He began in Los Angeles in   
   1950, at a time when virtually no one identified himself   
   publicly as homosexual and at a time when the American   
   Psychiatric Association defined homosexuality as a mental   
   illness.   
      
   In 1948, Harry Hay was middle-aged and living with his wife,   
   Anita Platsky, whom he had married to conceal his homosexuality,   
   and their two adopted daughters, when he was seized by the   
   vision of a secret society for homosexuals. Harry was an ardent   
   Communist, an aspiring actor and a disaffected Catholic. One   
   summer night in ’48 he attended an all-male party in L.A. and   
   ruminated aloud about whether the Progressive Party candidate   
   for president, Henry Wallace, might include a sexual privacy   
   plank in his platform in return for the support of homosexuals.   
   That night, while his wife and daughters slept, Harry scribbled   
   the gay movement’s first political manifesto with its organizing   
   principle that gays were an oppressed minority. Harry’s first   
   chose to call his group Bachelors Anonymous. It took him more   
   than two years to recruit four other male homosexuals. Two of   
   them had been Communist Party members; the third, Dale Jennings,   
   was arrested the following year for soliciting sex from a   
   policeman. The fourth man was Harry’s lover, a Viennese   
   immigrant named Rudi Gernreich, who would later become renowned   
   (notorious?) as the designer of the topless bathing suit for   
   women. Harry’s Mattachine Society hired a lawyer to defend Dale   
   Jennings against the solicitation charge, claiming police   
   entrapment, and won an acquittal.   
      
   As the Mattachine Society added chapters across America, it grew   
   wary of Harry’s Communist Party affiliation and forced him out.   
   The communists rejected Harry’s homosexuality after he divorced   
   his wife in the late 1950s. More than two decades later, Harry   
   formed the Radical Faeries, who were given to gay spirituality,   
   mud baths and ecstatic dance rituals.   
      
   The New York Times published an obituary of Harry Hay on October   
   25, 2002 that ran for 35 column inches. This was followed by a   
   glowing article about Harry on October 30th and yet another in   
   the choice Sunday magazine section of the Times on December   
   29th. The Times couldn’t tell us enough about Harry Hay, the   
   founder of gay liberation, who had died at age 90. These fawning   
   articles pretty much covered Harry’s entire life, including his   
   anti-draft and anti-war activities and his work with Native   
   American activists. The Times even made mention of Harry’s   
   participation in the Communist Party agitation that led to a   
   union strike that closed the Port of San Francisco in 1934. So   
   it’s mighty peculiar that the New York Times, the newspaper of   
   record, the paper all the other papers and all the television   
   networks look to for direction, somehow never got around to   
   mentioning that Harry Hay was an enthusiastic supporter of   
   NAMBLA, The North American Man-Boy Love Association, which   
   advocates the abolition of all age-of-consent laws. Yup, Harry   
   was an advocate of pedophile rights, which he believed was an   
   organic dimension of gay rights.   
      
   Harry Hay wore a sign proclaiming "NAMBLA walks with me" as he   
   participated in a 1986 gay pride march in Los Angeles.   
      
   Harry Hay and Rep. Nancy Pelosi both marched in same SF Pride   
   parade back in 2001.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)