Interview of Harry Hay,"We Are a Separate People,"

1. Transcript

1.1. Tape Number: I, Side One October 28, 1981

HARRY HAY: This whole idea of talking about the different tapings that I have done and my impressions of them, what is done with this material, I think is kind of interesting. I'm mentioning Sal Licata in particular, because after all I think he was doing a dissertation also. But it suggests, among other things, what I would consider one of the great failings, certainly in the middle of the twentieth century: a great many people who really ought to be scholars and who really ought to be faithful, let's say, to the materials that they're dealing with and to the principles that they're dealing with will, as he did for example-- I think he took about--oh, what?--maybe eight or ten hours of tape, a couple of afternoons; so maybe it would be thirty hours altogether, three different days. Then what is done with this I don't know, because Sal, like Dorr [Legg], wanted to give a certain impression about the gay movement. Both of them are trying to make it respectable, and in trying to make it respectable, they minimize, for instance--not only minimize but they actually distorted my whole relationship with the left. And this made me perfectly furious.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In what way was it distorted?

HARRY HAY: Well, I think there's one sentence in Licata's thing about "There might have been some slight influence of the liberal left in Hay's thinking, but it was more of a flirtation than anything else." There couldn't have been any less of a flirtation, because I was in the [Communist] Party from 1933 to 1951. In that particular period, all of my formative thinking, which eventually becomes part of the movement, is very much involved. I mean, what kind of a flirtation is eighteen years?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who all has come to interview you? I can think of at least three myself [John D'Emilio for "Dreams Deferred," Body Politic, November 1978-February 1979; Jonathan Katz for Gay American History (New York: Crowell, 1976); and Peter Adair for Word Is Out]. What has your experience been with oral historians of one sort or another and journalists?

HARRY HAY: It really begins with Jonathan Katz. He's the one that starts the whole thing going. I didn't meet him. We actually did all this by telephone and by correspondence from New Mexico to New York.

MITCH TUCHMAN: When was that?

HARRY HAY: That had been in '75--'75 and '76.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And were you satisfied with the use of the material that--

HARRY HAY: Well, no, I wasn't entirely satisfied with it, because with Jonathan Katz there's more emphasis, for instance, on the motivations to get the original movement going. But even he is not terribly concerned with what happened to the ideas once they were introduced into the group and how they spread out and what they did with them. Now, what I think about these things is one thing, but what the group actually did is something else. And it's the group and the development of the idea collectively that I think is the most important. And Jonathan Katz didn't seem to be interested in that. He seemed to be interested in me, which I didn't particularly care for.

MITCH TUCHMAN: When he interviewed you, it was for the book that he was preparing, Gay American History?

HARRY HAY: Right. And if you'll take a look at the book, you'll see, among other things, that he handles the personality in relationship to the thing, but he doesn't seem to be terribly concerned with what the group itself was doing. Let's see, then I went, John Burnside and I went to Seattle in the summer of 1975. I guess that was when I began making my tapes with James Kepner, in August of 1975.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you move to Seattle, or was that a vacation?

HARRY HAY: No, no, we went up there to do a workshop. That was also the year when we published a little memorial to my mother, who had been the president of the Mattachine Foundation in 1950--in her own name. And it was her address which was the first address that was given for gay people openly, as far as I know, in the United States.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that 3132--

HARRY HAY: 3132 Oakcrest Drive. Right. The one that's given in D'Emilio. He also shows a little picture of the house. And that house is one of these houses that's listed as an historical thing here in Southern California.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why is that?

HARRY HAY: Because Gregory Ain built that house in 1940, and he won his Guggenheim fellowship based upon small single houses, based on that house.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is that house in the Silver Lake area?

HARRY HAY: No, it's right off the Hollywood Freeway. Oakcrest Drive goes up from the frontage road at the top of the pass, the Cahuenga Pass. It has a view out over the valley, or it did have until a few high rises got in front of it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I do know where it is.

HARRY HAY: It was a darling, little house, and it was well photographed, I remember, by Architectural Forum, and things like that, when it first came out because of the problems that he had solved and the way he did it. So, it was a little, historical house in its own right before it became a collection place for our struggle against entrapment in the spring of 1952. The Citizens' Committee to Outlaw Entrapment carried 3132 Oakcrest Drive as its address. I've forgotten how we--

MITCH TUCHMAN: I don't know how we got onto--

HARRY HAY: We're wandering all over the place.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Let's go back to Kepner and the beginning of that series of tapes. What is the nature of that?

HARRY HAY: Well, James just simply decided that he wanted to begin getting some material down, the things around, so that I think all he did was, he just started me off, and whatever direction it went into it sort of covered. I think he was interested probably in my getting into the left movement, which would have been '32, '33.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How much taping have you done with him?

HARRY HAY: Oh, I guess, about one hundred hours.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is that an ongoing project?

HARRY HAY: I don't know whether it's an ongoing project, because I think in his case-- I don't know how much of it he's transcribed; so I don't know whether or not he knows-- I know there are lots of gaps. There are a lot of places that have to be filled in. But I think he wanted me to put down a lot of things that I remember, a lot of the activities we all were involved with in the sixties; he was afraid that that was going to get away, because no one is talking about it anyway. You see, one of the things that has complicated the history project here, as far as getting a regular sort of flowing history in Los Angeles, was the strife that went on between two personalities in the sixties and, then, three personalities in the seventies. The two personalities in the fifties and sixties are Dorr Legg and Don Slater: Don Slater who was editor of One magazine, which came out monthly, and Dorr Legg, who had been sort of president of the One board and was the instructor at the One Institute and editor of One Quarterly magazine, which was the scholarly pretension of One, Incorporated.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Don Slater was the editor of what?

HARRY HAY: Of the magazine called One. It originally-- This would have been in the fall of 1951. No, in the spring of 1952, we undertook to defend one of our members who had got entrapped. Oh, that was something else I wanted to mention to you too--this was something that you can put along--the attorney who fought that case for us is still alive, and I didn't know that he was, because I ran into a story on him the other day in the paper. His name is George Shibley, and he is still practicing law in Long Beach. Somebody should really get down to him on the basis of wondering whether or not he still has any memories of things on the trial he fought for us in the spring of 1952.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I wonder if that ought to be a coordinated tape with your tape--

HARRY HAY: I think it should, because I don't think anybody's talked to George.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Perhaps an appendix or--

HARRY HAY: That's a good idea, because I don't think anybody-- You see, the thing that was interesting was that George made a magnificent summary before the jury. We had transcripts made of the defense, as it were. There were ten copies. It cost us money, and we didn't have the money, but we managed to raise the money. We got ten copies, and they were sent out to different attorneys. And the records that we had of whom they were sent to were in the hands of a man by the name of Charles Rowland, who is one of the people that John D'Emilio mentions. And Charles Rowland went wonkie in about 1959 or '60, I think. I guess you'd call it nervous breakdown, or whatever. Dr. Evelyn Gentry Caldwell Hooker undertook to help him in this, and, as happens, I think, with anyone of those types of psychotherapeutic cures, areas which are painful get blacked out. [tape recorder turned off]

MITCH TUCHMAN: We're leading a train from one subject to another--

HARRY HAY: I know that, but let me finish this thing. The reason why I'm saying all this about Charles is because he had a list of the ten lawyers that we sent the transcripts to. Now, in '59 and '60, one night, Jim Kepner tells me, he went into Charles Rowland's house and found Chuck simply going through all the files and burning them. What is burnt we don't know, except that most of the stuff we had out of '50 to '53 is gone. Jim said that he managed-- When Chuck wasn't looking, he would remove this paper or remove a few things and take them away with him. But Chuck was simply saying, "This is all amounting to nothing. It's never going to come to anything. It's ruined my life." Boom, boom: he's throwing all this stuff into the fireplace, and so it's all being burnt. So, among other things, we don't know to whom these transcripts were sent. That is gone. We have no idea. And we didn't have copies. We didn't keep a copy for ourselves; so we don't know what was said. But presumably the transcripts were going out to help other attorneys elsewhere in the country fight similar cases and to give this as an example of what happened. It suddenly occurred to me that George Shibley may have a copy of his notes for that speech that he made for that case.

MITCH TUCHMAN: There's a subject that I had in my notes--we hadn't discussed this in our first [pretaping] meeting--but I would be very interested in discussing, with you, attorneys, the courts, and gay-related issues in Los Angeles. There are some attorneys whose names I know who, I've been led to believe, had very interesting relationships to those sorts of cases. I would like to hear your opinions of how entrapment and other cases have been handled over the decades; and we can come to that subject eventually.

HARRY HAY: That's good. We can do that. We also should, among other things, before it's too late-- There are a few places around L.A. which ought to be photographed, which are historical as far as the gay movement is concerned and which will disappear, I think.

MITCH TUCHMAN: OK. I'll put that down also as "places to be photographed" and that's a subject we can discuss also. You mentioned Dorr Legg and Don Slater and then said in the seventies there were three people responsible.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, Morris Right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, it's those two people plus Morris Right at that point?

HARRY HAY: Right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And in what way have they prevented this history from being committed to tape or paper?

HARRY HAY: Well, you see, the struggle between Don and Dorr was a struggle in a way to attempt to keep the thing as respectable as possible, trying to make it show that it was nice, middle-class people who were involved, or, as Don and a couple of other people who were part of the original movement wanted to make it, that they were absolutely the same as everybody else except for a sexual aberration. We have all of these things going. I mention that because I was myself always opposed to any of these particular approaches. My feeling is that-- I used to say, among other things, we're entirely different from everybody else except for that. This is the point that I think I remember making in the spring of 1965, about the time that I read-- Oh, I know what it was: Don Slater gave me Lawrence Lipton's Erotic Revolution to review, and in the course of looking that over, I thought, "My god, these people do almost the same things that we do in bed, but we are entirely different in the way we see and the way we approach--" It's very obvious, and it began to be apparent to me at that time. Morris Right, for instance, wants us to be the same except for slight sexual aberrations. So does Don Slater. So, in that regard they agree. Dorr is willing to admit that there might be some other differences, but he doesn't want it to rock the middle-class, respectable boat. Both Dorr and Don were very uncomfortable with the fact that I was a very open radical all my days, and I didn't seem to change any, and so that in a way I was never really invited to be part of the board of directors of One, Incorporated, because they were never quite sure of what I'd think of next. They were pretty uncomfortable with most of my political thinking most of the time. Jim Kepner was willing to be conciliatory. I never have been. I have a certain way of seeing. I have a certain approach to these things. In that respect, I am interested in seeing where that goes. I'm really not interested in seeing how I can make it respectable or tie it into somebody else's thinking, make it sort of a great big, happy, gray mass. I don't see that at all.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You've mentioned, then, the interviews that Jonathan Katz has done and what's become of those, and that Kepner has done numerous interviews, but at this point we're not certain of the status of the project.

HARRY HAY: The reason why we're doing all this is that Licata, leaning on Dorr, really wanted to downplay the part that maybe left or Marxist thinking had to do with the movement.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was he the next person to do interviews with you: Sal?

HARRY HAY: Yes, through Jim. I remember one day I was--I think this would have been late in '76--I was interviewing with Jim, and all of a sudden I met Sal Licata, and Jim said, "Do you mind if he comes in on the taping thing?" And I said, "Sure, I don't mind. I guess it's OK." I didn't know who he was and met him, but he seemed to be a nice man, and so we did get an interview with him.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was he working on a dissertation at that time? At USC [University of Southern California], wasn't it?

HARRY HAY: At 'SC, I think that's correct.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, it was in his capacity-- Was he doing these tapes for his dissertation?

HARRY HAY: Yes, he was. He wrote this thing; the dissertation, Jim said, is just a mess, I mean, as far as the start of the movement is concerned. It's just not correct. Not only not correct but he also has me doing things and saying things that are simply not where I would have been. Jim said he went back and listened to the tape, and it's exactly the opposite of what Licata has said. So, it's the researcher going and getting material and then deciding that he will rewrite the material the way he wants the points to come out, which, as far as I'm concerned, is not research. This is what I would call yellow journalism, and I'm afraid there has been quite a lot of that. The two people who seem to have been really faithful to their material would be John D'Emilio and Jonathan Katz. Others I think have sort of made what they wanted to make out of it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was John D'Emilio--he would be the fourth that you've mentioned--was he the only other one? (Oh, no, in fact, I can think of another one myself: the Word Is Out people.) Was John D'Emilio the next person to come interview you?

HARRY HAY: Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the purpose of his interviews?

HARRY HAY: Well, he was doing a history of the movement in detail. See, Jonathan Katz had given it a cursory thing, because he was dealing with it in a larger context, but John D'Emilio wanted the history of the movement in detail. And this is what he was using as his doctoral dissertation. So that he had been following a whole flock of people down along the line. He came to me first, and James Kepner brought him. He came out here to Los Angeles. He was here for, I think, the whole year; no, for six months in 1976; no, '77. James brought him out to New Mexico. The two of them came together, and he was there for five days, and he was then getting the details of the founding of the movement. And on the basis of that and the names that I gave him and suggestions I made, he followed up-- He interviewed other people who were in the original five. There are four of them left. He was able to reach three, I think. He mentions other people, if you'll notice in the article, whom he went and talked with separately. And that was interesting to me too, because I really hadn't been in contact with them, and I was wondering whether or not, indeed, they would corroborate what I was remembering or whether or not I was overremembering. And as far as I could see, it was a pretty good corroboration. I was rather pleased with that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Has anything become of his material in addition to the three articles in the Body Politic?

HARRY HAY: Well, he refers to it as a work in progress, and I don't know whether or not in the meantime he has finished his dissertation, graduated; I don't know this.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, maybe if he answers my letter [requesting unpublished footnotes to the Body Politic material], we'll find out. But to date the only result of those interviews that you've seen are those three articles, is that correct?

HARRY HAY: In the Body Politic? Right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Then, were the Word Is Out people the next to talk to you?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I guess they would have been the next ones. And Nancy had been--

MITCH TUCHMAN: This is Nancy Adair?

HARRY HAY: Nancy Adair, yeah. She had come up to see us in, I think, the fall of '76. They came and photographed in the spring of '77, and that's the way that went. No, that was the spring of '76 that they came and photographed; so she must have been there in the fall of '75. And we gave her about between six and eight hours of tape at the time. She was asking general questions.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At her first visit?

HARRY HAY: That was when they were getting an idea of did they want to use this at all, a background of what the film would be like. So, she had a bunch of tapes. Then the film came, and then we were interviewed on film, as it were. But of that material, as you notice, less than two minutes was used. So, this is where the idea for putting out the book came from, and the book is more or less, not all, but more or less what is on those tapes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Actually, your segment in the book--I got the book from the library recently--doesn't look like it represents even an hour of tape. All those segments are brief, not just yours. How do you feel generally about that project, that use of tape?

HARRY HAY: I was concerned--and I felt very badly about it, as a matter of fact--I thought it was badly handled, from my point of view. They worked awfully hard to make a film which would be essentially nonpolitical. And I don't really feel that you can deal with the gay movement without being intensely political. In a way, the mere fact that the people being interviewed represented a wide variety of political opinion should have been either in the book or in the movie, and preferably in both, but it certainly should have been in the book. And it isn't there. The thinking of people like Rick Stokes, for instance, and his lover in San Francisco: these people represent, well, I suppose you might call it the David Goodstein approach. So that Rick Stokes and his lover, Bill--whose [last] name I've forgotten now although we've met them at one time--were people who were involved with the gentrification program in San Francisco; this is kind of important. The move to middle-class respectability and this move to the right, which characterizes the whole movement in San Francisco, and these guys are very much on the ground floor of that. That should have been made apparent in the book, and it isn't. The corporation executive who's one of the people there, again, belongs to the gentrification program. A number of the other people probably are in the middle. Tede Matthews and John and I, probably those three, represent maybe the radical left, to give the spectrum. And this should have been mentioned--and it wasn't-- because so many of the young people these days want to know exactly these things. I think probably the movie was made in order to make us all look acceptable to a wide range of the faintly liberal heterosexual population who might be viewing public service broadcasts. I think this is what we're dealing with in the film there. But I myself felt that the causes that I have to make were very badly served. I wasn't happy with it at all.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Have there been others between that time and the present to do tapes?

HARRY HAY: There's one other that I do have to mention, because I think, again, the material was badly handled. Rosa von Praunheim interviewed John and me and others. This would have been in the spring-- It must have been April of 1978, because we came here for the premiere of Word Is Out, and that week when they were here, Rosa was here. I liked him very much, and I thought it was a good interview, but when I read the first paragraph in The Army of Lovers, which is where it is, where it appears, I was shocked at what he made of it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is The Army of Lovers a book that he's done?

HARRY HAY: It's a movie he's done, and then he's now put out a book of the tapes, I guess. The same thing that the Adairs did: he's put out the tapes, the stuff he didn't put in the movie.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Does he live in America?

HARRY HAY: No, in Germany.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And the book: is it an English-language book or a German book?

HARRY HAY: No, it's in English. I don't know whether it's a translation or whether or not he wrote it in English. It's possible he wrote it in English. But anyway, I notice that it's now out. I know what's in that, because James told me, and I also had reports on how it was handled and how it was handled in the movie. And it was quite unsatisfactory.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In general, it sounds like you don't have a very, at least to date, a very favorable opinion of the use that's been made of taping.

HARRY HAY: Most of the things that have been handled, that have been used by taping up until now, have been people who wanted to make a point, and they're simply going through various pieces of material, taking out this and taking out that which supports their point. They're not listening to what we who were involved with it were doing. So that I feel that I am not being presented; I am supporting somebody else's thesis, and the thesis usually turns out to be not the thesis that I had in mind. So, in that regard, it isn't that I don't believe in taping, I think the taping will work out very well. And taping is not the issue really. What I'm talking about are interviews and what happens to history through the whole series of interviews. Some of the interviews that I have read in various places are fine.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Interviews with you or just interviews in general?

HARRY HAY: No, interviews in general. They're very well done. A lot of the interviews, for instance, that have appeared in Gay Sunshine I think are fine. And having talked to some of the people who've done those interviews, I know that they were happy with them. So, I know this can be done. Well, probably because most of the interviewers have been people who have a need to make the gay movement look respectable, they are not going to look at the fact that the gay movement has never been respectable. The gay movement in-- Let's see, when would that have been? That must have been March of 1967, when the Western Homophile Association, which was a branch of the North American Committee on Homophile Organizations, called NACHO, which was formed in August of 1966 and dissolved with a great burst in July of 1970-- The western region group got together at a place called Aldergate, in Pacific Palisades--it was just the name of a big, old house that, I think, belonged to the Methodist church--and we had a three--or four-day conference up there. And one of the people had a wonderful resolution, which we passed, which, I remember, started out, "Whereas, the homosexual has no image to lose" (which I think is a lovely way of doing it). That resolution passed by acclaim, Don Slater dissenting, but dissenting and deciding not to count himself; he just simply removed himself from the voting process. We were able to put it through by acclaim, because he wasn't there, but he was furious with it. I was very happy with that, because, after all, the homosexual doesn't have any image to lose; so consequently there are a whole flock of things we can do, and we don't have to be concerned with it. But it took a long time for that particular thinking to finally get through in any kind of a public way, and this was agreed to by Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco, and L.A.--and thoroughly, absolutely thoroughly trashed by the East Coast when finally the news of that resolution hit them at the national level. They were just shocked to pieces. But I felt that this is an important statement to begin to make. However, since that time we have been developing images all over the place, as you know. It's part of this whole business of hetero imitation. Which reminds me, there are two publications that the Circle of Loving Companions put out, and I think that--would you like copies of them, for instance, for your--

MITCH TUCHMAN: To include? Yeah, sure. Now, you gave me a number of things when I was here two weeks ago. I wonder if they might be among the things you gave me.

HARRY HAY: I don't think so, because I think I gave you the stuff that has to do with my thinking now.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Uh-huh, that's right.

HARRY HAY: The two communications that I'm thinking about are ones that should be added along the line, but I'm liable to forget them when we come to the point. So, one was put out in October of 1966, and I'll give you that one today.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, there was nothing of that vintage.

HARRY HAY: I was interested in it because in it we outline what the Circle was doing and what we want to do. It's kind of interesting to look at it in terms of October '66, because we're talking about what we will give the name "gay consciousness" to in 1970, but the words hadn't arrived yet. So that in that respect, it's interesting to see the thinking that's beginning to happen in '66 from us. Don Slater and Dorr Legg are not moving in this direction at all. Publications of that time don't give you any idea of this, but that's where we happened to be. And we used this particular--I want to mention that, because you'll ask me about it later--but we put this out in October of '66, and in May of 1967 we passed these things out at a Renaissance Pleasure Faire (from the sexual liberation tent), which was held at that time. So, we're passing these out to families, you know, parents and kids and everybody else, along with our beautiful kaleidoscopes, which we were selling. This was our PR of the period. So, just in case anybody wanted to know if anything like this was happening in the sixties, yes, it was happening, and it was being passed out to millions of people too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the other publication? You said there were two publications.

HARRY HAY: We brought out another thing in 1975, and this is a development. It is an interesting development because a man by the name of James Weinrich, who is a sociobiologist now doing work at the Harvard School of Medicine--is it Harvard or New York? I think he's at Harvard under Edmund Wilson--saw a copy of that, and it was the thing that began making him think to look into the sociobiological, or the genetic, origins of homosexuality.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, is he the person whose material has very recently been published?

HARRY HAY: Yes, and as a matter of fact the American Psychological Association thing was held at UCLA about a month ago. He gave one big report on that. But in the letter to us, he mentions the fact that, having seen this article of ours in 1975, it was the one that kicked him off to move in that direction. So, that publication, if nothing else, ties into that. It was published in the August issue of R.F.D., 1975, but we put out the publication in honor of my mother's death.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why don't we, then, continue with the sorts of material we discussed at the beginning, and that is, your family and your childhood?

HARRY HAY: Well, for instance, when you say my family, what is it you'd like to know in regard to the family? There are some things that, for instance, now that I come to think about it, I've never talked about with anybody. Because, after all, this is now, I think, the kind of thing we should begin to be interested in; that is, who in the family might very well have been closet cases, you know, that kind of thing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Have you given some thought to that?

HARRY HAY: Some, yes. I've 'been thinking about it recently and been interested in what could have happened along the line. You see, on my mother's side, there are a number of people who probably are gay, but there are not enough descendants in that family for us to do much about it. I don't think we can go back and speculate about this and speculate about that indefinitely. But you need examples of people now, and that family has largely died out, which, in a way, might even be indicative. There might have been, in other words, widespread infertility here. But on my father's side, there is one niece that I know of who's gay, and there are a number of cousins who very well may have gay qualities about them although I don't know very much about them at the moment. Maybe I can find out about them in the next ten years or so, but I haven't looked into it very far. But my father, for example, was really a beautiful young man, quite a beautiful young man; and beautiful young men in the nineties are not that common. So that when you see pictures of a young man in his late or middle twenties, you wonder whether or not--particularly since he didn't marry until he was forty-five--rather suggests that even when he-- Although presumably he was very much in love with my mother, it also could be that he was reluctant to be married at all. He was the oldest brother, oldest male, of eight sons. Among those eight there were two who never married, and they were partners in business most of their lives. One of them I think probably carried a very strong gay component in him too. Being a Scotch clan, or, let's say, a sect of a Scotch clan, here in this country, the people, although they were widespread over half of the western states, still thought of themselves very much as a clan and, therefore, as a fairly closely knit extended family.

MITCH TUCHMAN: As part of which Scottish clan?

HARRY HAY: Hay.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, Hay is one of the Scottish clans?

HARRY HAY: Well, we are the Hays of Errol, or we're part of the Hays of Errol. It's an established and ancient clan. It goes back, as far as I know, to 823 A.D., which is when they presumably were first recognized as a family and a holding in Errol. Errol is one of the counties in northeastern Scotland: probably the lower section is Perth and the upper section is now what you know as Findhorn. This is all part of the earldom of Errol. But there is a clan now of the Hays. When we first came here, we were (with the exception of a woman by the name of Mary Hay, who originally owned the Garden of Allah, which was one of the big apartments in Hollywood) we were the only Hays of Errol who were here. Since that time, a lot of them have showed up. I get the sense that a number of them probably left Scotland during what they call "the troubles," which was when England annexes, formally annexes Scotland and takes it over. We're a bit of an independent lot: we don't like being taken over by anybody.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you think they came here during the clearances?

HARRY HAY: Well, I think a lot of them probably came to Canada to start with. I think a lot of them ended up in Nova Scotia in the beginning of the eighteenth century?

MITCH TUCHMAN: As did many Scots.

HARRY HAY: Yeah. My father's mother's people, who were the MacDonalds of Glencoe, were one of the families who were wiped out--in song and story, you might say, because Sir Walter Scott, for instance, has a huge footnote on the massacre at Glencoe. My grandmother's great-grandfather was one of the three children who survived that massacre. Where he went I don't know, but chances are he went to Ireland first, and then from Ireland some of them went to Nova Scotia.* [My grandmother's aunt, I think, came back to Scotland for a short time with my grandmother when she was a baby. This story is obscure. My grandmother was either dropped or abused. At any rate, she was taken away by a kind neighbor who was emigrating with his family for a new life on South Island, New Zealand. Grandmother, when she grew up, had a hump on her back and was always very tiny: four foot eight.] But anyway, that's that sort of general background. My father was born in New Zealand. His mother, when she was a little girl, had decided that sometime in her life the family was going to come to California and grow oranges. So, they arrived here more or less penniless after the journey in, I don't know, I think maybe October of 1878, at San Pedro [California]. They rented a dairy at what is now Dominguez [California]. For a number of years, I think, my father--I don't know where he went to elementary school, or grammar school, but he must have been ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracked section during his review of the transcript. down in that area, and I know he also worked in dairies and various places. He went to L.A. High, and beginning about 1880, I guess, or 1884, maybe 1884-- He went a couple of years, and then he dropped out, and he worked. He worked a great many years, again, to make enough money so he could continue high school. And then he worked again in order to go to college. But, as far as I can see, he seems to have graduated from L.A. High in 1890, and he graduated from the University of California as a mining engineer in 1896.

MITCH TUCHMAN: University of California at Berkeley?

HARRY HAY: Berkeley, yeah. In the meantime he had worked for the Pacific Electric, Henry Huntington's Pacific Electric, which were the big railway red cars that we had in this area, and I think he was the person who made the survey, first, to the top of Mount Washington, in 1884-85, and, then, later the Mount Lowe railway, which I think he was doing in 1888. That is the famous semicircular road that used to go to the top of Mount Lowe. That was an impressive red car thing. I can remember hiking along that railroad track myself in the twenties, when I used to go hiking up in the mountains. As I say, he graduated in 1896. He immediately went to South Africa, because Cecil Rhodes, the developer in South Africa, was calling for American mining engineers to come and help develop the gold fields. And so he was one of the people that answered that call. I do have some pictures of him. He got involved with what was known as the American Volunteer Service in the Boer War. At one time my mother had a beautiful silver trophy that he got for shooting, as he was good with a rifle. And we used to have a big ball with that urn. It was a magnificent-looking urn with all kinds of fancy engravings and big handles on it. On the top it had a big, fancy knob, something which could look-- Either it was the statue of Victory or something, but done in silver. In South Africa it probably looked a little bit like fairies and Peter Pan in Kensington Garden as well as the [Nike of] Samothrace. I don't know, it was an interesting combination of something. But we, as kids, used to put ashes and burnt matches and things like that in the bottom of the thing, and when people would look at it, we would say, "Ah! Don't touch that. It's Grandmother." My mother and father, I don't think, ever knew about this, but the three kids, really, we had a thing going; we used to have people tiptoeing around this damned thing, which stood on a table in the middle of the library, and saying, "Oh, that's Grandmother"--and then giggle when they were gone.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You haven't actually, as far as I can remember, told me their names: your mother and father.

HARRY HAY: Oh. My mother's name was-- In the first place, my mother was born-- Let's say, she was born in Indian territory. She was born at Fort Bowie, territory of Arizona, which would not become a state until 1912. Her father was a lieutenant at that time, Lieutenant John Mitchell Neall, attached to Fort Bowie, and he was out bringing in Geronimo when she was born. That story in itself should be an addendum somewhere along the line, because when he went out--he was still under the command of General [George] Crook--and he went out to persuade Geronimo to surrender himself and bring his people in; and if he would do so, my grandfather gave his word to him that, if he would do so, they would be permitted to go back and live in peace in the Chiricahua [Mountains], which was their chosen area. While he was out finding Geronimo and bringing him in, persuading him to come in, the command changed from General Crook to General [Nelson Appleton] Miles. And Miles was one of the type of men-- Crook was always known as a great friend of the Indians. I mean, people like Sitting Bull and people like Crazy Horse and so on all knew General Crook and knew that his word was good and that he was a fine person and that he was an understanding man. But Miles was one of [those who believed] "the only kind of good Indian is a dead Indian"; and when my grandfather brought Geronimo in, Miles said, "There isn't such a thing as giving your word to a heathen. Consequently, he and his people will be sent to Florida. They will never be allowed to go back." And so this is a young man who has had his word flouted in his face, which I think made a very great difference to him, as I will explain to you later on. (It had something to do with my life too.) This is a story, incidentally, I never knew from him, except indirectly, and I never knew it directly from his sister, my great-aunt Kate [Neall], whom I loved probably more than I've loved any other woman in the world, and who taught me to read and write when I was five. (Whenever they have these stories in the papers now about how public education has never been a success in this country, I think about her teaching miners to read and write in Virginia City [Nevada] for fifty years. Public school education worked just fine when it came to Aunt Kate. She was a wonderful teacher, and lots of people learned all kinds of things from her, from every class you can think of. )

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was her last name Neall?

HARRY HAY: Her name was Kate Neall, yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And your mother's last name was Neall?

HARRY HAY: My mother's name was Margaret Hardie Neall. (Hardie: I'll mention him because we'll come to him later on. I think he was gay.) OK. My father's name was Henry Hay--and no middle name. My name is Henry Hay also--no middle name. Henry is not a name; it's a title. In Scottish it means "mother's steward." In Gaelic this is what it means. Anyone who's named Henry is his mother's steward. This is a matrilineal culture, and mother inherited the property. Her steward, her oldest son, or whoever the son was who was designated, carried on her business in her name. But he never spoke except as-- He was her voice. But he didn't think for himself. She gave him what he would say, and he simply distributed it to the world, as it were. I mention that because this is a custom which was still more or less true in my family in this country in the twentieth century. Grandmother [Helen MacDonald Hay] died in '24, but nevertheless for those twenty-four years, at least, my father was her spokesperson in this country. And it was recognized that way. If everybody wonders whether or not matriliny still existed, well, in this small pocket of Southern California, yes, it did. It went on being that. My father, as I said, went to South Africa. He was active during the Boer War a little bit--I don't know how much, but anyway enough to have his picture taken in a nice uniform and looking kind of jolly and having fun and this and that. Mother remembers--she was born in 1886--in 1892 she remembers when Fort Bowie was abandoned and that the whole army, which was cavalry, moved in large wagons from Fort Bowie, Arizona, up through and along the Mother Lode country, along the Sierras in California, and up probably through northeastern California--there was a fort there that I can't think of at the moment [Fort Bidwell]; there are some Indian people still there--to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where there was trouble between Indians and miners in 1892, and the army was involved with that.* [Actually it wasn't trouble between Indians and miners; it was a miners' strike involving the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World.] Mother can remember how they tried to move these wagons, going up that way. And I don't know where they went after that. They probably went to San Francisco. My grandfather was commandant for the city of San Francisco during the Spanish-American War. I remember that they lived in San Francisco at that time. Then as soon as possible-- As a matter of fact, he had wanted to resign then, but he couldn't because he felt that he owed, since they were into a war situation, he felt that he really had to complete his tour of duty. But the moment the war was over, he resigned. I think that had to do with the broken heart that he suffered in 1886. Because of the fact that he had graduated high in his class at West Point (which --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. was, incidentally, the same class that General Pershing was in; I think this was the class of 1885), he accepted a job as professor of military science--

1.2. Tape Number: I, SIDE TWO October 28, 1981

HARRY HAY: Anyway, he became professor of military science and [engineering], French, and mathematics at the University of Nevada-Reno. The family went up there and lived for a number of years. The young men he trained there--because, after all, the University of Nevada was also a fine school of mines--a lot of these youngsters were also going to South Africa, where there was a huge field and the gold fields opening up in all directions. They did their hiring, hundreds of young American miners. About 1904, I guess--1903 or 1904, according to what I remember my mother saying--a lot of these youngsters were writing to him and saying, "You know, we need consultants. We need consulting engineers here. We know you have never been terribly happy in the United States, and we know that maybe you'd like to travel, maybe you'd like to broaden yourself and see the world. So, any time you want to come, Cecil Rhodes says he'll hire you at Waters Ran Deep," which is where he eventually ended up. So, in the spring of 1906, the family debarked, shall we say, for South Africa. It was March of 1906, because they were in Hawaii when they received word of the San Francisco earthquake and were terribly upset, because, again, the family had lived in San Francisco for many, many years, and they had all kinds of friends there. Their closest friend would have been old General Wallace, Lew Wallace, the man who was governor of New Mexico, the territory of New Mexico, in 1850 or thereabouts.* [He wrote Ben Hur, which I never liked, and Aztec Treasure House, which I did like.] He'd been a great friend of the family. Louise Wallace Noyes would have been his only daughter; [she] had a house on Van Ness. I think, as a matter of fact, one of those houses that just escaped the fire. You know, along Van Ness in San Francisco, the fire came down to about Union Street, and then beyond that it didn't burn. I think her house was on the other side, and they received hundreds of people who had fled from Nob Hill and from California Hill during that particular thing. Well, I remember this because I met old Louise Noyes when I was a little boy, and I remember her telling me some of these things. So, they went to South Africa, and my grandfather and grandmother died there; they never came back. I never met them. I just knew about them and had letters from them, but I never met them. My mother and father met in South ------------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Africa, and they were married there in 1911. My father was almost twice my mother's age, and I know that her father was very disturbed that she would have married a man as old as he. I know this from my aunt, from his sister. But anyway, they were married in 1911--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were your mother's father and your father contemporaries?

HARRY HAY: Well, he was probably ten years older. My mother would have been twenty-four when she was married, and my father was forty-five. So, she was twenty-five and he was forty-six when I was born. He was a very successful engineer. He was at this point, in those ways of doing it, he was almost a well-known, you might say, worldwide-known engineer for some of the work that he had done. By this time he must have known a number of other American engineers; he and Herbert Hoover were partners as mining engineers and consultants. They had an office at 7 Old Jewry, London--and this must have been at the time of my father's marriage--it was a section of Notting Hill. So, that was their address, 7 Old Jewry, London.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This was during the time your father was in South Africa?

HARRY HAY: I know that they had this office at the time that I was born. I know that Herbert Hoover had been in Africa during the 1900-to-1909 period. So, they must have formed a partnership at that time. There were all those young engineers, more or less, in the field, as it were. So, anyway, they had this office, because I know that when my father went after they were married--it was customary for an affluent man at that time: their honeymoon lasted a month or two months or something--I know that they did some traveling in Europe. I know that he went to see his family in Scotland, in Earnn and in Perth; this would be in Errol. Mother remembers that. They traveled all around through what was known as the Lady of the Lake country in Scotland.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That's Robert Burns country?

HARRY HAY: No, Sir Walter Scott.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Sir Walter-- Sorry.

HARRY HAY: Well, it is Robert Burns too, but the stories of the Lady of the Lake and Katherine's Isle, and so on, the Trossachs-- And then he went over to Glencoe, which is where his mother's people had come from; he wanted to see what that was like. At this time my mother is pregnant with me. So, I always say I traveled, but I was in the kangaroo pouch; I don't remember much. I couldn't see too much. However, that must have been just beginning. He got a job; his first job after his marriage was to open up a whole new series of gold mines at Tarkwa. Tarkwa is in existence now but would have been known as the Gold Coast in West Africa. They now call it Ghana. My mother had a wonderful story of how you landed at Accra, which is their major port. She came aboard in what was known as a mammy chair. A mammy chair is the back of any broad native who happens to be around. In those years [the port] was one of those roadsteads where the ships could come in about a mile from shore and then have to hang off because it was very, very shallow. Then boats would be put out to pick up the passengers. Then the last two hundred feet coming into shore, you had to be carried piggyback, and your baggage would be carried the same way. So, this was her way of coming ashore at Accra in what is now Ghana.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, had you been--

HARRY HAY: I wasn't born yet. I'm still in the process of forming. I'm getting her in bad shape, as it were. I guess about January of 1912, my mother decided--no, it must have been October of the year before--she must have decided that this was no place to bear a child, and so she goes to England.

MITCH TUCHMAN: With your father still in Tarkwa?

HARRY HAY: My father still in Tarkwa. Mother goes to England and settles in a little seaside port called Worthing, on the south coast in Sussex. There I am born, and then, two years later, my sister is born.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Your sister's name is what?

HARRY HAY: My sister's name is-- Oh, dear-- She was named Margaret Caroline, but she was always called Peggy. She's had five husbands since. We do not speak as we pass by.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Does she live here in Los Angeles?

HARRY HAY: Yes, she lives up on Mount Washington. How to put it? Apparently, opening up Tarkwa was all he did, was his initial work. Once the thing was built, and once the crushers were in and the smelters were in, his work was finished. He moved then to the service with the Guggenheims, to the Anaconda Copper Company in Chile. And insofar as I know, he went there shortly after I was born, in, I would think, the spring of 1912.* [I'm wrong about all this. Mother would have come back to England and settled in Worthing in January of 1912. My father came back to England maybe in the summer, because he took my mother up to London for the coronation of George V. I think he finished at Tarkwa in March of 1913. He was in London and Worthing in the spring and summer of 1913. He went to Chuquicamata, Chile, in the fall of 1913. My sister was born February 5, 1914.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, did these enterprises also involve Herbert Hoover? Did that partnership cover these enterprises? --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

HARRY HAY: It doesn't seem to have. So, therefore, I think that they sort of worked together-- Probably what engineers would do, they would take on various things and later decide: you take this one, and I'll take that one; you take this one, I'll take that one. I think this is about what it amounted to, because I don't think they ever worked together on things.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, how long did their partnership continue?

HARRY HAY: Well, I suppose it continued until the end of 1915, when my father suffered a major accident in Chile and gave up mining engineering. So, I would think that sort of stopped it there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You were very young. Do you have any memories of Chile?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I do have some curious ones, but I have definite memories, [including] something that tied into People's Songs much later. All I might say is I'll add the name now, which will jog my memory in case you forget it, and that's Yma Sumac, because Yma Sumac enters the life of People's Songs briefly in 1947, and it brings back a memory of Chile to me.

MITCH TUCHMAN: OK, I have her written down next to People's Songs on the next page. I'd love to hear anything about her, but I guess we can wait.

HARRY HAY: I can give you a nice story on her, but that belongs-- We should have gotten into it just prior to Henry Wallace, but we aren't at that point.

MITCH TUCHMAN: No, not quite yet.

HARRY HAY: Yes, I do have some memories of Chile. We left for Chile in-- My sister was born in February of 1914, and we left England on the last American transport to cross the Atlantic during the First World War, which would have been September, late September of 1914. I have some memories of England too, as a matter of fact, not very much, but I have one or two, maybe three, memories, very strong in my mind.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What sorts of memories?

HARRY HAY: Memories of people up to the waist. Lots of memories of legs, you know. [laughter] I have a number of pictures from that period.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Several distinct kneecaps of the day.

HARRY HAY: Well, whatever. For instance, one thing I can remember--and this must have happened in late August or early September of 1914--I can remember a lot of legs in what they used to call puttees, the wrapped leggings, and also the gaiters, which were also worn. The gaiter was canvas on one side and leather facing. So, these would have been probably the cavalry. I can remember lots and lots of these legs, all passing over-- They seem to be going up and down; so they must be going over a bridge. I remember telling my mother about that, and she said, "Oh, yes, your nanny took you to Waterloo Bridge"; they would cross from one side to the other in order to get to the station, in order to start off for the First World War. Who among the famous people who got killed in the first winter of 1914, I don't know, but I apparently saw their legs going by. I can remember standing and watching all these legs going by, and I could hear the clank and then the people going, "Hup, hup, hup," and a certain amount of singing. It's an afternoon, and the sun is glinting off a lot of things, and I guess I'm seeing helmets too. But mainly I can remember all these legs, because I'm all of this high; so I'm looking at these legs, you know. Whenever I would see these movies, like Waterloo Bridge, and plays that were made in the late twenties and movies that were made in the early thirties, and I would see these films, I'd keep thinking I would see all these legs going by, but I'm seeing it in color, and it's in black and white on the screen, you see; so that I realize I'm remembering something here. I can remember walking around with older people over lawns--so this would be in Worthing--hanging onto somebody's hand; so they're up here somewhere, and I'm down here. Again, I'm remembering things about this high, you see. Apparently I wasn't terribly interested in looking all the way up to what the face was. Probably I got to the crotch and stopped. I don't remember that, but I bet you. I can remember going to the beach. I can remember going in the water, which was cold.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At Worthing?

HARRY HAY: At Worthing. According to my mother and according to my nurse, I apparently was always wild about the water and had an awfully hard time being restrained, even when I was a little kid.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is Worthing near Brighton?

HARRY HAY: Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is it just to the east of Brighton?

HARRY HAY: No, to the west. It's between Southampton and Brighton. You have to realize that a mining engineer, an affluent mining engineer, is upper middle class. And so, consequently only the common people went to Brighton.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I beg your pardon.

HARRY HAY: The nicer people lived at Worthing. Now, Worthing happens to be the place where Thomas a Becket's palace was and where he was murdered.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Very nice people.

HARRY HAY: That's important to know about the Thomas a Becket chapel, because it was in his chapel-- This is where my birth certificate was. Interestingly enough, because of the fact that it was the chapel, the records were moved both in the First World War and in the Second World War, and I was actually able to come across-- I have a birth certificate. I don't think I have a birth certificate, I have a baptismal certificate. But I've got something that proves, at least, that I was around. They were simply removed because it was an important chapel. Most of the other chapels they bombed the hell out of, and nobody paid any attention to it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: If you have a baptismal certificate, were you brought up in-- Were your mother and your father religious people?

HARRY HAY: Well, my mother was a Catholic, and in this period everybody's religious, except my father, who deliberately wasn't. But he agreed--I don't know whether he accepted instruction or not--but he certainly agreed that his children should be brought up in the Catholic church.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And you were?

HARRY HAY: I was. That also has some material too, because I'm one of the few people who got thrown out, literally.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But not, I take it, in Worthing.

HARRY HAY: Not in Worthing, no that was later. That was a nice little town, Worthing. Retired civil servants lived in Worthing. I have a picture of the house I was born in, taken not too far from that time, I guess. I don't know how to work it out, but the houses in Worthing, or at least some of the houses in Worthing, the address was the name of the house. And the name of the house I was born in was Colwell.

MITCH TUCHMAN: They still do that, name the houses.

HARRY HAY: I have a picture of that house, and I think the name of the house is on the gate. My sister was born in a house called Placilla. I guess that's how they were known, because when you addressed houses, you sent it to Colwell, Bath Road, Worthing, and that was the address, as I remember. I can remember the house. I can remember the garden. Curious garden: it had a brick wall around it, and then at the top it had what they called a wattle--wattle fences. Wattles are something like willows. It's kind of a woven thing, and it would have this woven section on top of the gate. Sometimes in these old English movies you'll see these brick houses and this kind of wattle thing around the top-- The last two feet or three feet is this wattle weaving. I can remember that big garden there, and I can remember a ball. I can remember--but this may be because of pictures too, because there were pictures of me doing this--I can remember standing at the top of the stairs at Colwell and refusing to go down into the street until somebody found my gloves.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Your gloves?

HARRY HAY: My gloves, my white gloves. I wore little white gloves. I had a little white hat and little white gloves, and I wouldn't go without my gloves. I was a little queen even then--and very determined then, not stamping my feet, but making it very plain in my voice that I was just not budging until I found them.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who was taking these pictures, by the way?

HARRY HAY: I don't know. I guess that these particular pictures, or some pictures, must have been taken by a professional photographer. One of them looks like a professional photographer [took it]. My father was an avid camera fan, but he was only home very occasionally. I think he was home maybe around the time of my sister's birth, and maybe he took some of those pictures.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was he for the most part in Tarkwa while your mother lived in Worthing?

HARRY HAY: No, at this point he's in Chuquicamata in Chile, because about the time I was born, he finished the job at Tarkwa and went to the Guggenheims in Chile.

MITCH TUCHMAN: He went on to Chile without-- But the family stayed behind in Worthing.

HARRY HAY: Yeah. Well, in that case Chile was a difficult place to live, and there weren't very many families living there then.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who lived in your house? Your mother and the two children?

HARRY HAY: My mother and two children and my nurse and, of Course-- Did you see Upstairs, Downstairs, I mean, the play that was on TV so many times?

MITCH TUCHMAN: No.

HARRY HAY: Well, we would have had a cook and an upstairs maid and a downstairs maid. I don't remember-- And a butler. That would have been the usual complement of servants even in a house like that. I don't remember any of these people. I remember the cook vaguely, and of course I remember my nurse very well. But I don't remember anybody else. My mother had a magnificent singing voice, which she should have done something with, but "nice people" didn't go on the stage; so consequently the world didn't hear that voice, and it was really-- Well, a lot of people did hear it though, because she sang a lot. This is a period in England and in South Africa when the people entertained each other and entertained themselves, and my mother sang a great deal.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was her repertoire? What sort of things was she singing?

HARRY HAY: Well, my mother didn't have-- Not having a proper training, her taste was what amounted to better-quality sentimental ballads, I would think. She never sang opera, as far as I know. She did sing the lieder: Grieg and Franck and Brahms and Schubert and so on. She had what was known as a woman's baritone, which I think might be indicative, I don't know. But anyway, the point is that this woman's baritone was a deeper voice than a contralto. But I would say that she probably had, at least, a three-and-a-half-octave range, because she had a number of--what we would call in the soprano range too and could use it, but there was a definite break in between the deep voice and the high voice. So, she never learned to bridge that, because she never had any training. She played the piano and accompanied herself.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you also-- Well, you would have been very young at that time, but as the years went on and she sang and played the piano, did you join in, and was it a family thing too?

HARRY HAY: Of course. It was a family thing. One of my first memories, my first memory, she's teaching me to sing, and I'm probably not more than eight or nine months old. But I can remember sitting in her lap at the piano and being more interested-- I can remember the pages a little bit on the song, but I was much more interested looking down; and there is a very interesting pattern on her dress, and there is another pattern in the covered seat that she is sitting on. I can remember that pattern intimately; even at this point I can probably draw it for you. She had little tiny flowers in the silk dress she used to wear. I can remember those, because she's carrying me, playing with one hand, and I'm looking down, and I'm supposed to be looking at the book, but I'm not. But what she taught me to do was, she would sing a line, and I would come in on the last word; apparently this is what I was doing. But, yes, we sang. The point is that, again, as would be a proper English family--we were always raised as an Edwardian family--we would have been taught to sing. We would be expected to sing for visitors when they came. Each one of us would have a song that we would sing, and then my mother would sing too. So, this is the entertainment for the evening; this is before phonographs and radio.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did this result in your having-- Well, your father was simply absent a lot of the time; so what effect did that have on you?

HARRY HAY: Well, he was absent for the first couple of years of my life. He was absent a great deal anyway. As English children were raised--and my mother more or less raised us as English children, because she had seemed to like that way of life; she loved Edwardian life generally--we had a nurse. So, for instance, even living in South America in the same house as my father and mother, I probably was taken in to see my father between five and six in a given afternoon. Well, not every afternoon. I don't remember him at all, not at all. I don't have the foggiest-- I remember some of my mother's gentlemen friends who came to call in the morning; I guess everybody knew who they were, although one or two of them were-- I don't know.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who were they?

HARRY HAY: I didn't know who they were. I just think very well one or two of them might have been gay men. They would be young engineers who came to do various jobs and who might be available in mornings. I know one of them had a perfectly beautiful guitar and used to come and sing to my mother.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are you suggesting that these were people with whom she was having affairs? Or these were gentlemen who paid calls?

HARRY HAY: No, they were gentlemen who came. I think my mother, being a very young person, half my father's age—and these also were quite young men, obviously men in their thirties in my memory--I'm sure she enjoyed their company. My guess is, however, that they were safe. And by the word safe I mean I think they really didn't care--my guess. They didn't care for women sexually; they liked women very much.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Would these have been Latin men or Americans?

HARRY HAY: No, they would have been probably American or English. But more probably English than American. Oh, I don't know that. They could have been either one. I can remember one of them was kind of handsome, and I remember he used to sing "A Spanish Cavalier Stood in His Retreat," and I used to love that song. He had beautiful ribbons that hung from his guitar, and you're not going to see ribbons hanging from a guitar from 1916 until probably-- Until People's Songs you won't see them again. The guitar simply disappears, more or less, in that period, but after that People's Songs brought it all back. So, I was thinking of that as different. Again, I have a very small memory of my father except as a sort of a stern presence. There were other engineers whom I knew and other engineers whose families I knew, whom I saw a lot of and who played with me as a little boy. I was very fond of them. So, there were a lot of men around in Chile. A lot of men around. I didn't lack for role models, if anybody wanted to know.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How was the trip made from England to Chile?

HARRY HAY: American carrier, and it was a leaky, old tub, I might add.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you remember the name of the ship?

HARRY HAY: No, I don't think I do, but I'll tell you one thing, I have a picture of it somewhere in one of my books, and I might be able to find out what the name of it was. But the two boats or the three boats that had crossed just previous to our crossing had been stopped. One of them had been torpedoed; and the others had been stopped, and the people taken off, and then the boat torpedoed by German submarines in the South Atlantic. So I know that my mother and our nurse, who traveled with her, that we were packed and on deck the entire time--we never went down to the cabins-- from the time we left Gravesend, which is the mouth of the Thames, to the time we got to Barbados, which would be in the Caribbean. They simply never went down. They simply lived on deck the entire time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And from that point on you would be in British-or American-controlled waters?

HARRY HAY: Not entirely, not entirely, because, you see, South America had been heavily developed by German companies prior to the First World War. The Battle of San Juan-- As we were traveling down from Panama to Chile, we got word of the Battle of San Juan Fernandez, which broke the power of the Germans. But it did not happen until after we left Panama; so people were terrified of this.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you go through the canal?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, we went through the canal. The boat that we were traveling on, there were a lot of Germans going to South America; so they were very busy, you know, running the boat and saying, "We're winning the war," and all this kind of stuff. But after the Battle of San Juan Fernandez, they all went down to their cabins, and mother said we never saw them again until we got to Antofagasta. What they had was, they had large hampers, which were like wicker baskets, that might have been, say, three feet long, and they were double. They could be double baskets. They could be put together top and bottom and then handles at the side, leaving air coming in around the thing, but nevertheless a cover on the top. In the top of one basket were all my clothes and what I needed, and I was in the other basket. My sister had one too. My mother would handle one, and the nurse would handle the other. What the idea was that, if they were stopped to be torpedoed, they would have these things and could move directly into the lifeboats. This is why they lived that way. Her things and my clothes were in one basket, and my nanny's things and my sister's things were in the other basket. I was sleeping in one. My sister was sleeping in one. So, we were in these halves. This is the way we traveled.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How long was the nurse with your family, and what was her name?

HARRY HAY: Her name was Miss May Pittock. She traveled with us as a nurse and governess all the time we were in Chile, and then when we came to the United States, she came also. At that time she more or less acted as sort of a maid and cook for my mother as well.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And stayed with her how long?

HARRY HAY: She stayed with us until-- Oh, dear. She didn't go to Tustin; so she must have left-- I guess she left-- (I can't believe this. How did she get back?) She must have left about 1917, and I don't know how she got back. No, I guess she left about 1919, I guess, but I'm not clear about that. (Isn't it funny? I haven't thought about that.) She must have left about 1919. I think she left as soon as was possible to return.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, your boat reached Antofagasta, and you were in good shape.

HARRY HAY: Yeah. We got in in fine shape. I can remember my father came down to meet the boat. And I can remember Antofagasta, which is interesting too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But that's not where you lived.

HARRY HAY: No. It was just a port. It was an elegant port. This was a port that had been built, maybe, in the 1700s, I guess, in Chile. I remember the hotel. You're going to ask me the name of it, and I almost thought of it. Somewhere I've still got some luggage that has got these stickers from that hotel. I get the idea that it was called the Grand Hotel, but I'm not sure. But anyway, what it had that was so interesting: it had these wide verandas that would be in the front of all of the-- Let's say, the building might have been four or five stories high, and they had these wide verandas in front of every single floor, and the verandas were-- I can remember them, because they were wide and probably hardwood floors. Quite wide, I would think; maybe six, maybe eight feet wide.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Deep. You mean, out to the--

HARRY HAY: Out. They were covered with beautiful black ornamented ironwork, which was done in grapes and leaves and things like that; so I can remember looking out from the back end and seeing these silhouettes out against the city itself. We overlooked the plaza, because there were lots of trees, I can remember, and people walking down below, and then bands playing on Sunday. I can remember all this; so we must have been there a couple of weeks, because I can remember the bands playing. Way at the top of the, not the top, but looking out from the city, looking up towards the Andes, I can remember that there were two peaks that you could see, one of which was smoking; so that they were dormant, but not necessarily inactive volcanoes. I remember that somebody told me that they were named for the Apostles, San Pablo and San Pedro. So, I can remember these distant volcanoes. Somewhere or other I've seen a picture or drawing or something of Antofagasta of about that time, and there, my god, are those two peaks way out at the other end. So, apparently, this was something-- I'm not making it up. I can remember it happening.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Where did you go?

HARRY HAY: But one thing that I do want to mention: on the way down we went into Guayaquil, and I can remember going-- Guayaquil in Ecuador is a long way in. You go in about probably thirty or thirty-five or forty miles up this river.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, the port's not on the coast?

HARRY HAY: No, it's the mouth of the river, and you go in. The reason why I mention it, the reason why I remember it, is that you had jungle on both sides of the river. I can remember the monkeys and the parrots, because you were going up the river. We even spent the night in the middle of the river, or something. I can remember hearing the jungle sounds at night as a child and waking up and being utterly fascinated by it and remembering that for years and years and years. I don't have much memory of the port of Guayaquil. A little bit. I remember it from the boat looking towards the shore.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You're how old at this point?

HARRY HAY: Two. A little over two. I also remember that when we went to Callao, which was in Peru, there, again, you lay out in the roadstead. You didn't come into shore. The boats came and got you because you couldn't come any closer. In other words, they didn't have a dock. It was a roadstead port. I can remember the Portuguese man-of-war, which is the jellyfish floating in the water. It was absolutely beautiful, clear water, and these huge jellyfish, floating as they do, looking like sort of inverted parachutes in the water with these long [tentacles] going down. I remember this in the early morning, looking out the porthole and seeing the jellyfish in the water and flying fish, which I had never seen. You know, you don't hear much about flying fish anymore.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I've seen them.

HARRY HAY: Are they an extinct species?

MITCH TUCHMAN: No, if you go fishing in Mexico, you see them.

HARRY HAY: Well, they had lots of flying fish at Callao. But the most important thing about Callao that I remember was that we were there-- (Why we were there a week, I don't know. I don't remember why we would have stayed there a week. Maybe they were taking on-- Oh, I guess a lot of the Germans were debarking, and they were taking on cargo or something.) But anyway, we were there for about a week, and my mother and my nurse took me up to Lima, which is above Callao. Lima is up about six or seven thousand feet, and you kind of go up a little river, and you get to the top, right up. The important thing to me in Lima was that we went to the zoo. At the zoo we saw a giraffe. It was the only giraffe I ever saw in my life, until I guess the giraffe at Fleishhacker's, which I didn't see until I went to Stanford. I am so impressed that I have actually seen a real honest-to-Pete giraffe. Of course, they had lot of llama, but then we had llama all over the place in Chile; so there was nothing special about that. But the giraffe: I've never forgotten the giraffe at Lima. I don't remember anything else about Lima except the giraffe.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Except the giraffe. I'm sure the Chamber of Commerce would be horrified. Where did you live in Chile?

HARRY HAY: We lived at-- Oh, dear. Chuquicamata.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And was that an American compound, or--

HARRY HAY: It was an American compound. It was an American mine, built by-- I mean, Chuquicamata was a small village. It was actually a Chilean village, but it was actually built by the Guggenheims at the Anaconda Copper Company. And Chuqui probably consisted of-- (Curiously enough, there are pictures of this at Claremont, because-- Why they're at Claremont I don't know, except the Mudds must have been involved with this too. I think Seeley Mudd must have had something to do with this. I've seen pictures of the Anaconda Copper Company there at Claremont. I was quite interested to see that. There was a picture of Chuqui--why I don't know--in Life magazine about, oh-- when?--maybe the early fifties. I guess they did something on the Anaconda Copper Company. But anyway, there was a picture of Chuqui, showing the earlier pictures, and I was kind of interested because I found our house in it.)

MITCH TUCHMAN: How long did you live there?

HARRY HAY: From 1914 until the end of 1916, long enough for my brother to be born there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And what is his name?

HARRY HAY: His name is Jack William--John William Hay. He was born in May of 1916. I have a number of pictures of myself and my sister playing around the yard there. Because of the fact that we were about 11,650 feet in the mountains--very dry, very high--a lawn of grass was almost unknown in the area. We had a lawn in front of our house that was all of that wide, I guess, just about wide enough for my sister and me to sit on, a strip around the house.

MITCH TUCHMAN: A foot across in every direction?

HARRY HAY: In every direction. I can remember going on an excursion with a number of families, who would be the families of other miners, other engineers there, to Calama. Calama was important because there was a spring there, a spring and green grass and flowers. We were taken as children--the parents went to see this too, this phenomenon, you see, in the middle of this absolutely terrible, this dry, utterly arid desert--to go to a spring where there were trees and bushes and flowers and running water.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is this part of that desert in Chile where it's never been known to rain?

HARRY HAY: That's right. It's never been known to rain; the Atacama Desert has never received rain of any sort. That's why Calama was terribly important. At that time the mine manager was a very well-known, world well-known man by the name of Fred Hellman, whose family had come from Peru. They were exporters in San Francisco in the early days. I think he had probably been born in Peru, had been educated at Heidelberg, and then joined the rest of his father's brothers in San Francisco, where he met his wife, who had been born in Grass Valley [California]. The two of them went to South Africa. But he had gone about, oh, four or five years earlier than my father; so he was sort of a senior man. Well, he was the general manager at Chuqui, and my father was--what would you call it?--I guess he was the person who was actually in charge of operations. The other man was sort of the administrator. My father was the actual one to carry it out, mining operations and development of smelters.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Superintendent perhaps?

HARRY HAY: He was the superintendent, and then my father was manager under him. But anyway, that house was very interesting because it had an inner patio.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Bellman's house?

HARRY HAY: Bellman's house had an inner patio, and it had a glass cover over the top of it; so that they had ferns, and they had grass, and they had flowers in the patio at all times.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You didn't lack for water in this town even though it didn't rain? Was there spring water? Mountain water?

HARRY HAY: There were springs that had been developed, and we had quite a lot of water, as a matter of fact. They had all the water they needed for the mines; so, therefore, they had tapped some kind of an artesian well of tremendous proportions really, I think. I guess pipelines bringing water down to individual houses were rare, but the mines themselves had plenty of water for sluicing purposes and so on. I loved that patio, because I would go up to lunch in the patio probably once, maybe twice a week, because they were childless; so they were making a lot of me--and I was a cute little kid; there's no getting away from that. I'll have to show you some pictures sometime.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Would you have gone with your mother and sister, or would you have been dispatched with the nanny?

HARRY HAY: I probably would have gone with Nanny a couple of times, but also I'm sure I went with my mother, because Mrs. Hellman loved my mother very much, and they were together a great deal. They were both from Africa, and they had known each other when growing up in Africa, and so on; so they were very close in that regard. We were there a couple of times a week at least. Mr. Hellman used to play games with me. He would play eagle, and he would play teddy bear, and he'd play something else. Now, the eagle was when he would go rushing around, roaring around the patio, and he would pounce. I liked it better when he played teddy bear or pussycat because they were gentler, and he didn't keep raising his voice all the time; and there was some snuggling that would go on in pussycat. So, I liked pussycat better, but Mr. Hellman was really very disappointed because I was giving the wrong signals. I should have liked eagle. My sister liked teddy bear, and I liked pussycat. Anyway, that's the way it went. So, you can see the characteristics showing up at four, which is just not the best thing all around. My father had one of the few Edison phonographs there. I can remember certain pieces that were played on that phonograph, because I can remember it being played at night. Or maybe it would have been played in the late afternoon, or maybe I was taken into his room and allowed to listen, or something. But anyway, there were certain things that I remembered. One of them would have to have been probably Chabrier's Espana. He must have had some kind of a record, a little, five-minute cylinder record, Edison cylinder of that. Later on, whenever I heard that piece, I could remember things about that room; so there has to be a connection there somehow. The other piece that I can remember was the "Staircase Waltz" from The Count of Luxembourg by Oskar Straus. When I first learned to play the piano in this country, I would pick out this piece, and my mother would say, "Where did you hear that?" I'd say, "I don't know, but I can remember Nanny--" and I told her some other things. And she said, "Oh, yes, your father had a cylinder of that waltz." But this is what I remember. When I was eight or nine years old, I'd pick it out by ear on the piano.

MITCH TUCHMAN: When the family sang, did he sing too? Was he also a singer?

HARRY HAY: No, my father had no music at all, none.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You said he was stern. Was he very restrained? Would he have been unlikely to sing temperamentally as well as, you know, whether he had a voice or not?

HARRY HAY: No, he probably would never have been the kind of person who would have-- I don't know about that. You wonder, you know. A lot of his brothers liked to whistle, and there were one or two brothers who did like to sing. But they were raised in a Christian household. In a Christian household, the Christian sect of the Presbyterian church is a little bit like-- Well, for instance, where the Moravians, for instance, loved music, the Amish and the Mennonite people never sang, never had buttons on their shirts, that kind of thing, because this was worldly. My grandmother went to this extreme. She was very-- Anything that was a little bit worldly would be sinful. And this is not entirely true either, because she had some pretty things in her house, but they were in the parlor, and the parlor was always kept locked and shut. They wouldn't live in it. Someone went out and dusted it every so often. I don't think that she would have approved of music. Oh, yes, she did, because there were a couple of grandchildren who were abandoned by this brother or that brother and were raised by her and were given music lessons. My grandmother must have been a strong set of contradictions, but she could be very stern and very religious and very strict at certain points, and other time, other times not. She had some rather nice artwork, and she had some lovely crochet and things like that around, which a good, strict Christian woman should not have had.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You mentioned that your father was rather deliberately not religious, and yet did he subscribe to any of these notions?

HARRY HAY: He took after some of the sternness of his mother without necessarily sharing her harsh religion for his motivations.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How do you remember him as a person?

HARRY HAY: I remember him as a person who laughed very little, or he didn't laugh with the children. He laughed with other adults but not with the children. He was a little bit like a stern preacher. He was always coming out with what you should do and what you shouldn't do. Whenever I would come home with a report card, he would always say, "Well, you could have done better." I don't ever remember his giving me any encouragement. He always found fault with whatever I did. He was encouraging me to exceed myself, I think is what it amounted to. If you'd come home with an all-A report card, you'd think that maybe he'd find something good to say about it, but he wouldn't, you see. He would usually say, "Well, maybe one of these was an A- minus," and "maybe you could do better next time." I never remember anything very kind coming from him. And I never expected it eventually.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you do anything together? You said that you would be shown into his room, perhaps, in the afternoon.

HARRY HAY: When I was shown into his room, that was when I was three and four.* [In Chile when I was three or four, my father would come home from the mine, and he and mother would have tea in the late afternoon. He would put a cylinder on his Edison phonograph. Mother had tea in cups; sometimes he had something in a glass. Nanny would get me and my little sister all dressed up and washed and combed; my little sister would have her hair brushed into long curls. Then Nanny would take us into the drawing room to be kissed by both Mother and Daddy. The room was still in daylight; there are no candles lit yet. I think we were each allowed to have a sweet cracker or something. "Only one now, mind you, or you'll spoil your supper." This was what we were supposed to do every day. It wasn't something I looked forward to doing. This is the only memory I have of my father in Chile. ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. No, there is a vague shadow memory of a bare room with south light coming in a window over a rolltop desk. There are men with mustaches sitting at tables and drafting tables. My father seems to be swiveling at the rolltop. There are people in the room with wraps around them. One of them is my mother. There are layers of talk and smoke coming from different parts of the room. "Children, don't fidget!" There may be other children besides Peggy and me. We are all just about to go somewhere. Or maybe we've just come from somewhere. Maybe we've just come from the properia, the mine's huge general store. Chuquicamata was a settlement on a fairly steep, but flat slope. The oficinas and the properia down to the right, little Anglo houses, where other children lived, in rows one above the other across the gradient to the right. Our house, with a tiny strip of grass around it, seems to stand alone, way above some long, corrugated mine structure, on the gradient to the left of Quebrada. And way above our house is the general manager's house, Mr. Hellmann's house. This house I seem to remember as being red brick and yellow sandstone. Its center patio, which is what I remember of its interior, must have been an atrium/solarium, because I remember grass and flowering plants and birds and a fountain and a big glass table where we would be served lunch.] That was when we were in Chile. Later on, after he had his accident, and so he was home all the time, I did a lot of things with him.* [That would have been after we came to California and in Tustin on the little orchard when I was five, and later on in Los Angeles when he had an orange orchard in West Covina, where he went every other day--and on Saturdays--when I was seven and on.] He put me to work very early; so that I did a lot of work with him. I never did any play. I don't remember any play. Well, that's unfair. He lost his leg in a mine accident in May of 1916. My guess is, from the stories I've heard, that actually they tried to kill him, but they missed, and they caught his leg, and they smashed the leg. To take on that kind of major accident at the hospital there-- He couldn't be moved for months, and they had no way of handling, for instance, bleeding or clots in the blood or anything like that. They didn't know how to handle things like that in those years, so that finally they had to remove the crushed leg below the knee. In October, I guess, of 1916, he was well enough to move, and he decided he wanted to come back to California. So, we came back-- I came to California for the first time. He came home to California. ------------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed material during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: When was that?

HARRY HAY: We arrived in Long Beach in November of 1916.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So he was in hospital how long?

HARRY HAY: He was in hospital about-- Let's see. I think it happened in May. My mother gave birth to my brother in-- I think it happened in April, and my mother gave birth to my brother in May, and he was in the hospital from April until September. My mother spent-- She had a divided house. This was during that period: the nurse had all to do with us. My mother goes to the hospital in the morning, and she comes home in the evening. She was there every day. During the early part of the time, during the operation, she was there all the time. So, I don't have much memory of this period.

MITCH TUCHMAN: His relationship with you sounds rather formal. What was the relationship between your parents like?

HARRY HAY: Well, by the time we know them in the family, it's a slightly formal relationship. I never could imagine my father and mother being lovey-dovey with one another. However, I've seen some of my father's letters to my mother, and he seemed to think she was the most beautiful thing that ever walked; so that he had a very sort of passionate relationship toward her. I don't know what her relationship towards him was. I don't get a sense of that, but it seemed to me to be sort of formal, and my guess is that they never had-- They didn't have sex very often.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was his relationship to your brother and sister much as it was to you?

HARRY HAY: No, he was more friendly with them than he was with me. I was to be the example of the family and set an example for the other two. And so he was sort of rearing me in a formal fashion and sort of instructed me, and I would instruct them, as it were. [laughter] That never happened. I don't think. I ever instructed them in anything. That would not be who I was. But my sister was the apple of his eye because she was the little girl, and that was traditional. My brother was a feisty little character and, I suppose, very much like him and always into mischief. Not a week didn't go by that he didn't either have a bad bump, a scratch, something broken, you know, that kind of thing. I didn't have much of that. My brother was always into something and always falling off of something. When he eventually became the football hero of the family, as my father had been in his time--and I wasn't--the two children more or less lived up to his expectations of what children were, and I was a mess.

1.3. Tape Number: II, Side One October 28, 1981

HARRY HAY: My guess is that very early on I must have given my father the wrong signals. In other words, I must have smelled wrong to him right from the beginning, because he's always being terribly concerned with making the proper little boy of me, and I am resisting fiercely in return. I can remember being madly in love with pansies, violets, and dahlias. This is when we were living in Tustin. When we came here to this country, we lived in Long Beach for about six months. I guess during that time my father was looking for a small ranch or orchard that he could safely manage with his wooden leg, and at the same time he would be involved with plants, which were his second great love.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had he given up any hope of reviving a career as an engineer?

HARRY HAY: He had not given it up. He was one of these people, always had been, when he took on a job he either did it completely as he thought it ought to be done or he wouldn't do it at all. Because of the fact that he'd lost his leg, he felt that he couldn't be active as a mine manager or general engineer or an exploratory engineer, and therefore he just wasn't going to do it at all.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Wasn't there some other sort of engineering he could have pursued?

HARRY HAY: He could have, but he didn't think in those terms. Well, you see, for instance, during that period, I think, his commanding salary was fifty thousand a year. In 1914 that's a lot of money. So, I think he probably had fairly good investments. So, therefore when he was knocked off, he simply retired as an engineer, and now he would go and grow oranges just as his mother had wanted to do.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At this point he would be about fifty-one, -two, something like that.

HARRY HAY: Yes. So, I think he came here to grow oranges, just as his-- He had always had ideas about how to grow oranges. He had a friend by the name of Luther Burbank. Burbank was not working with orange trees; my father wanted to do that. So, he was here. He thought he would develop strains of oranges and lemons and sort of work in that direction. I think this is what he had in mind to do. So, he came here, and he was looking around for a small ranch, and he found one, I guess, in July of 1917, and we moved there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: To Tustin?

HARRY HAY: To Tustin.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This is where the pansies, violets, and dahlias grew.

HARRY HAY: They grew there, because we had a large flower garden as well as lots of vegetables and fruits.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What would he have preferred that you--

HARRY HAY: Well, at this point I don't have a real picture of what little boys should do. I only know that I used to just love to walk in the [garden]. We had rows of dahlias, and they would be way over my head, because they would be maybe four and five and six feet high, and I am about three feet or under at this point. I can remember looking up and finding these great, heavy flowers full of lush color and not too much odor, smell. But nevertheless, these beautiful colors are leaning down on me. I used to wrap myself in them. [tape recorder turned off] I can remember sort of wanting to reach up and hug these flowers. I think probably several times I picked them and would just hold them around different places, you know, Carmen with a flower in my hair or behind my ear. My remembrance of these flowers were they were as big as my head, and so you can't wear one of those behind your ear very well. Then I can remember the little wood violets. I can't remember their odor, but I can remember how darling they looked, how tiny. Then I can remember the pansies, which I just thought were marvelous, the little faces and all the different colors, but particularly the blue into brown, which is something that's been a passion of mine all my life. I can remember them in sheltered places there on that small farm, under the avocado trees. Then another thing we had too, we had these guavas. We had this big bush, two bushes of strawberry guavas. Then I think these are called pineapple guava, and there was a lemon guava. They were all over that place, and nobody else even knew what they were. My mother used to make guava jelly and jam, and we always had these things for breakfast. Then on that farm too was the original Northrop avocado tree, which, in my memory, was just gigantic. I don't suppose it was very much bigger than the tree that's out there now, but to a little boy it was just enormous, and it was wonderful because you could climb in it. It had lots of branches to climb in and sit in. I think I had a treehouse in that tree. We had a Bartlett alligator pear, and we had this Northrop, and the Northrop are little avocadoes. As far as I know, people were always coming to the ranch and buying slips, which they would use to graft and to bud their own trees with.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did he make a going concern of this orchard in Tustin?

HARRY HAY: I think it probably could have been a going concern, but one of the problems was that his leg was beginning to bother him. It turned out that the leg had been smashed, you see, and that actually the flesh was full of little slivers of bone. He was going to have to go through a series of operations, and I think that probably taking care of the ranch, of that orchard, at least at that time, was going to be too much for him. And so, I guess, about the middle of 1919, he decided to sell out, and we bought a house here in L.A. at 149 South Kingsley Drive, which is right in this area here, in November of 1919, and we moved here to L.A. That is the beginning of the life that I remember. I have a lot of spotted memories of there in Tustin, but I begin to relate to people when we moved to L.A.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Before talking about moving to L.A., is there more to be said about-- You said that already you may have "smelled" wrong to your father. Is there more to develop on that theme? And also would you say the same was true with your mother? You haven't described really your relationship with your mother up to this point.

HARRY HAY: Well, because of the fact that I grew up with a nurse rather than with my mother when I was a very little boy, there are certain things I can remember of my mother. I can remember wanting to sit in her lap, I can remember wanting to snuggle with her, and I can remember being removed by my nurse from her lap far earlier than I would have removed myself. I have vague memories of that not only in England but in Chile. So that by the time we get to Long Beach, where I am going to see much more of her, I'm already not expecting too much. However, I can remember sitting in her lap and reading stories. She used to read lots of stories to us. She read to us beautifully.

MITCH TUCHMAN: She wasn't as stern or distant as your father, I take it.

HARRY HAY: No, she wasn't. Well, she could be stern in her own way. She was rather aloof. My mother was not what you'd call overgiven to lots of affection, hugging and kissing; she didn't do much of that. But I can remember sitting in her lap, and I can remember her voice. I can remember her reading to us, lots of reading to us. And kissing at the proper times, like saying good night or saying good morning or something like that, but not a great deal of affection in between. And wanting it badly, wanting it very much, but not getting much. Always a little cool and being concerned about messing her dress or disturbing her hair or something like that. So that, therefore, there was a certain holding off, as you can see, right away, by this.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the living arrangement? Did you and your sister and brother have individual rooms, or did you all live together?

HARRY HAY: My brother and I shared a room. My sister had a separate room, which would become a guest room. I mean, women who came to visit in the house--aunts or women friends of my mother's or cousins--would share my sister's room.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This is in Tustin now.

HARRY HAY: Both in Tustin and here on Kingsley Drive, yes. I don't have much memory of the living arrangements in Tustin. Somehow or other I don't recall this. One thing I do remember about Tustin, though, that is important. And so at this point I have to be five or five and a half, somewhere like that. Two things were important. I apparently masturbated like crazy. How early I began this I don't remember. I think at one time I did remember, and my guess is that it probably began in Chile, but certainly it's what we call an advanced addiction by the time we get to Tustin. This is a period when I think they had-- I'm not too sure whether or not they had moved from the idea that-- Oh, no, they hadn't-- I remember being told by them that I would lose my mind and become absolutely an imbecile if I continued this dreadful practice. I can remember the doctor telling my mother this in my presence. So that they decided that the only way to cure me of that noxious habit was to-- They made a little cuff and glove, which went onto my hands at night, and particularly around my thumb, and my thumbs and hands were pinned to the corner of the bed all night long. These I think I wore until-- [tape recorder turned off] Anyway, my hands were tied up to the top of the bed, on either side of the top, from-- Well, let's see how long. I guess I was doing that-- You know, I don't remember whether this happened in Long Beach or whether it happened in Tustin, but I remember all the time I was in Tustin this went on. And they were doing it even when we moved to Los Angeles. I was still being tied into that position to keep from you know what. This must have gone on until I was about seven years old.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, how did they discover that this step was necessary in the first place in their eyes?

HARRY HAY: I don't know.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Caught red-handed?

HARRY HAY: I guess I was caught red-handed or, not red-handed, but anyway red-cocked, let's say, at some point. Or maybe there were noises. Or maybe my sister complained of the noise, or my brother did. I don't know how they found out. I don't have any memory of that. I really don't.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You don't remember either your sister or your brother doing the same thing, do you?

HARRY HAY: No, I don't remember that. They didn't go through that pinning thing. I was the only one who went through that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Have you ever heard of anyone else going through that, or was that a device for you?

HARRY HAY: I can remember when the doctor said, "Now, this is one of the things they do"; so, therefore, apparently it was not an uncommon practice. Or at least I'm sure he didn't invent it, but it was something that they do. It was supposed to work fine. All that happened in my case was, you know, I got to masturbating in the daytime, when they couldn't do that. I couldn't wait until they unpinned my hands, and I went right back to it. So it was a strong sexual thing with me right-- I mean, I had a strong sexual thing going very early. I can remember at a point in Tustin--and I can't give you whether it's May or November--but one night-- I think it has something to do with an illness; so I may have had a temperature or something. My father and mother were concerned; so they get up in the middle of the night, and they come into my bedroom. I think I'm still in a crib at this point. And my father leans over the crib, and his pajamas part, and I see his genitals. And I think they're the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life. Now, by this time, I had seen my mother naked any number of times, and it didn't impress me. I wasn't that impressed with her breasts, for instance. I wasn't in particular impressed with that. I thought they were kind of ugly. But my father's genitals I thought were just beautiful. And at the moment I know how beautiful they are and how much I want to sort of, I think--I don't know--maybe press my cheek against them, maybe kiss, I don't know-- I know at that moment that I can't tell him, and I must not touch them. So I know all of this at the same time, but I have this beautiful vision: how beautiful they are. This is a memory that I will carry with me all my life. So, in that regard, whenever I wanted to hate him--and that was frequent--I would always at the same time remember this, and so I couldn't-- I've never come to the place where I've bombed him. JOHN BURNSIDE: Would you like to take a rest? Somebody called about draft counseling. He'll be there until two o'clock.

HARRY HAY: Oh, hold on. [tape recorder turned off] So, where were we?

MITCH TUCHMAN: You were talking about this experience, being sick, and your parents coming--

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes, and seeing my father's genitals. Well, that's just a beautiful memory in my mind and something I can remember and being terribly impressed with. And, again, it's one of these things that have to be looked into and questioned, because at this point in my life I will not have seen genitals. I will not have seen them in books, you see. After all, I'm five at this point, five and a half. Since you don't have books like that in the family, let's say, a respectable family of that period, I would not have ever seen such things, and I would not have been necessarily open to seeing these things with other people, because there weren't any other people around. There's your family, and that's it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is this something that you thought about a great deal at the time? I mean, this image was before you a lot at that time or just occurred now and then?

HARRY HAY: Well, I don't know, but it has to do with my masturbation, I know. It was one of the things that I used to-- Once in a while I'd be very angry with my father. All of a sudden this vision would suddenly appear, and I would sort of calm down because it was something that would remind me of the fact that there was some good here with my father. So, whatever my frustration or my anger or my fury might be, I would still get that vision, and that would sort of proceed to calm it down. Then sometimes when I needed to be comforted, I would sort of conjure this thing up in my mind, and this was one of the things that I found pleasant to look at and remember.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What, if I may ask, was the nature of-- I mean, I don't remember. What is the nature of masturbation for a five-year-old? Does a five-year-old get an erection?

HARRY HAY: You get a pleasurable feeling, and I think you do get flashes of erection on occasion. You get tumescence certainly. When I was cut, when I was circumcised, they left a little pouch of skin right at what would be called the glans, which is on the other side, and it made it possible for me to get a hold of my cock, this little piece of skin, and use it as a form of, not irritation, but a form of very strong caress and rubbing, so that I find it very pleasurable, and I find it a way of not only giving me a sense of security, a certain secret sense of pleasure, and I'm aware of the fact that I'm able to-- It takes the place of the lack of affection, I guess. In other words, instead of being caressed and stroked and held and so on (which incidentally most children find to be sexually attractive, or satisfying; this is something that you simply develop for yourself), and since I didn't get very much stroking or petting in my childhood, I'm stroking and petting myself.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What made your parents abandon this practice of hooking you up at night?

HARRY HAY: I don't know that. I don't know that. I only realize that, by about the time, I guess, that I entered school here, by the fourth grade, I don't remember that this was going on anymore. Well, I know. It's very possible, it's very possible that the doctor that my parents went to for all of us kids, who lived in the neighborhood, by the time we moved to L.A., he might have suggested that the practice be discontinued; that if it didn't seem to have broken the habit, maybe I would grow out of it; that it didn't seem to be doing anything very much, and it might be dangerous. So, I think that was probably why they gave it up.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you think that from that time on your parents kept a vigilance over you that was intrusive?

HARRY HAY: I don't get that sense. No, I don't think so. I think that maybe they moved on to other things by then, or something.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you get the sense that what you were doing was wrong but was a temptation that couldn't be resisted? Or did you get the sense that, "By God, I'm going to just do this. Anyway, I like it"?

HARRY HAY: I can remember--because this is true of a lot of other things that I'm going to think of later on--I knew that they thought it was wrong. But I remember making that separation in my mind: that they thought it was wrong, and I didn't think it was.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that enough of a reason to continue it?

HARRY HAY: Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Would this lead to the notion, that I said I want to ask you about, of always being-- The inclination toward dissent I was going to ask you about?

HARRY HAY: Well, prior to a certain action that happened when I was about nine, I guess, I can't say that I'm too clear on that. I mention that because I was one of these bright kids. I had learned to read and write--I don't know how much about writing, but I certainly could read--by the time I was five. This was my great-aunt Kate, the one who was involved earlier in the crossing of the Plains with her mother. Aunt Kate had taught me to read when I was about five and a half in Tustin, and I guess I could write fairly well by the time I was seven. So, I got pushed into grades far beyond what my age group should be, so that I guess, I think I was about nine--that would be 1921--I am nine years old, and I'm in the fifth grade. I can remember James Breasted’s book; the first chapter in our ancient history book, which we got in the fifth grade in those years, would have been James Breasted's story on Egypt. I don't know how it happened, but at the dinner table one night my father made a statement, and it was almost the exact opposite of what Breasted said on page 1 of the story on Egypt. I have somewhat of a photographic memory, and my father made the statement, and all of a sudden I saw the page, and I could see the statement, and I knew he was wrong, and I said, "You're wrong." Now, I don't suppose that I remember ever having said to my father, "You're wrong," before in quite that way, at the dinner table with everybody with their faces hanging out, you know. But at the moment that I said that, there was a distinct pall. I mean, chill descends upon the family household. My mother takes a sharp breath; I can hear her. My father sits here. I sit here. My brother sits here. My sister, and if there's a guest, it's over on that side. And my mother's at the far end of the table. I can hear my mother going-- [gasps]

MITCH TUCHMAN: The men are one side, your sister and the guests are opposite them, and your mother's at the end.

HARRY HAY: My father and mother at the head and foot. My father's the head. My mother's the foot, naturally. After all, you know the position of women, silly. (No, OK.) So, I'm at my father's right hand. I am, after all-- ("I carve biforn my father at the table." You don't know Chaucer? I did at one time, I might add.) So, I say, "You're wrong." I remember my mother taking this sharp intake. My father's face goes absolutely cold, and he sort of sits back at the table--he's a big man, big hands--and he sits back at the table, and he takes a deep breath. And we sit and we sit and we sit, and finally my mother said, "Your father is waiting for you to apologize." And I said, "Well, I can't apologize because he's wrong." At that moment my father reaches across the table. Now, he will reach across, and he will catch me by the ear on this side.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The right side.

HARRY HAY: Normally speaking, he would box me. And when he used to box, he used to box here. When they box ears, a great big hand would hit you on the ear. Well, as a matter of fact, what they do, these fingers will touch this area right behind the ear, which is where the sound box is, and there's a wall where the nerves are. I don't have any hearing in this ear. That's gone long ago, and it came because of insistent drumming on this area here. But the doctor said, "How did you ever get beaten in that area? Because you've obviously been touched many, many times in this area, and those muscles are all gone, and the nerves are all gone." So, I told him about boxing the ears, and he said, "Oh, my God, I never thought of that." But, of course, that's why so many people were deaf, because they had their ears boxed, which was the way of punishing children mildly in the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. So, anyway, my father reaches around the table, and he catches me by the ear here, and he unwinds me from the table, and we leave the table forthwith. We go out into the back, not to the woodshed, because we didn't have one; but we had a garage, and behind the garage he had a workshop, and in his workshop he had his razors and his strops, which were used for sharpening razors. He had a strop for every day in the week, because he had a razor for every day in the week. So he would take this seven-strop--this huge thing, long leather--like a leather--what was the word they used to use? I've forgotten, the word they used to talk about—cat-o'-nine-tails. It was like a cat-o'-nine-tails except it had seven tails and they were all leather. He would take a hold of it, and he started to whip me. And he whipped and he whipped and he whipped and he whipped, and, of course, he had my arm twisted up behind my back, you see, so that I couldn't move. All I had to do was to apologize. After all, he's a Scotchman. I'm a Scotchman. In that respect we have the same thing: and the stubborner he got, the stubborner I got. I wouldn't say anything, and I guess he eventually realized that I was going to probably pass out before anything happened because he quickly undid my arm, as it were, and he said, "Now, you go upstairs to your room, and you won't have any supper; and you don't get anything until you apologize." So, I went up to my room. My mother came up shortly thereafter. There were some bruises, and there were some things that had to be healed and some scratches on my back and some bad bruises on my arms, and this and that. So, I got put into an Epsom salts bath, and a few other things. But I was to apologize, and I refused to apologize. That night, as soon as everybody was not looking anymore, I went to the book. I didn't show this to my mother. I don't know why, but I didn't. I waited until she had left, and then I went and looked in the book. There on the page was exactly what I thought it said, and it was exactly the opposite of what my father had said. And so I started to do some thinking that night, and I thought, "You know, if my father can be wrong, then the teacher can be wrong. And if the teacher is wrong, maybe the priest could be wrong. And if the priest is wrong, maybe even God's wrong--sometimes." Anyway, I know by this time that some of the things that they're already telling me about, that I've got to do and I've got to think about or that I can't think, I suddenly think, "I don't think they're wrong. Inside me they feel good, and inside me they burn. And someday I'll find words to tell them how beautiful it is. And it's not wrong." I think from that day forward, I never had any guilt because I knew people could be wrong--even teachers and priests could be wrong--because my father was wrong. Up until that time he had been the total authority in my house, and all of a sudden I had caught him wrong. Not lying--I was never concerned with that--but he was wrong.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In error.

HARRY HAY: Error is mild. He was wrong. This is how it seems to me. He was wrong. And because he's wrong, other people can make errors, and they can be wrong. If even supreme authorities can be wrong, because he was the supreme authority in my life that I could think of at that point-- I worked it all out this way in my own mind, so that the voice of dissent begins that night.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you have any idea whether this had as lasting an effect on him as it did on you?

HARRY HAY: No, I don't think so because, after all, this is the way he did. This is the way he went on doing with me until-- Oh, this is when I'm nine, and he went on doing this until I was eighteen.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had you ever been beaten before like that?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes. This was by no means the first time. The only thing that's important was that this time he was wrong. Oh, no, the beatings: that's par for the course.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What sort of transgression on your part would bring out that--

HARRY HAY: Any crossing of him of any sort. For instance, by this time I had probably gone out and worked on his orchard. He had an orchard. When we left Tustin and came to L.A.,* [he had another orchard in West Covina, which he had bought, I think, on the trip he made to California in 1913, when he came to visit his mother and father just before he went to Chile. It was thirty acres right where Azusa Avenue ended at the bottom slope of the Kellogg Hills. He must have set out the trees at that time. There were two acres of navel orange trees already there. Daddy set out ten acres in lemon trees and then ten more acres in Valencias. The navel oranges were winter-ripening oranges, the Valencias were summer ripening. He must have planted the two apricot, the two peach, the two quince, the two persimmon, and the two avocado trees at that time too, because by the time I meet these trees in 1920 they're big; they're grown to the point where they are bearing. This orchard, mostly set out in new trees, he turns over to Charley Jackson, who's just gotten married and is working on his mother-in-law's place, which is just next door to us on Azusa Avenue to the north. (Azusa Avenue is now a main thoroughfare in West Covina.) Daddy eventually sold the ten acres of grown navels to Charley Jackson, so that he ------------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. had an orchard of his own, but he went on working for and with Dad clear into the middle 1930s, until a Mr. Dougherty more or less worked for Dad full time. Dougherty's younger brother was one of Gilmor Brown's cuties at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in the late '30s and throughout the '40s.] That he went out to two or three days a week to work on, and he would take me every Saturday, and sometimes Saturdays and Sundays, and certainly always holidays; I would always go out there to work. I went to work there by the time I was [eight], I guess. This would be the early spring of 1930.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Doing what sorts of things?

HARRY HAY: Same things he did. I learned to hoe. I learned to shovel. I learned to prune. I learned to irrigate.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you enjoy that or dislike it?

HARRY HAY: No, I hated it. I think I would have liked it, but I hated it because of the way he made me do it and because of the fact that, for instance, he insisted that I work right-handed, and I think I was left-handed. I was left-handed. I would wait until after he slipped around from behind a tree and went off somewhere else, and I would switch to the other hand. Then I wouldn't hear him coming back, and he'd catch me, and he'd whip me and make me do it with the right hand. I would work with the right hand until he disappeared, and I'd put it in the left hand again. And I got whipped again and again and again and again, but I never gave up going to the left hand.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did your brother and sister work also in the orchard?

HARRY HAY: No.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Not at all?

HARRY HAY: No, because after all there wasn't room to take them out; so I was the oldest, and so I got [taken].

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was it, a pickup or something that you went in?

HARRY HAY: My father had a Model A Ford in those years, but earlier-- Well, we had a Model A how long? From 1924, I guess.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Bet it was black.

HARRY HAY: Uh-huh. The last one was green, but usually they were black. I guess we just had regular Fords earlier than that time. I don't know. I've forgotten how early the Model A came out. I think the Model A--it was about '23 or '24. But anyway, it seems to me that he had one. I know he used to drive.* [I remember now. We had at first a big Ford touring car, which had oiled-canvas rain flaps inset with isinglass windows, which you attached to the side of the car when it rained. We three kids sat in back with a ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. lap robe in winter, and Dad and Mom sat in front. When an aunt or uncle was visiting, they got shoehorned into the back too. In 1922, my father got a great big Huppmobile V-8 touring car. In the summer of 1923, when I was eleven, I started to learn to drive it. By 1924 my dad would make me switch places with him as soon as we got opposite the Ramona Convent on Valley Boulevard (it faced up toward Alhambra, and, incredibly, it's still there in 1983). In 1925 I got my first California driver's license, and I carried that license until all such licenses were revoked in 1942. So I guess we didn't get the Ford Model A roadster until we moved to 940 South Windsor Boulevard, complete with two-car garage and tennis court.] No, he only took me. On big occasions, he would sometimes--when there was fruit to be picked and things like that--he would take my brother and sister and my mother. We'd make a picnic of it, something like that. But when he went to work, he just took me. I resented that too. You see, he also had me working in a grocery store. I worked in a grocery story Mondays through Fridays and sometimes Saturdays too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What became of your earnings? Were those yours, or did you turn them over?

HARRY HAY: No, they were mine, but they paid for my clothes. Later on, when I belonged to a boys' organization and I wanted to go to boys' camp, I had to pay for that. So my earnings went for that. Then I bought myself a saxophone, and I never played it after I got it, incidentally. But it took me three and a half years to buy the thing, and then by that time it had become--I had gone into other things, and the saxophone was no longer that important.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did your mother or sister or brother or anyone take your part in any of these battles with your father?

HARRY HAY: Well, sometimes my mother would try to take my part by saying, "He didn't really mean it."

MITCH TUCHMAN: Either that or to prevent your being beaten or anything like that?

HARRY HAY: No, no. My mother used, she used her hand and the hairbrush.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, she was a handy one too.

HARRY HAY: Sure. We got whipped on both sides. And I got more of it than most of them did because I was the example, therefore whenever I made a transgression, that had to be corrected. Well, I got a slipper from my mother, a slipper. She used to use a soft slipper. She used her hairbrush, and she used the back of her hand. My father nearly always used his hand or the razor strop.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this the entire nature of your relationship with your father? Was there anything more positive to recount in that?

HARRY HAY: Well, my father was very good in-- He would help me with arithmetic. He was stern; I could make no mistakes there either, and I would get whipped for making a mistake. Nevertheless, he was the one that trained me how to do fractions and long division. My mother helped me with English. In those days you didn't diagram sentences, you parsed, which was the old way of doing it. I learned parsing from her, and I learned French from her, and I began to read poetry with her. My father allowed me to take piano lessons, and so I took piano lessons from the time I was about eight until the time I was about fifteen, I guess. I'm a fairly good pianist. As I said, I worked, I really worked for every cent of money I ever spent. This has always been true. The inheritance that I eventually got from them went to my children; so, consequently I never saw any of that either.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this characteristic of other children you knew?

HARRY HAY: They had allowances, and I never had one.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, they would have allowances. Would they also be working?

HARRY HAY: No. And certainly not at our level, because we would be at a level-- We would be middle class. We wouldn't be lower middle class. And in those [days] the kids had cars. The kids had cars young. This was the Prohibition period and in high school they're going to be going out on drinking parties. I could never do things like that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did your working serve to separate you considerably from your peers, both boys and girls?

HARRY HAY: Working did, because I didn't have much of a childhood, and I didn't do much play. I worked on Saturdays, and that kind of thing too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you think that, in the eyes of other middle-class kids, did that seem to signify that you were different and of a different class because you worked?

HARRY HAY: I didn't think so, no. I don't think so because by the time I went to high school, I wasn't working that way any longer; I worked for him in the orchard, and I was making a small wage by then. Earlier he didn't pay me at all. I was just simply-- Children helped the father, and you didn't ask for that. Later on, for instance, when I would go away-- When I was thirteen he decided that I was a big boy and that it was time I learned to work like a man. I was a big kid by then too. I was probably six feet, six feet one, not the strength to go with it, you understand, but nevertheless up in there, up in the air there. So he sent me to work in the hayfields in Nevada, where he had a brother who raised some cattle. In the main they raised hay. They raised alfalfa and corn and silage and had their own vegetables and stuff, and then they had cattle that they would use to feed off in the wintertime. I could have gone up into the grainfields in San Joaquin, where he had other brothers, but for some reason or other I got sent to Nevada. My brother eventually worked in the grainfields, but I didn't. I went up to work in the hayfields. This would have been the summer of 1925. I made some pretty good money for those years. I mean, when I worked, I worked as a man, and I got a man's wage. I wasn't one of the high-paid people at first. I was later on but not at first. Nevertheless I still probably would have earned about $250 to $300 that summer, and that would have carried me through the year. If I worked it very carefully, it would carry me through my expenses, the expenses in high school, and that stuff. So, this is how I would make my money then in that period. I guess it was the fourth year I went up there--it would be '28--I learned to-- I had been working as a pitcher, pitching hay onto the wagons in the fields. For that I made three dollars a day and board. Then in the fourth year I learned to stack. And stacking, if you were a three-man team, you made nine dollars a day and board; and if you were a two-man team, you made fifteen dollars a day and board, and if you were a one-man team, you made twenty dollars a day and board, and that was high money. That was big money. By '29 I was a one-man team. I not only made twenty dollars a day and board but I'd won a medal at the Nevada State Fair at Carson City for building one of the finest stacks in the area.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that a competition they had?

HARRY HAY: I didn't know this, but it was a competition at the fair. What they did was, they would check you out to see how well you knew things, and then they would want to know a stack you built. One of the stacks I built was well known all over the western part of Nevada because it was the biggest one they'd ever seen, and it was a perfect round. You see, you built the stack so that when it settled, it settled in a perfect ball. It would be done in such a way that it was thatched, so that the stems of the alfalfa were all out, the heads were all in where the food is; this is where the protein is. If it's properly thatched it will withstand sun, rain, and snow. That stack stood for three years, I think, and when they finally cut into the middle of it, it was just as fresh as when they put it in. So, this is what won me the prize, you see, because there were very few people who knew how to stack that well.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It never occurred to me there was anything there but just a bunch of dead grass.

HARRY HAY: Well, you see, the great round stacks in Nevada were really almost institutions in themselves. I don't know why you don't see them elsewhere. But one thing: you'd have to have a very big derrick to do it with, and for another you had--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, this isn't something you did by hand.

HARRY HAY: Well, you do it by hand. You have a derrick that lifts the hay up into place. But once it lifts it up, puts it on top, then you take the hay and you spread it all around and then you build it in a particular way. This particular stack was 120 feet in diameter, and it was about-- Well, 120 feet in diameter is quite a stack, you see. Oh, no, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said 120 feet in diameter. It wouldn't have been. It probably would have been about 30 feet in diameter. It was 120 feet around. That's what it was. Well, it was 30 feet in diameter, and it was 80 feet high. That was what it was. What happens is, you build it up in a big thing like this, and it settles. When it settles and it settles, it makes a perfect round. It was the making of the round that was the trick, and you have to know how to build it so that it settles correctly. You have heavy, heavy hay in the middle, which is tying all this stuff together so it won't come apart, because it has to come down in the middle. I loved doing this kind of work, and I did it very well. I was very powerful by this time, a big kid with a big, powerful back, a strong back. I used to build bales-- Later on, when they started to bale hay, I could buck 250-and 275-pound bales without much trouble. I never learned how to properly pitch, so that what I used to do was, I used my whole back as a fulcrum. I got to the place where, if I could get my hands into them, my fingers under something, I could lift almost anything.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At this point, the summer of 1928, sixteen years old, and you're a six-foot-one, humpy teenager.

HARRY HAY: No, a six-foot-three, humpy teenager.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And at that point, I wonder--since it's 2:15; we were going to go until about 2:30--I wonder if what we ought to do is ask you to pick up this story next time, but just get onto the tape the story about your great-grandmother crossing Utah and the story about whether your grandfather was killed. Should we do those two things?

HARRY HAY: We could do that. Yeah, we could.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why don't you go ahead with that?

HARRY HAY: My great-grandfather on my mother's side—this would be the Neall side--apparently was the son of Samuel Neall of--I had always heard it was Cook County, Maryland, but there isn't a Cook County, Maryland. So, anyway, he was a builder of China clippers in the Chesapeake. He was an interesting man. He had four wives, and a total, I guess--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Consecutively or simultaneously?

HARRY HAY: No, consecutively. He went through four wives, let's put it that way. They died, and then he would remarry.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I see. He was an interesting man but not a superhuman man.

HARRY HAY: No. He had I think a total of, probably between the four wives, he probably had a total of about twenty-eight or twenty-nine children--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Getting back to superhuman.

HARRY HAY: --of whom about, maybe, five lived. This is what happened in those years, you see. This is what happened: women died in childbirth, and children died in childbirth. Our knowledge of medicine is very, very recent. What they call puerperal fever, which would be fomented blood, and blood diseases, and so on were very, very common in that time. After all, don't forget the surgeons of that time didn't know about washing their hands until 1890, and this is a much earlier period. So, my great-grandfather Joseph Neall's mother's name was Keturah Mitchell. I know about Keturah Mitchell because Charles Willson Peale painted her portrait. Now, whether he painted her portrait before she married or after, I don't know. For instance, I have Joseph Neall's daguerrotype of his mother's portrait, which he carried with him; I still have that. He anyway came around the Horn in 1849 as first mate on one of his father's ships on its way to China. They docked at San Francisco. Among the passengers who came around the Horn with him were two young sisters of the Corcoran family from Washington City, as Washington, D.C., was known in those years. They were coming out to visit [an aunt] who had recently married the man who was the editor of the Stockton Bee, which later on becomes both the Stockton [Bee] and the Sacramento Bee; they're important papers here in early California. They were coming out to visit their aunt; it was their Aunt Kate [Corcoran Smith], The young people met on board the China clipper, and Joseph Neall extracted a promise of young Margaret Corcoran that she would write to him at San Francisco and he would pick up the letter on his return from Canton or Hong Kong or wherever it was he was going. He did so, and he came to Stockton and visited her, and then, in 1853, he came back to Stockton, and they were married. He didn't like being a China clipper man. He didn't like being a sailor. He took after an uncle of his who was an engineer, a mining engineer. So, they were married, and I don't know what they did between 1853 and 1855, but by 1855, 1856, he had taken his young bride, and he has gone to Mexico, at Mazatlan. At Mazatlan he leaves her in the hands of the American consul at Mazatlan, and he and his brother and an uncle go inland to Durango, where they do find gold mines, and they begin to develop mines in this area. So, anyway, the upshot of the whole thing is that in the period of time that he is in Mexico, [Benito] Juarez begins his-- First of all, the Emperor Maximilian is brought by the French interests and installed as Emperor of Mexico. Juarez begins his counterrevolution to oust this foreigner. So, at this point the young American mining engineers are sort of caught in the middle because they're really not interested in either side. But the upshot of it is that he and his brother die of yellow fever at the mine in Durango, and here is my great-grandmother with three babies at Mazatlan and [with] no visible means of support. She can either return to Washington City, where her family is-- And in order to do this, she'll have to take a boat and go around the Horn. It happens in about, I think it's probably May or June of 1865, and she realizes that no boats are going to be coming by this way in order to go around, and even if they did, they would have to boycott because of the trouble in Mexico, and they will probably miss Mazatlan--they won't come into the port at all--so there's no choice. She can't get back to San Francisco by boat or to Washington City by boat. So, she buys a buckboard and a team of horses and a rifle, and she packs her babies and her baggage into this blackboard, and she drives overland from Mazatlan through Mexico, through Arizona, to Price, Utah, where her brother runs a newspaper. This is in 1865.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How long did that take her?

HARRY HAY: I understand it took her about five months, something like that. I don't know. Aunt Kate was not very clear about it, because, after all, she was the oldest, and she would have been four at this point; so she doesn't have a good memory of how long it took. But I would guess it was about five months. But anyway, she goes there to keep house with her brother, who runs this newspaper. Now, Price at this point is outside the Mormon aegis. The Mormon aegis is along the Great Valley, the valley of the Great Rift. This is in the mountains. Price is a mining town. So, she's there about eight or nine months, taking care of her brother, when all of a sudden the young Mormons, who are known as the Jack Mormons, begin what are known as the Danite raids. They were named after-- Because the sons of Dan did this same thing in the Bible. They are looking now for young wives, and for third and fourth wives, because they're running out of women in Utah for extra wives; so the young men are not going to be able to marry at all unless they find these women. The Danite raids were when they would raid non-Mormon settlements, particularly mining settlements, in Utah, or whatever they could get their hands on, and they would carry off all available women; whether they were married or not, it didn't make any difference. If they had children it was even better. They would simply burn the places down, shoot the men, and carry off the women. So, Price, Utah, at one point is raided because they've heard about the fact that there's a young widow with three children there and she might be a perfect catch. So, they attack Price, and my great-grandmother and her brother successfully fight them off. By the time the neighbors come to the rescue, my great-grandmother realizes she has to get away. She realizes that she's a sitting duck exposing the whole community to further attacks, because they're going to be watching her and they're going to be raiding again, and she feels that she's no longer safe here. So, she packs up her buckboard and her team of horses and her rifle, and she drives north to Independence, where the wagon trains cross, which was right near Fort Duchesne [Utah]. When she gets there--this is August of that year, and the snows are coming early, and there are no more wagon trains--she misses the last wagon train going east. So there's nothing that she can do except join the next train going west. So, she thinks, well, this way she'll at least get to San Francisco, and she'll wait in San Francisco until spring, and she'll go 'round the Horn to home. (You're running out of tape, and so I can't finish it here, but it's an interesting story.) What now happens to her on that trip west is really very interesting, and it has a lot to do with the public school education system.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That's extraordinary.

HARRY HAY: It's a wonderful story, you'll have to admit.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you want to go until [the tape] runs out?

HARRY HAY: I'll put it this way: she joins a wagon train-- Oh, wait a minute. My dates are wrong on this. I shouldn't have given it to you. The wagon train she joins is in late 1863 because the War between the States is still going on. The train she joins is full of young Cornish and Welsh men, twenty to twenty-five years old, who have come to make their fortunes in the mines of Virginia City. The mines in Virginia City are absolutely essential to the Union; they need that silver and that gold. Here is a widow woman who cooks well, and here are a bunch of young men who need socks darned and who need, more importantly, somebody to write letters home and to read letters that come to them along the way; so, she undertakes to do this, and they undertake to feed her, bring her rabbits and things like that--

1.4. Tape Number: II, Side Two October 28, 1981

HARRY HAY: OK, so here she is darning socks for these guys and making Maryland biscuits, you know, beaten biscuits, and they are busy bringing her in food, and she is, as I said, reading their letters for them because they don't know how to read and write themselves. So, they get to Reno, and they are met with news that, because of early snows that winter, the Donner Pass is closed and there will be no more trips across the Sierras to San Francisco. So she doesn't know what she's going to do.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It sounds like a shaggy dog story.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, it's like that. She thinks, well, somehow or other she's going to have to find a way to subsist in Reno. There are people who say, "Well, we can take care of you. There are ways by which you can live in people's houses and maybe help them with the houses and so on and stay in Reno until spring," because this is what happened to people. She could sew, and she could do a lot of things, and so she was not incapable of making a living that winter. But the miners say, "Look, we're going up to Virginia City. Why don't you, instead of staying here in Reno, why don't you consider coming up to Virginia City with us, and you open a boarding house, and we'll all be your boarders?" Now, this is really a good offer in a way because, after all, there were about twenty of them, and it would have made a good boarding house for her. She wouldn't have to advertise at all, just move in, and that would be fine. They all knew each other. She said, "All right, if I go to Virginia City to open up a boarding house--and it's not at all clear that I'm going to do this--but if I decide to go there, you will be my first boarders, and you will take care of the yard on Sundays and shovel the snow in the winter, and you will wash the dishes after supper. And for an hour, after the dishes are washed and before you go to bed, you will sit with me at my fireside, and you will learn to read and write." She did go to B Street in Virginia City, and she opened up that boarding house. She died there in 1911, and she never went home. Now, the thing that I want to say is that among those people who learned to read and write in her boarding house were Clarence Mackay, who eventually became ITT, Luigi Giannini, who becomes eventually the head of the Bank of America, [State] Senator James C. Flood, and [State] Senator Fair, James Fair. They were the people who learned to read and write on my grandmother's hearthside in the house on B Street.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That's extraordinary.

HARRY HAY: And her daughter, my great-aunt Kate, learned to become a schoolteacher in Virginia.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Virginia or Virginia City?

HARRY HAY: Virginia City. It was called Virginia. Virginia City. She became a schoolteacher in Virginia City. She was a little, tiny woman about four feet eight and very skinny but with flashing black eyes, and she had quite a temper in her own right. She was always given the job of handling the eighteen- and twenty-year-olds, young miners who came up there, because for some reason or other she could handle them, and they would listen to her. Her idea of teaching, her idea of how you taught school: you set up a project-- Now, I'm talking about 1875-1880; I'm not talking about later than this. In 1880, she is teaching twenty-year-old mining kids how to read and write by taking them on the Lewis and Clark expedition. That was her idea of how you did it. She read them the Lewis and Clark expedition, and then when they would come to a certain place, they would have to use their arithmetic and their knowledge of writing to figure out what kind of supplies they would need for the winter and what they would need to carry certain boats over the falls and what kind of horses you need and how much feed do you need for horses and how you buy this. So, she was teaching arithmetic, history, writing, and English, and spelling on the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1880. So, in 1935 we're going to call this the independent project, and we're going to call it the progressive method of education, but she's doing this in 1880 on her own. And it's working because the kids just loved it. They would stay after school. They would really learn.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This is Kate who's doing this.

HARRY HAY: This is Kate, the daughter, who was doing this, because, after all, it was her mother who was teaching the guys a generation earlier to read and write around her fireside. But anyway, they [Margaret Corcoran Neall] had a number of books, for example. They had a great many books, most of which, unfortunately, got sold during the Depression. But I have some of the books that came out of that family. [They included] the collected works of Scott, for example. Where the cards went to now, I don't know, but when I first saw those books--and the first American edition of Shelley's complete works--there would be little calling cards in there to show that those books had been borrowed by people who were on their way through. They would go to Oregon, or they'd go to Washington, or [to] Fort Astoria, which is between Oregon and Washington. The book would be there a couple of years, and then it would return with a little thank-you note. So those books were the first lending library in that area, and they went all over the place. Then they would come back with little notes saying how much they liked it and how they think this is a young man you have to watch because obviously he was going to be a good poet, and so on. So, in a way she became sort of a cultural resource in that area because of the fact that she would have books. She would have the collected works of Balzac, and she'd have the collected works of Dumas.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This is Kate or--

HARRY HAY: No, this is Margaret Corcoran, who brought these things from Washington City in her youth. Aunt Kate lived in Virginia City. She went to San Francisco, and she went to Los Angeles, and that was the only traveling she ever did in her life. But her mother, as I say, had been around the Horn a couple of times, and she had come across the-- The Corcoran family were a well-known family in Washington, D.C., in the nineteenth century.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The name is still well known.

HARRY HAY: Yes, still known around there. Anyway, that was just the background I wanted you to have.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, and what a great saga.

HARRY HAY: But isn't that a lovely story to put in a movie someday?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yes. SECOND PART NOVEMBER 3, 1981

MITCH TUCHMAN: We were talking, as we concluded last week, about your great-grandmother, and you had mentioned that we should be sure to tape something about your great-grandfather.

HARRY HAY: This is not related to the great-grandmother [Margaret Corcoran Neall], The great-grandfather that we're talking about, that I mentioned, his name was James Alan Hardie. He came out of a line of sort of a military family, I think you'd call it, because in that family there had been, either on his mother's side or his [father's] side, there had been a member of the family every generation from either the colonial wars, when we were still a British colony, down through the beginning of West Point, and on down, there had been somebody either from West Point or from the officer group all the way down the line. I can remember, for instance, my great-grandfather's two daughters. One of the daughters [Katherine Cox Hardie] was a woman who had become a genealogist for the Library of Congress. She was one of these women who is absolutely hip on families and who you were and all this jazz. You couldn't exist and couldn't draw breath unless you knew who you were, which I used to think was very funny because I thought, "Well, how come she missed all the horse thieves?--and I'm sure there were plenty of them--or the black connections." Because, after all, they were a family who floated in and out of the South all the time. But none of that ever shows up. But anyway, her father, James Alan Hardie, had graduated from, I think from West Point in either 1845 or 1846. He had been converted to Catholicism by a William Starke Rosecrans, who was also a general at that time and who belonged to the Rosecrans family out here. What Rosecrans was doing converting young officers at West Point to Catholicism I don't know, but nevertheless this seems to have been a passion of his. He had visited the pope either when he was eighteen or something, but anyway he was full of the fire of the zeal of Holy God and all this stuff. So he had converted my great-grandfather.* [The UCLA Library has an archive on the Rosecrans family and on young William Starke Rosecrans's passion for converting young West Point -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. graduates to Catholicism. I remember seeing a display of Rosecrans artifacts at the UCLA Library around 1960 and seeing my great-grandfather listed as one of his "conquests" (UCLA didn't quite put it that way, of course). It sticks in my mind that Rosecrans permitted himself to become a papal count for his services. The only other papal count I've ever known was the worthless son of John Collier, the great commissioner of Indian Affairs under F. D. Roosevelt: Charles Collier of the Rancho Lucero north of Alcalde, New Mexico. He had a couple of countercultural-minded daughters, Monica and Lucy, who had the good sense to inherit their humanity from their Sephardic mother.] My great-grandfather was spoken of as sort of a dreamy man. If you look at him, he looks a little bit-- Well, he looked a little insane. Sometimes the photographs of that time could make you look that way because you had to sit in a totally rigid position for twenty minutes or something. But anyway, in the photograph he looks a little bit nutty. But he also looks very much like me. I apparently take after him and look very much like him. A number of people along the line said, "You're like him in so many other ways too." It looks a little bit like he wasn't what you'd call exactly a hetero man, but in that period, of course, the mere fact that you wore uniforms and clanked around with sabers rattling on your side, and so on, apparently your gender was unquestionable. At least, that seems to have been the characteristic. But I wonder at times-- He had a tendency to write poetry, which of course he was thoroughly ashamed of and he destroyed almost at once, but I understand he did that. His education consisted largely of reading and writing in Latin and Greek. He preferred the Greek to the Latin, and again I thought, "Aha! He liked the Greek, and he liked Greek poetry. He knew the poets, and he had a collection of the poets," which would suggest again that he had what was known in the nineteenth century as a morbid interest. I keep thinking, "I wonder whether or not, if I look very much like him, and I take after him, and the aunts all said to me, "You're the only one in the family who has the same ambience that my father had,'" I keep thinking, "Well, what do you know? I wonder what Grandpa had what I have." So, this is all I can say about him. But, nevertheless, I have a little biography of him. He managed to be in all kinds of interesting places and collected as a result of his-- He was here, for instance, in California, in San Francisco, in 1871, during the period of a great many riots in San Francisco, to help bring law and order and peace back to the city, whereupon the city in gratitude gave him a large hunk of land; and nobody has the foggiest notion of where that land was in the middle of San Francisco in 1871. But anyway, he took [the deed] back with him, and the next time you hear about him he was in Chicago, and all of their goods were destroyed in the Chicago fire. So, that's where the deed to the property in San Francisco all went. He was not very good at matters of money, and they were always a little bit broke.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Wouldn't the deed have been recorded somewhere in the public records of San Francisco?

HARRY HAY: I don't know. Well, if it were, that was destroyed in 1906 during the great earthquake. So, what the hell. It doesn't make any difference now. There's no way of finding any of that out. This business of having property at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-second Street and stuff: there are all those stories in New York too. All the families who ever had anything: they've always got relatives who back somewhere or other had a farm where now the Empire State Building stands.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now that I have a clearer notion of who he was and the Rosecrans connection, and you've spoken a bit about records that have been destroyed, you did tell me before we ever started, and perhaps you can tell me again now, about a box, or boxes, of records that you do have, perhaps from the woman who was the genealogist for the Library of Congress.

HARRY HAY: Yes, I have her papers. She said, "Since you're the only one who is like my family, I will send these papers to you." I've got--oh, I don't know--I've got a hundred pounds of papers, or such.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And just what is that?

HARRY HAY: Well, they're letters, they're books, they're little notebooks. She was a genealogist, and so she'd been tracing the family back; so I'm probably one of the few people who is able to tell you who most of my people were on my mother's side for at least twenty generations back.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Twenty generations goes well beyond the Revolutionary War, very much further.

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes, her records go back at least to 1620, or something like that. She has some fascinating stories about who some of these people were. Although it's true [that] we don't have horse thieves and I can't find out where plantation owners slept with their black slaves and stuff--that would be my real great-great-grandmother, although I don't know about this [laughter]--we have to assume some of that happened. It must have been in there, but I'm sure that doesn't show up in those papers. We do have a few illegitimate daughters and sons around that were mentioned, and one of them has to do-- Apparently I'm one of the many heirs of the Trinity Churchyard in New York City, which was a very famous case in the nineteenth century; and I don't know, but anyway it was still popping around, for instance, in the Depression years. But anyway, she had all of these records and all of these people and these connections and cross-connections and stuff. Some of them are kind of interesting. I think there's some, I guess they call them holographs, you know, signatures and so on in there that are kind of interesting. One of them is from Abraham Lincoln. This James Alan Hardie, my great-grandfather, was assistant secretary of war under Lincoln. He was at that point a major general. He was in charge of the ordnance during the Civil War. He doesn't seem to have ever covered himself with glory in bloody battle or anything. He preferred the clerical work.* [But he apparently did like the dress uniforms and the braid that went with being a major general. My brother has his epaulets. I have his dress sword and his gold and ebony cane of office from the time when he was assistant secretary of state.] (Sounds like a sissy to me.) There are a couple of [Matthew] Brady photographs, I think, where he appears. The thing that is really quite interesting, and I don't know whether I told you this or not--this will have to be another story later on; this is sort of laying the --------------- * Mr. Hay added the bracketed section during his review of the transcript. basis for it--I'll have to tell you about his son, Francis Hunter Hardie (I think he was), who was also a graduate of West Point. He, like so many of those families, was involved with the Indian wars. My great-grandfather may have been involved too, but I don't get much sense that he was. But anyway, Frank, Uncle Frank, my mother's Uncle Frank, was involved with the Indian wars, and he appears, for instance, in several books that have been written. Mari Sandoz has written some stories about the people like Crazy Horse and Indians who--I guess these were the Cheyenne--who were involved around Fort Robinson in the Nebraska territory.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, you did mention an uncle who-- Is this the uncle who had made the promise to Geronimo?

HARRY HAY: No, no. He wasn't the uncle. The one who made the promise to Geronimo was my mother's father, my grandfather. This has to do with the Indians in and around Cheyenne. There's a very famous book-- It's a skin record, a skin painting, made by the Cheyenne, which is now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. There's a very well-known skin book, as they call them. It was made by Little Fingernails, I think he was called, at Fort Robinson. This is during the period when the Indians were being starved out, more or less, by the American forces in an attempt to bring them to heel, as it were, when we were fighting for the Black Hills area. This all culminates in the story that's Custer. But anyway, I think that the book I'm thinking about is called Cheyenne Autumn, by Mari Sandoz. She talks about that whole thing, which is another one of these dreadful stories, one of these places where the United States makes treaties with the Indians and then breaks them right and left. At one point, when we were working with the Indians back in the sixties, when we were helping the traditional Indian movement get started, it was a well-known statement to say that the United States had made 471 treaties with the American Indians and never kept one of them. In case we ever thought our honor was intact, there never was such a thing. It's only if you're white and Christian and are standing wrapped in the American flag that you ever get anything from it. So, Great-uncle Frank was at the Battle of Wounded Knee. He was one of the white officers involved with that particular, that "glorious" victory. Among other things, because of the fact that I have all these papers, I have all his medals, and I have the flag that was carried by this group, which was the Third Cavalry. Thereby hangs a tale, because, in fact, the Battle of Wounded Knee comes about because the Indians have thoroughly believed in the visions of the man who is known as the Ghost Dance and the Ghost Dance Prophet, whose name was Wovoka. So, there's a connection with Wovoka that I have to tell you about-- As a matter of fact, we've already gone past that part, I realize now, because if I've been telling you about building haystacks in Nevada, we've gone past the year 1925, and in the year 1925, in the summer, something happened to me. So I really ought to tell you something about-- Stop it. [tape recorder turned off] The year of the haystack has to be 1929.

MITCH TUCHMAN: These are the haystack stories that we ended our last session with.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, right. I think that would have been 1929. So, the story that I'm talking about now is 1925; so it was the first year that I went up there. I don't know whether I've already told you this. That's the trouble. Do you know?

MITCH TUCHMAN: It doesn't sound familiar.

HARRY HAY: Have I told you anything about an Indian [with] whom I worked in the hayfields? Have I told you about him?

MITCH TUCHMAN: No.

HARRY HAY: OK. The first year that I went up there to Nevada to work I was thirteen. I was a big kid. I guess I was six feet one by then, but I didn't have the strength to go with all that height. I was just lanky but not necessarily strong. You can look like you're strong without necessarily being that way. So, my father decided that it was time for me to go to work. Now, going to Nevada in 1925 was an interesting situation because there were lots of parts of the country where you couldn't get to yet by road, at least not from one place to another. If you were going to go to Nevada, if you were going to go to Reno or Carson City or Carson Valley or any of the places that spread out from Reno to the east and south, the fingers that go there through the mountains, you went by way of San Francisco and the Donner Pass. There was a road that went up there. In those years it was a two-lane highway--and not necessarily always paved, but nevertheless a fairly reasonable road and reasonable condition. But most people didn't go by bus in those years. They went by train, because the train was the famous Union Pacific that crossed the Rockies and crossed the Sierras at Donner and had those marvelous snow sheds that you would go through. That was the sensible way to go from San Francisco to Reno. But here I am living in Los Angeles, and my father, who is, if anything, a practical and thrifty Scotchman, even though at this point he's reasonably well off, he nevertheless--as I think I've mentioned to you before, although he was probably worth between a half and three--quarters of a million at that point--he did not believe in coddling the children, and I worked for every penny I ever had. So, at this moment I'm about to do this again, and he's not about to advance me money to go that elegant way, up to San Francisco by boat, which is the way you would have gone if you went in these years--it was the cheapest way to go from L.A. to San Francisco in the twenties--and then across the mountains by train. So, he decided to send me off directly. However, we found out that there was a night train, a narrow-gauge railway, that went from here to Tronah. Tronah was a potash mine right on the edge of Death Valley, and there was a train that went up there, [tape recorder turned off] So, we knew there was this night railroad to Tronah. Now, Tronah goes to one side of the Owens Valley, and then there were always the highways on the west side of the valley. We knew that there was a jitney bus that went from Sierra (in those years called "sy-erra"). There was a branch. One train went up to Tronah, which would go into Death Valley, but they came to a-- The dead end came to a stop at Sierra. From that moment I took a jitney bus, and I went across to Bishop. Then in Bishop there was a jitney stage that was known to go around all the Sierra resorts, and it ended at Mono Lake. Beyond Mono Lake nobody knew anything. So, consequently, Mono Lake would be 150 miles from where I'm supposed to go. So, my father said, "Well, after you get to Mono Lake, then you have to find out. There must be some way to get to Bridgeport, and you'll have to find out when you get there." I'm thirteen years old, and I've never traveled before, and I don't know all these things about-- I don't really understand how railroads and buses and everything else go, but anyway this is what I'm supposed to do. So, I go to Sierra. We get there at three o'clock in the morning, and then there's a jitney bus, and the jitney bus is going to pick us up at, they think, maybe eight o'clock in the morning; so I sleep in the station the best I can. At nine o'clock in the morning the jitney does come, and he's got a lot of things to pick up, and so we don't get to Bishop until three o'clock in the afternoon. But it's all right because his brother-in-law is the guy who has the stage that goes to Mono Lake. We're going to connect obviously. I get to Bishop, and I'm waiting in Bishop in sort of a bus station when all of a sudden, "Clang, clang, clang," and lots of rushing around, and it turns out that there's a major fire in town, and everybody turns out for the fire. It was wonderful. I had never seen one of those things before, but in the twenties, a major fire, everybody turns out. There was a good reason: it's a dry area, and there isn't too much water at that time, Los Angeles having taken it all. There were lovely little signs in the toilets all through Bishop and Lone Pine and places like that, saying, "Don't flush the toilet. Los Angeles needs the water." That's one of the things I become acquainted with. (The cousin that I'm going to work for that summer had recently moved from that area to Nevada because Los Angeles needed the water and had bought out the water rights, and sometimes people just had to leave. So, it's all part and parcel of the picture.) There is this old house that is a three- or four-story house, fine old family dwelling that may be seventy-five years old, and it is just blazing like crazy. The usual things are happening where people are rushing down the stairs carrying a mattress or throwing the china out the window, you know. Bishop prides itself on having a fire station, and it has a fine little fire hose, except for one thing: it's got a little pump, and everything is working just fine, but it just so happens that, to go from the corner where the fire hydrant is to the house, the hose turns out to be fifty feet short. So, the water goes as far as it can, and then we have a bucket brigade that goes to the house from the end of the hose, you see. There's a steady stream. I get involved in the bucket brigade, passing the water on. You know what happens. You get people to climb a tree, and then you hand the buckets up, and then they throw it across, and most of it goes on the lawn, a little bit gets on the house. It was one of those things. But the whole town is out. All 504, I guess, are out, involved with this thing, helping people. It's like a beehive, with all kinds of people going up ladders and disappearing and coming out, carrying stuff, and going down the ladder again; and the house is merrily blazing away. But I got involved, and I suddenly found out that the jitney man, who's going to be driving me, is the guy who's running the fire brigade. He's running the bucket brigade. So, we get all through, and we've gotten everything out we can get out, and eventually they've finally gotten the fire sort of contained so it's not going to catch the other houses that are all around it in that little cluster, and all the excitement is over, and then they invite us up to the fire house with little speeches to thank everybody who participated and to pass around nice, cold, tall glasses of buttermilk. (I've never had buttermilk in my life before, and I'm not at all sure I'm going to like this. But as it turns out, I find that I like buttermilk very much.) But anyway, that's the reward you get for fighting the fire; so you might as well enjoy it. We get in the jitney, and we go up, and I land at Mono Lake after dark with the happy announcement that this is the end of the stage, and you may stay here for a couple of days if you like since you bought a ticket on the stage, and this is another brother-in-law, and he's connected with that. So, I stay at Mono Lake, and "Maybe someday somebody will come through." And that's how you get from Mono Lake to Bridgeport: "Maybe somebody will go by. Somebody did go by a couple of days ago on his way to Bridgeport, and maybe if [you're] very lucky, somebody will go by again."

MITCH TUCHMAN: They would be going by in what kind of conveyance?

HARRY HAY: It could be a wagon, but it might even be a motorcar.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, there is a road?

HARRY HAY: There is a road of sorts. It's a one-lane, but nevertheless it is a road. It goes to Bridgeport. Bridgeport is on the border between California and Nevada, and it is also a place where three rivers come in. One comes down from the Sierras just south of Tahoe, and then the Walker River, which is where I'm going to be interested in going, two branches of it come into Bridgeport. So, it's obviously the next town, and it's from there that I'm going to get to Smith Valley. To make a long story short, no one did come by for three days, and I eventually managed by party line to reach my aunt [Laura Hay] by telephone from Mono Lake, and she came down and got me. So, I arrived in Nevada, and I am about to go to work in the hayfields. Now, what this means I haven't any idea. I've never seen a hayfield in my life because I've lived in L.A. all my life. Oh, I've done a lot of hiking in the mountains. I've climbed a great many mountains, and I've done some mountaineering by this time. I climb the highest mountains in California when I'm eight, and by the time I'm ten I'm an experienced camper, and I'm taking adults up that mountain. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. So, I'm not what you'd call incapable of handling myself-- and alone--but nevertheless I hadn't done anything in a hayfield before. So, I go out to work in hayfields the first time. I'm to pitch hay and put it on a wagon, and I don't seem to be able to get the hang of how I work this thing. Now, I might add that this is a period when I'm beginning to recognize the fact that I'm probably left-handed. My cousin [George Hay] and my uncle [Tom Hay] are good men, and I said, "Look, I can't work this way, but I can work this way"; so I showed them. "Oh, you're left-handed. Well, that's interesting. Did you know you were a southpaw?" I said, "Yeah, I know it. My father doesn't know it, but I know it." "OK, this is fine." Well, even so, I couldn't get the hang of how they wanted to do things; so the third day I found a way by which I could do it. They said, "Well, this is the way you can do it. You're knocking yourself out. You're using three times as much strength as we would use, but if that's the way you work it, fine." But even so, it was so difficult for me to do it that I can remember hanging on to the chains or the back of the wagon to pull me from hayshock to hayshock. I just thought I was never going to make it. On the other side of the wagon, on the right-hand side of the wagon, was an Indian by the name of Tom. He was a Washoe, and the Washoe Indians had a reservation, or, as they called it, a rancheria, at the top of Smith Valley, where I'm working. They lived at the top of the valley. There's Smith Valley, and then there's Mason Valley, and the main town in that area was a place called Yerington, which earlier had been called P'ison Junction. It was sort of the main town where everybody went to get their supplies and where the men went on Saturday nights to go to the crib. You know, the center of society for that area. The Indians live at the top end of the Smith Valley. So, Tom is a man of about fifty perhaps. He doesn't say a great deal, but he has a kind face and has sort of quizzical, kindly eyes, and he very soon sizes up the situation. So, he very adeptly, and almost unnoticeably, gets his shocks on the wagon, and then he comes over on my side and picks up a couple of shocks, takes them back on his side, and puts them up on the wagon. So we're able to move ahead more or less even, and I'm not being left behind with a lot of things on my side, and he has nothing down on his side. This way we worked until about the end of the week, I guess, and I just think I'm going to die. I just don't think I'm going to be able to get through. At the end of the day I'm so tired and so cramped and so muscularly sore that I don't eat very much. But by the beginning of the second week I begin to catch on, and I begin to get a sense of what I'm about to do, and the muscles don't hurt quite so much. By about the end of the third week, I'm going over on Tom's side and picking up shocks and putting them back. Now, that wasn't the smart thing to do, you see, but I'm thirteen years old and I don't recognize the fact that you don't shame an older man. I just should have held back at this moment, and we could have both worked together. By the end of the third week I've caught on to what we were doing, and being young and full of piss and vinegar, I'm now going to show off; so, consequently, I'm over on Tom's side. And Tom quits a couple of times, and we have to placate his wounded sense of honor, and a few other things, and I finally learn what I'm doing. So, this is all through July. It's full of storms and passions and one thing and another. I have to learn how to handle myself with men, and I have to learn how to be concerned with other people's sense of face, and so on. It's hard learning in all directions, but my uncle and my cousin are, again, fine people, and they sort of smooth the whole thing out, and they recognize the fact that I'm obviously going to be a useful workhorse because I'm full of energy, and now I understand how to do these things. But at the same time they have to keep peace with the other workers in the valley, and old Tom is a reliable man. He, incidentally, is paid in hop, which I thought was interesting. They never paid Tom in money; we paid him in hop.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What's hop?

HARRY HAY: Well, hop was-- I guess it must have been-- A hophead. They called it hop. It's a drug of some sort, but whether it was cocaine, or what it was, I don't know.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It's not the same as the hops in beer though?

HARRY HAY: It's presumably made from the hops in beer; that's why it's called hophead. But, nevertheless, it was a drug. It was a narcotic of some sort. I guess it may even be a form of opium, because the Indians had been introduced to it by the Chinese who worked with them side by side on the railroads in that area in the eighties.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Would he be paid in this for his personal use or to go back to the reservation and sell and make whatever he could?

HARRY HAY: No, no. This was his personal use, as far as I know. I do know that it happened a number of times that, when we were not able to get the hop, that the Indians themselves could get it at Virginia City; and they knew they could. They would walk all night to get the hop and be back and be ready for work the next day. In other words, they were all addicted--and they were all heavily addicted, and if they didn't get it, they were in trouble. So, consequently, all the Indians in that area were paid in hop, and my uncle and cousin just simply had it on hand and paid them that way.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you think they ever tried it themselves?

HARRY HAY: I don't think so. They may have, but I don't think they ever really did.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But it wasn't a customary thing.

HARRY HAY: It wasn't a customary thing to do. As a matter of fact, you got the feeling that hop was something that only Indians and Chinese did. It was something not civilized. The white people did "civilized" things: they got drunk. That's what you did. You had alcohol. But the Indians had hop, and that was the difference between the two apparently. I don't think I ever was curious about it myself. I don't think. But I do know, I can remember several times when my uncles didn't have it or weren't able to get it, or something went wrong with the shipment, or something of the sort, and the Indians were just not there. They would go on for two days, walking to wherever they went to get it, in order to come back, and they'd be OK again.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What did you earn in the summer?

HARRY HAY: Well, the pay for everybody. If you worked on a wagon, you got two and a half a day and board. If you were a pitcher, you got three dollars a day and board. If you were a stacker you got-- If you were on a four-man stack--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, that's right, I asked you that.

HARRY HAY: I think I gave you that thing once before. OK. So, anyway, that was the way the pay worked out. So, Tom and I would be making three dollars a day and board.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What did you bring back to Los Angeles at the end of the summer?

HARRY HAY: Well, I didn't spend much; so, consequently, I probably brought back about $230, something like that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And was that your money, or did you turn it over to your father?

HARRY HAY: No, that was my money. At that moment I would buy clothes with it, and I would parcel it out to be used as allowance and then save some of it to be used for presents that I would want to give at Christmastime, and things like that. Of course, I also-- I used to get a job in the Christmas holidays and work for that part of it. Then, if I could do it, I would save it towards maybe some kind of a trip that I might want to take, or something like that. So, I learned to budget my own money out early. This is what I would have had for the year. Well, $230, for example, for a kid in 1925 would be the equivalent of about $1,000-1,500 now; so, you know, it wasn't a bad amount for a kid of thirteen to have and to budget and be taking care of. So, Tom about the middle of August, I guess between the twelfth and the fifteenth of August, one day said to my aunt, "We have fandango on Sunday. You bring boy. You come rancheria two o'clock." So I said to my aunt, "What's the rancheria? What does he mean?" She said, "Oh, they have some kind of a doing, some kind of a fiesta. They have this every year, but no one that I've ever known before got invited to go. So, you'd better go and find out what goes on because we all want to know." And I said, "Do I have to go by myself?" "Oh, yes, you have to go by yourself, but Tom will take care of you. You don't have to worry. Tom is a good, reliable man, and everything ought to be just fine. You just go, and you find out what goes on." So, at two o'clock, or one thirty, on this Sunday, my aunt and I drive up this narrow, almost impossible track in the sand between the mesquite and sagebrush to the upper end of the valley. By this time we're into mesquite and sage which is over the top of the car. (I should add that my aunt had a perfectly marvelous 1924 Buick touring car. It was a lovely, little car; and this was 1925, so it was brand-new. I mean, it's only a year old. It had springs in it; so you only have a little sort of shock when you go over the bumpy road. It isn't heavy shocks as you're expecting as you have in a wagon. The car really pulls through all kinds of situations. Much later in my life that car is going to play a major role, ten or fifteen years later, when it becomes a truck, of course. But in these years it's still a touring car.) So, we drive up in the car, and at a certain point all of a sudden three Indian women are standing in the middle of the track, and they hold up their hands, and they say to my aunt, "You stop here. Now you turn around. You go home, and you come back here about eight o'clock." And this is all they say. And I say to my aunt, "OK, I'll see you." All of a sudden these women, whom I don't know, I've never seen before, simply signal to me that I'm to get in line with them, and we start going through this brush.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Walking?

HARRY HAY: Walking. Within seconds we are out of sight of the track of the road, and at this moment I'm in sagebrush and mesquite way over my head, and I have no idea where we're going. So, at this moment I feel a little bit like I'm four feet off the ground and I can't touch bottom. It's the feeling that you have when all of a sudden the water is too deep, and you're not quite prepared to swim. It's that kind of a feeling. So, I think, well, OK, and I continue with them. After about five or ten minutes of walking, I guess, we come to what is obviously a wall, a big fence of brush that has been built up around this-- It's obviously enclosing something. We go through this into an enclosure, and it's been cleared. In the center, to the right, in the center of an area that has been well padded down--you can tell there are many footprints in the sand and in the dirt--is a little pine tree. Obviously, there are no pine trees in the valley; so it's been brought from somewhere else, and it's been put there. It's in the center. Around it are a number of people kind of shuffling and singing; so this is some kind of a dance and singing thing. That's to the right of you. Right ahead of me was kind of a series of booths, just mattings and sagebrush put over to act as a shade against the sun, being held up by posts and by pieces of wood and so on. Underneath it are quite a number of people who are obviously sitting around waving wildly at each other. (I'm to find out much later that they're playing gambling games, sort of a stick game.) Then, at one point, there are a lot of cooking fires and the smells of things, and there are strange-looking old, battered pots that are on the fire and on the stones, and I think there are a number of kinds of pots, which are sort of inserted into the fire itself. They don't have any cauldrons or anything swinging from chains or anything like that; so, therefore, they're not using pots of any sort. The pots that they have are sitting on stones, sitting on the fire itself. Then over to the left, there is sort of a --I suppose you might call it a dais--but it actually is a platform, which is made up of a lot of willow, willow that has been intertwined, and it sort of stands about a foot and a half, two feet off the ground. It's obviously something that has a spring to it, because when people walk on it, you can see their bodies spring. On it are a number of skins and a few blankets, and then a kind of a robe, which I think was made up of pieces of rabbit fur, which were kind of woven into each other. Sitting on this--because, as I'm going to find out later it's fairly comfortable, it's fairly springy, and these are sort of pads and things that they've been putting on it too, so that you don't feel the willow through it--is a man who is apparently a very, very old man, very, very old. His skin is very heavily wrinkled. It's like dried parchment. And he is talking.

1.5. Tape Number: III, Side One November 3, 1981

HARRY HAY: I notice this old man is talking, and when he was talking he used his hands, and when he used his hands he'd be touching people; so I wondered whether or not maybe he didn't see very well or something. When I first come into the enclosure, the old lady takes me over and she introduces me to some boys who are maybe my age or a little younger, and they are playing a variety of games, which I find out later are the same gambling games that the men are playing over in the enclosure to the north. They're challenging, and I've never seen them before. They're not playing for money. They've got little counters or sticks or various things; whoever has the most sticks wins the game. So, I very shortly find out how to play these games, or I get some idea how to work with them, and I start to play with them, and of course, I lose every time, because they turn out to be games of immense skill and a certain amount of understanding of human nature, and I don't understand the Indian ways at all; so I don't get any of the proper signals; so, of course, I keep losing all the time. But, nevertheless, it's fun, and it's kind of challenging and fascinating, and I find myself involved with it. The kids are nice. They're not, as I recognize now, they're not in our sense competitive at all; so for a little sissy that's very nice, and it all fits out very well, and I'm getting along just fine, and we kind of like each other, and the afternoon is going on. All of a sudden an old woman comes to me, and she said, "Our sacred man, our old man, our wise prophet, our man who is visiting here, knows that you are here in the camp and would like to see you. Is it in your heart to come and speak with him?" I'd never been spoken to "in my heart," and I think, well, this sounds interesting, and I realize it's the old man who's sitting over there. I'm kind of curious to know about him too. I got a sense that I would like to at least say hi and tell him I'm very pleased to be here at this fandango. So I said, "Yes, I'll go." So, I go over, and I'm taken onto this little platform, and the old lady says to me, "It would be nice if you could kneel down," sort of kneel squatting position in front of him. "He is blind, and so he has to see you with his fingers, and so he will run his hands over your face, and you are not to mind." So I think, OK, I won't mind. He doesn't speak to me directly. He doesn't ask me any questions. He simply runs his fingers over my face all the time. He runs it over, and he touches all the parts of my face and my ears and around my neck and behind my neck and around my chin, and so on. But I keep noticing that he comes back to the temples, right in this area. He keeps touching this, and when he touches it, he says something to somebody who's standing behind me. I think it's the old woman who brought me there. I'm not sure about that, but I thought that was it. Then he would run his hands over my face some more, and then he would come back to this, and he would say something. He would touch it, and he would say something. Then, finally he touched me on the forehead in a strange way with something that he took from somewhere. He touched it like the priest blesses your temple, something like that. Again he said something, and then he came back to this, and then he came here again. He kept coming back over this. Then, all of a sudden, after this had been going on for a few minutes, the old lady touched me on the shoulder and said, "Now you are to come away. He's tired, and he needs to rest a while." So, I thank him and tell him that I'm very pleased to be at this affair, and I go away. I go back with her, and she takes me over back to where the boys are, and then shortly she comes over with a large bowl--it's an earthenware bowl, a clay bowl--and it has a variety of different kinds of foods in it, and most of the things are things I haven't seen before. It looks like a kind of a stew. It looks like kind of a stew, and then there are bits of food here and there that I'm to have. The kids look at it, and they giggle, and they tell me names of things, but this is all in Washoe, and I don't understand it, and I can't pronounce it quite right, and they giggle, and I make a mistake on that, and then a couple of them are helping me, telling me what it is, and they're helping themselves to my food anyway. So, then the kids gets bowls of their own, and we're going back and forth. But before all this happens, I said to the old woman, "I'd like to ask a question." And she said, "Well?" And I said, "When he was talking to me, he kept putting his hands to the side of my head, and then he was saying something to somebody back here, and maybe it was you." And she says, "Yes, it was me." And I said, "Well, what did he say? Can you tell me what he said?" And she says, "Yes, I think I can tell you. He said we are to be kind to you because someday you will be a friend." And then I said, "And then he did something here." And she said, "Oh, yes, this is our way. He made a blessing for you. We are pleased that you have come to our dance, and we can tell from the way that you are that you are pleased to be here, and that you like us, and we like you. He has given you his blessing." So, I thought, well, that's nice, that's fine. Then my aunt came for me at eight o'clock that night, and I go back. I don't have too much memory of this incidentally. I have some memory of certain areas, but the blanks, what was going on during the day, I don't really remember all the things that happened. I think there was a lot of drinking and a lot of shouting and a lot of scuffling going on around the pine tree, and I was a little uneasy and a little frightened by it. I didn't quite know what it meant. I hadn't seen Indians drunk before because, as I said, most of the Indians that I knew had hop, and it made them very quiet. It didn't make them drunk. So, I was a little uneasy. The food that I had had some strange flavors, and some of it was hard to eat, and some of it was bitter. So, it was all very interesting and strange, but I can't say that I was thoroughly comfortable and that I was just full of joy because that wasn't quite the case. It was all very difficult, but interesting, and challenging, but frightening at the same time. At about this time, after dark--the days are late in Nevada; the sun really doesn't go down until about nine o'clock in the middle of the summer--so, it's just getting dark, when all of a sudden the women came over to me and say, "Well, it's time for you to go now." So, we walk back through the sagebrush for another, maybe, ten minutes, and then all of a sudden there's my aunt in the car, and I get in, and we go home. So I told her about what I can remember and what I've seen, and she says, "Oh, that old man. He's one of their sacred people. He's a priest or something, and he lives in Yerington, or he lives in Mason Valley. Once in a while they mention fandangoes, and they mention that this old man comes, and he's some kind of a figure, some kind of a priest or something for them. He's fairly well known. I'll ask Tom when he comes to work the next morning if that's who it was. I think his name's Jack Wilson." So the next day when Tom came for breakfast, to go to work and a regular day, my aunt asked him, and Tom said, yes, that was Jack Wilson, and so therefore I remembered that: his name was Jack Wilson. Now, this is 1925. The years go by. There's a big problem about the Hopi responsibility and the Hopi rights, and it comes up around 1936 and 1937 in the Roosevelt administration, and I get involved with this, whatever we're doing for the Hopi. I get in a petition campaign or something, and I do this. But by this time I have a different reason for working with the Hopi than that particular episode that I just mentioned to you. I belonged to a boys' organization here called the Western Rangers, which eventually became known as the Trailfinders. It was an organization sort of in competition with the Boy Scouts. But where the Boy Scouts would sit, as we used to say, sit in the basement of the Presbyterian church and tie knots on Friday nights, and they had a nice camp up in here off of Cahuenga Pass, where they had-- These would be old army tents from the First World War, and they would live in these army tents, and they would have nice, little, white rocks out in front, which they were busy painting with whitewash. So, they tied ropes and painted rocks white, and this is all I knew about the Boy Scouts, but they never went anywhere, as far as I know. The Trailfinders were always out on the trails. We learned to hike in the mountains without trails. We learned how to find ourselves Indian-fashion. We knew how to tell what was north and what was south by where the moss was and how the rocks went, and we were able to tell which was east and west by the stars. We learned what foods you could eat, which were natural to the area and which were not. And all we took with us were a little water and a blanket. This was something that I was learning to do, and I loved that much better. The guy who was the head of the organization, the guy who'd started the whole thing, was a man by the name of Ernest Thompson Seton, who was a very famous writer of Indian stories and nature life in the early part of the twentieth century, a very well-known writer. Harry James, who was the actual leader of the boys in that time, was a person who had been adopted by the Hopi on Second Mesa, Shongopovi, in about 1920 or '21, because he had done a lot of things for Indians. He'd gone to live with them a number of times, and he lived with certain families of Shongopovi on Second Mesa, and he had done quite a number of things in trying to translate what they needed to the white man's government, and so on. So that he would take boys on trips every year into that area, and they would live at Walpi, or they would live at Chinopavi on Second Mesa and Walpi on First Mesa, and they would be gone about six weeks in the Indian territory. Eventually I found out they went as far as New Mexico and lived right adjacent for a while to San Ildefonso. But that cost $246, and that was $246 I never had. I would have maybe $15 or $25 to go on a week's trip, but I couldn't afford $246; so I never went. But in 1927 the Hopi came on one of their pilgrimages. Every twenty-five years apparently, from time immemorial, they've come to the West Coast to pray on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, because, after all, presumably they had come across the Pacific in primeval times. They came to pray to the western sun, to the western sea, and to gather salt. They gathered salt in two places, one place which was down near about Malibu and one which was down near either Corona Del Mar--between Corona Del Mar and Laguna.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is this what raised the question of Hopi rights?

HARRY HAY: I only bring this up because this-- When they came to this part of the country, they stayed with Harry James at his house, which was our Western Ranger house in Sycamore Grove, which is off Highland Park. It's off the Arroyo Seco Parkway, along in there. A whole bunch of us would go over there, and we became very interested in what the Indians were doing. We were interested in helping them, so that we ourselves--this was our own idea--we volunteered-- We set up a large half-circle, and whenever they went down to the Pacific Ocean to pray, we formed this large half-circle up on the cliffs and on the road, and we simply saw to it that no white people bothered them in the three days when they were at Malibu or the other three days when they were at Corona Del Mar. We just simply stood there and saw to it that nobody came to disturb them in their doing or whatever they were doing. We didn't ask them. We just simply did that as a courtesy for these Indians who came. And in thanks, at night, when we took them back to Sycamore Grove, they would tell us stories, and they would dance and sing for us. Of course, this was tremendous because in 1927 who knew anything about Indians at this point, and certainly these strange Hopi people who did all kinds of things? So, I knew some of the chants, and I knew some of the dances from the Hopi people because this is something they had given us. So, in 1937, when the question of Hopi rights came up, naturally I got involved with it because I am remembering my friends, the old men, the sacred old men from the Hopi country, from ten years before. I put that in in passing because I'm now referring to the things that happened to me in 1925, which at this point I'd forgotten. In 1966 I got involved with a group that becomes known eventually as the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life. John and I have a kaleidoscope factory at Washington [Boulevard] and Western [Avenue], and the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life begins to be an entity in the counterculture; it was one of the counterculture organizations that sprang up in that period. There was a great deal in 1966 and 1967 over KPFK on a program called "The Wizard of Oz," which was run by Peter Bergman, about Hopi prophecies. All of a sudden Hopi prophecies were part of the counterculture. The Hopi prophecies were being told by a group of Indians, David Monongi, chief of the Sand Clan, from Hotevilla and old Dan K'achongva, who was in a way their titular, leading sacred man. Dan K'achongva at this point is about 106 or 107 and a very hale and hearty, old man. He doesn't speak any English but understands English. (I had a couple of interesting things with him too.) But the story that I want to tell at this moment is that we got involved with the Indians, and I become one of the spokespeople for the Traditional Indian Land and Life group, which incidentally is set up-- We don't know how to set ourselves up at this point--nobody can figure out how to do it--but we certainly don't want to vote. We don't want to be involved with Robert's Rules of Order and voting. It's a group of some three or four hundred people by this time who have gotten together. They're all non-Indians, and they were under the guidance of traditional Indians, the Hopi that I mentioned, Rolling Thunder of the Shoshone, Janet McCloud of the Nisqualli, and Calvin Roob of the Yurok. These are all Indians who were around in this area. So we were visually non-Indians under the guide of Indian people. We wanted to figure out how to operate, and so I said, "Well, you know, back in the early fifties I was involved with a gay organization"--as far as I know, John and I are the only gay people in this group, and I'm telling them all about this--"I was involved with this gay organization called the Mattachine Society. Because of the fact that we were the first of our kind as far as we knew--we'd never known of any other gay organization, and we couldn't afford to make a mistake--we operated by unanimity, which means everybody's positively in favor." I said, "Now, that guarantees that every meeting is at least sixteen hours long." I said, "We don't have time for that here. That's too difficult, and I don't think we have time to operate that way. But I suggest that we operate the opposite of that, which would be consensus: nobody violently objects." I said, "Of course, that means everybody trusts one another, and there's a loving, trusting relationship in the group," which was true of our non-Indian group anyway. So, I said, "On that basis, if everybody knows that the moment I might have a major objection to something we're doing, but I can't find the words for it, I just can't quite-- I've told you all my reasons, and you've all listened very lovingly, but you are not convinced, and I still am not satisfied, I haven't gotten out what I really wanted to say, and I'm aware of the fact that the moment I can think of what it is I want to say that you'll stop and you'll listen, if I'm assured of that, and I'm pretty sure that that can happen, I'll go along with that. That would be called consensus: if nobody violently objects, or if they know that they'll be heard." And so our non-Indian committee said, "Well, it sounds pretty good. Why don't we work that way?" So, here we are, a group of 250 people meeting in a kaleidoscope factory, and we decide this is the way we're going to operate. Now, we don't know of anybody who's ever done it before, but we're going to try. So, we start moving in that direction, and it begins to work very well. It has some difficulties, but we were able to do it. Once we start to operate that way, the Indians come to us and say, "We couldn't have told you this before, but now that you've discovered this for yourselves, this is the way we operate." So, all of a sudden we found that we have our circle of consensus and they have their circle of consensus; and when they would come, we would open up our circle of consensus, and they would simply enter it. OK. It worked out that eventually these Indians said to us that we had helped as no white group had ever helped them before. This was the only white group they had ever known that had helped Indians the way they wanted to be helped, which I felt was quite an accolade. But anyway, this is the beginning of the thing. By this time all kinds of stuff are beginning to come out on American Indians. I mean, there are Indian movies, and you've got Buffy Sainte-Marie singing, and getting things all upset. A traditional Indian movement is beginning to make its appearance, and Rolling Thunder is beginning to appear on television. We're getting television programs here, and Mad Bear Anderson from New York is beginning to be heard from. And so, all of a sudden, there's a lot of interest in Indians all over the place. So, a lot of books begin to come out on American Indians. At one point Dover brings back a book that had been out of print for fifty years--I think it was by James Mooney, who was an anthropologist in the nineteenth century [1861-1921]--called The Ghost-Dance Religion [and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896)]. What Mooney had done, shortly after the Battle of Wounded Knee: he had petitioned the [U.S.] Bureau of [American] Ethnology to finance him, and he came out west, and he did a three- or four-year study of the whole Ghost Dance religion, because it was well known by that time that most of the Plains Indians, most of the Indians west of the Mississippi, who had been thoroughly in despair that their culture, their civilization, and their land was all going under the hammer blows of the thrust of white man's civilization and that the Ghost Dance religion had something that had given them hope, that there was a way by which they would be able to reclaim themselves and their way of life or that the white man could be driven away--one of these sorts of apocalyptic religions of despair--but anyway, had caught on like wildfire, and it was all over the western part of the country. It was [by] wrapping themselves in the Ghost Dance shirts that they wore and singing the magical Ghost Dance songs and performing the ritual dance themselves that they believed that they would be immune to the white man's bullets. Therefore they were totally unarmed, totally defenseless, and the Battle of Wounded Knee just mowed them down like they were flies. That was a great tragedy because it was no battle; it was a pure massacre. So, the Ghost Dance religion is developed by a man by the name of Wovoka. So, out comes this book. It was one of the books that we had in our kaleidoscope factory. It was part of the library that we had for the Traditional Indian Land and Life Committee, which was meeting there. So, we get a copy of it, and I'm reading it through, and I'm looking through varying pages, and all of a sudden I'm coming across this section on Wovoka, and there's a picture of him as a young man, and there's a picture of him as an older man, about the way he looked about the time that he had been talking to Sitting Bull and to Crazy Horse and to the others who were the sacred people of the Cheyenne and of the Sioux at the time of Wounded Knee. All of a sudden I turned the page, and it said, of course, his white man's name was Jack Wilson. Jack Wilson, and he lived at Yerington [Nevada]. The reason why he was named Jack Wilson was his father had worked for a man by the name of Wilson, a Wilson family, and they called him Sam Wilson, or something, and the son's name was Jack Wilson, and his dad lived there, and he died in 1932 at the age of ninety-two. So, I'm saying, "So, that's who blessed me. That's who said, 'Someday you'll be a friend.'" Then I was suddenly blown away by the fact that here I am, the great-grandson and grandnephew of the man who carried the flag for the white man's cavalry at the Battle of Wounded Knee, and I had been blessed by the Ghost Dance Prophet who was responsible for that, the inadvertent massacre of the Indians, the Ghost Dance thing. How did he know that someday I would be a friend? (Because I had forgotten.) I didn't know. I was involved myself. I'd been thoroughly involved in the Indian thing, but for two years by this time; so I was a friend, but not for him, only for me. So, to me it was one of the great mysteries. I didn't understand that, because I didn't know who he was from 1925 until 1969. I had no idea that he was Wovoka.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Not knowing where this circle was going to close, I was struck by something else entirely, and that was, by the summer of 1925, you're only ten or eleven years out of Edwardian England. From an Edwardian childhood to Chile to California: I was just wondering if you had given some thought to how this rapid barrage of cultures has affected you subsequently, if you'd just thought about that.

HARRY HAY: Well, I might even say this much: it isn't so much out of Edwardian England because my mother brought Edwardian England with her. When we lived here in Los Angeles, we lived in an Edwardian household still. She was one of these people who assumed that time had stopped so far as she knew or was willing to recognize. Time had stopped. Edwardian England for her, just before the First World War, was to her the most beautiful and most wonderful living in all the world. So that wherever she was, in her own way she would set up a bit of Edwardian England wherever she was. So, this is the womb, shall I say, of my childhood, because we were dressed as Edwardian children in the United States in 1918 and 1919 and going through hell. My mother doesn't understand why this is happening, but I'm in Buster Brown suits, for god's sake, in 1919 with little velvet hats, and the kids are making fun of me. I'm a sissy anyway, but I'm having a particularly bad time because of these silly clothes I'm wearing, which as far as my mother's concerned are what nice children wear. She hadn't bothered to check the newspapers, because after all "that was American tastes," and in England, which is the apotheosis of all culture and all civilizations, this is what they're wearing. And they had been wearing it ten years before, but I think even they had changed by that time, but she didn't know that. The spread of experience from the high society, presumably the low end of the high society, again, which I'm living in Los Angeles in the wintertime when I'm thirteen years old and fourteen years old, and what I'm doing in the hayfields of Nevada when I'm fourteen years old, that spread is about as far as you can make it, because not only am I being blessed by a man who's going to turn out to be Wovoka in 1925 but in 1926, '27, '28, '29, '30 the men who work on the wagons, with whom I'm a pitcher, and later who are working on the derricks when I was working as a stacker are one-time members of the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World], who are Wobblies. They are all of them mining prospectors. I mean, they make a stake in the summertime working in the hayfields, and they get some grub together, and they load up a donkey, and they go out looking for lost mines and veins of gold and silver. In the wintertime they find a little here and there, enough to maybe get them through the winter, but they never strike it rich, as it were. They had been all working as miners in Utah around the time of the First World War, and three of them had been taught the principles of the First International IWW by Joe Hill, who is the Joe Hill of legend, song, and story.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Would you hear talk about it at that time?

HARRY HAY: Not only hear talk about it, they're busy making a socialist out of me. They're feeding me William Ingersoll, who was the writer of socialism in the nineteenth century. For light reading I get Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, which was presumably the great socialist novel, written around in the nineties. They're practically inculcating me into the IWW.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did any of this come back with you to Los Angeles and get you into disputes with your father?

HARRY HAY: Well, I mean, I didn't need anything to-- I could get into a dispute with my father on anything anytime.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, those were not political discussions necessarily.

HARRY HAY: They were political discussions based upon the things that I was reading in the newspapers. I had a tendency to be a radical. In other words, if he was a Republican, I was a Democrat regardless of whether I believed in the Democrats or not, you understand. I was certainly not going to be where he was. I was going to be on the other side. Besides, my beloved Aunt Kate, the schoolteacher daughter of the great-grandmother who lived and died in Virginia City, was a Democrat. Since she had taught me to read and write, and to me she was the dearest person in the world, probably the only person who really showed me love, since she was a staunch Democrat and a radical Democrat at that in those periods, I was a radical Democrat, too, automatically. She fought with my father, I fought with my father, you know, that kind of thing. This was just like mother's milk; that was no problem. No, the socialist thing began to feed into my whole sort of general philosophy. I had trouble with it, and I recognized that it ran athwart of everything else that I knew about, but I wasn't going to turn it down either because it was interesting.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You certainly seem to be very open to cultural and political experiences and one to simply say, "Well, I'll experience it now until I understand it. I don't understand it, but I won't close it out."

HARRY HAY: The thing that was interesting to me was that of all the children in the family I probably came to know my Aunt Kate better than anybody else. She at this time lived in San Francisco, and in order to come down from Nevada-- I only went up that strange way [one time]. After that I always went to San Francisco, and from San Francisco across. And when I came down in the fall, I always made a point of coming down in time so I could spend a week to ten days in San Francisco with my Aunt Kate before I came on back to L.A. to go to school, whatever I was going to be doing, whether it was high school or college. She was very, very poor. She lived with her niece, my cousin Lucie, who had a very tiny income. People got paid awful little amounts of money. In the twenties, a woman working as a secretary or as a typist or as a bookkeeper might make as much as eighty-five dollars a month. That's about what Lucie made in San Francisco working for the W. R. Grace Company. Aunt Kate had a pension from the state educational system of Nevada of fifty dollars a month. So, between the two of them, this is what they lived on in San Francisco in a little apartment on Pine Street on Nob Hill.

MITCH TUCHMAN: They were both unmarried?

HARRY HAY: Yes, they were both unmarried. Lucie had been married. She'd gone through one of those strange marriages. She'd married a young guy in the army. While he was on leave, she was married, and then, when he came back at the end of the war, he had wanted to be divorced, and so that was the end for that with her.* [When I first met my mother's cousin Lucie, it was explained that she was our cousin Lucie Cook, who had recently married a Bob Morse.] I would stay with Aunt Kate. And Aunt Kate had taught me, among other things, that you kept your mind open and that you looked into all kinds of new ideas and that you didn't necessarily make up your mind until a given time when you had to make it up. Always keep it open. Always consider all kinds of possibilities. For instance, because of my great-grandfather's conversion to Catholicism, I was raised as a Catholic even though my father was not a Catholic; he came out of a strict Scots Presbyterian background.* [My father's mother, my grandmother, Helen MacDonald Hay (who all her married days would address my grandfather as Mr. Hay), belonged to the narrow, puritanical Christian sect of the Presbyterian Synod. The Christians seemed to teach that it was necessary to get through this vale of tears by snuffing the life out of the culture around you as much as you could. My grandmother as a result was a fiery, little, four-foot-eight bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, she saw to it that her eldest child, my aunt Alice, never ----------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. dared to, as Aunt Alice said to me, "lift her eyes to a man." Even in speaking to my father in the 1930s, when they were both in their late sixties, Aunt Alice would avert her gaze. On the other hand, Grandmother's great dream in New Zealand was to bring her family to California to grow oranges. In 1878 she brought her brood of eight children to California, and in 1909 my father bought her an orange orchard. In 1913 my father sold the Anaheim orchard for her and got her a more comfortable home and orchard in a settlement east of Covina called Charter Oak, where the Sunkist orange coop had a packinghouse and where there was a Christian Church congregation and a public school. The public school was going to be important because Grandmother's middle son, John, who had been his father's mainstay and working partner on the cattle ranch at Hernandez, had recently died of cancer. His wife had been suffering mental breakdowns for a number of years and couldn't care for their children, two daughters, Edith and Alice (later to be known as Toots); so Edith and little Alice would have to come to live with their grandparents and be tended by Aunt Alice at Charter Oak.] But my father was not a religious man, period. So, he agreed that my mother should raise the children Catholic. That was what was required when marrying a Catholic woman; so we were all raised Catholics. But Aunt Kate, who came from another side of the picture, had been sort of raised, if anything, Episcopalian. Because she had lived in Virginia City, where all kinds of religions came together and all kinds of questions would come up in that period, she said, "You keep your mind open." So, when I would come to San Francisco, she would take me to the Jewish synagogue, she took me to fundamentalist, we heard Methodist, we heard atheists. We heard all kinds of discussions on all manner of things. She took me to ethical groups, and she took me to the Episcopal church, and she said, "You keep your mind open. Consider all possibilities." All kinds of religious things were being discussed at that time. There were just the beginnings of the questioning, of looking into religious backgrounds in the twenties. Whenever she knew about this ahead of time, she would have this all lined up, so that when I got to San Francisco, for that week I was very busy having my mind opened up into a whole variety of ways that I had never thought of before. We had looked into theosophy.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Sounds like Auntie Mame.

HARRY HAY: Well, she was not a colorful person like Auntie Mame in that respect, but nevertheless she was a dear little person and wildly excited about all kinds of ideas. The whole world of ideas was in Aunt Kate's house, and we investigated all these things. Don't forget that she's the woman, whom I think I told you about, whose idea of teaching the young Welsh miners how to read and write was to take them on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yes.

HARRY HAY: So, this was that kind of a wide-ranging mind who wouldn't settle for any one doctrine. Once she came up with a doctrine, she would immediately say, "Yes, but on the other hand, here's this other doctrine that would be opposed to it, and you have to know them both." So, it was a world of ideas with Aunt Kate, and I loved her for this, and she loved me, and we had a wonderful time when I came. She was also the one who would take me to hear [Ignace] Paderewski, or she would take me to hear [Fritz] Kreisler or any musician or great composer or great actor who was coming through town at the time. Piper's Opera House at Virginia City was maybe one of the great performing houses of the West, maybe outshining anything in San Francisco at that time. In the nineties, when Jenny Lind came, she spent a week in San Francisco and four weeks at Piper's Opera House in Virginia City. And when Madame [Adelina] Patie would come, they would spend more time in Virginia City than they would spend-- Because the miners had money, and they delighted in this kind of entertainment. Aunt Kate said that Fanny Kemble, who was the niece of the great English actress Sarah Siddons, memorialized by the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, had read at Piper's Opera House.* [But Aunt Kate has to have been wrong here. Her mother probably heard Fanny Kemble read in Washington City (or Georgetown, as it is called now) in the period between 1848 and 1855, when she returned to California to get married. Or she may have traveled from Stockton down the bay to San Francisco with her Aunt Kate Corcoran Smith to hear Mrs. Kemble read in San Francisco. But Fanny Kemble was no longer traveling the personal appearance circuit by 1866 when Aunt Kate would have been old enough to have attended theater. I know she heard many great actresses of the time read, because this type of entertainment she adored all her life; such performances by retired Shakespearean performers for literary clubs and charity benefits and church socials were frequent occasions in San Francisco in the 1920s and cost little to attend. Aunt Kate had many friends from Virginia City who would remember the old lady on such occasions and would invite her to be in their party. So Kemble couldn't have come in Aunt Kate's time. But Sarah Bernhardt came several times, and Ada Issacs-Mencken --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. came and Ellen Drew and Maurice Barrymore and the young and flamboyant Richard Maxwell.] So, therefore, although I wasn't old enough to ever see Sarah Bernhardt or Adelina Patie, when any people like that came to San Francisco, she and Lucie would save their pennies. They wouldn't do anything or buy anything; [they would] scrimp and save so that they would have enough money for three tickets when I would come, whatever was going on. So, I learned far more about culture in San Francisco with these two almost penniless old ladies than I ever learned from my father with three-quarters of a million down here.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Maybe we should talk about "down here" and your education down here. You mentioned that as we speak about your education and your life here, we'll also be speaking about Los Angeles society.

HARRY HAY: Well, I can sort of lay this down, because my education here in L.A. was public school. Because of the fact that I was apparently very bright--although whether I was bright or not, at least I learned to read and write from Aunt Kate when I was five or six years old, which put me a long ways ahead of where other kids were at that time-- My father, for instance, would always insist on taking the arithmetic of every year, and in the summertime I did in advance all the arithmetic problems I was going to be having in the fall. So, when we were going to learn fractions in, let's say, 1923, in September of '23, I already know fractions by the time I go to school at that point--or long division or whatever else, algebra. I would probably have graduated from high school before I was thirteen. Then my father had said, "And now you have your pick: you can either be an engineer, or you can be a doctor, or you can be a lawyer, or you can be--" I've forgotten what the other things were, but these were things I had to choose from. And which are you going to be? And at thirteen, how the hell are you going to know? By this time I've already worked in the hayfields, and I've talked to a variety of people, and I've already heard a little bit about Ingersoll, and I'm damned if I know what I want to do. Maybe I want to be a teacher. Maybe I want to be a trade union organizer, but the last one I can't tell him; I know I can't tell him that one. But it was like "Doctor, merchant, Indian chief." I mean, how do you know? So, I thought, I can't decide, and I'm not going to decide. By this time, because I have the facts--I have worked in the summertime on my own, and my uncles and my cousins treat me as a man at that point, and I appreciate this; my father doesn't--but I suddenly decide I'm not going to have to decide. So, I persuade him that I'm too young and that I should go back and go through high school again. So, I go with the regular group of people, the ones I had gone through grade school and junior high with, who were all five and six years older than I am, up through the twelfth grade, and then I go back and I join, in the beginning of the eleventh, and I come through again with another group. These are much more my peers because they're only two years older than I am, or maybe three, because usually kids in those years graduated from high school at seventeen or eighteen, and I'm fifteen going on sixteen. But, nevertheless, I'm still a lot closer to them. Those two years of my life were probably the happiest years of my childhood.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What schools did you attend, elementary schools, here in town? Are they schools that are still--

HARRY HAY: Yeah, they're still there. The old Cahuenga Elementary School at Second and Hobart; it's still there. I mean, the school is still there. The buildings are not there. The buildings have all changed, but [the school is] still there. Then I went to Virgil Junior High School at First and Vermont. [That] is interesting because Beverly Boulevard-- Was it true when I was there? Yes, it would have been still true when I was at Virgil. Beverly Boulevard in those years didn't go all the way through. Right at the bottom, where the streets, Virgil and First and Beverly, all come together now, down in that area was a big swamp. It was quite a large swamp, and a number of little streams from different parts of the city all converged into that little swamp. One of the big storm drains coming down Western and Santa Monica Boulevard entered into that swamp. So, I would say that maybe it was, oh, twenty-five or thirty yards across one way and maybe a couple of hundred feet wide somewhere else. We had barges down there on that swamp, and rafts and things, and the kids from the east side who would come-- They'd be on the east side of the swamp, we were on the west side of the swamp, and on Saturdays we fought pitched naval battles all over that thing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Let's see. This is that very confusing intersection, and truly everything descends into that intersection where that large building is now. It's the Yellow Pages building.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Everything from every direction-- Virgil comes down. Beverly comes down. Temple comes down.

HARRY HAY: And they all ended at the edge of the swamp all of those years, and most of those streets weren't even paved in that time because, after all, it ended in this big swamp. I'm not quite sure just when that swamp was filled in. I don't have a memory of that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, that telephone building [Yellow Pages building] is certainly of the same era perhaps as the Bekins buildings. It could be the late twenties or early thirties, something like that. [Yellow Pages building, originally American Storage Company, built 1928-29. --Ed.]

HARRY HAY: I think it's probably the late twenties. The reason why I'm saying that is that it probably happened while I was away, while I was working, and I don't remember when all that happened. But I do know that it was there all the time I was going to Virgil Junior High School.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The swamp was there.

HARRY HAY: The swamp was there, yeah. There used to be, just to the south, I guess between First and Second streets, or maybe Second Street, which would be up on the hill, Vermont and Second, there was a marvelous old swimming pool that was known as Bimini Baths. That was a perfectly lovely, wonderful, wonderful place. I know that because I spent a lot of Sundays at Bimini Baths, or maybe Saturday nights, when I could afford it. Saturday afternoons.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Where was your house? Where did you live?

HARRY HAY: We lived at 149 South Kingsley Drive. Kingsley is about halfway between Western and Vermont.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And so you were south of Beverly.

HARRY HAY: We were south of Beverly.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, quite close to both your elementary school and to your junior high school.

HARRY HAY: And junior high school, right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, when you went to high school, you went to Los Angeles High.

HARRY HAY: I went to L.A. High.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had you moved, or was that the closest high school?

HARRY HAY: No, we lived on South Kingsley for the first couple or three years that I went to L.A., and in 1926 my father bought a house at 940 South Windsor Boulevard, which is almost eight blocks from the high school. So, we moved over to there.* [No, maybe the house was built in 1926.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, you were between Wilshire and Olympic.

HARRY HAY: Olympic, yeah, right. Windsor is two blocks west of Crenshaw.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, were you inside Fremont Place?

HARRY HAY: No, just to the east of it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Just to the east of Fremont Place.

HARRY HAY: Right. This was one of these big houses that had just been built. I guess it must have been built in the same year that we bought it. It was on the crest of a hill, and then it drops down to Crenshaw. It was just on --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. the crest of that hill, and it had a tennis court on that property.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is that house still standing?

HARRY HAY: The house is still standing, and the tennis court is still there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you suspect at that time that only fifty years later I would live just about ten blocks from there?

HARRY HAY: I had no idea. I really did not know that. But the guy who became the--we always called him the "token Indian"--the resident Indian of the kaleidoscope factory would be married to a black woman who lives exactly a block and a half away from that. But anyway, to get back to Bimini Baths. I want to tell about something there. There was a streetcar--I think it was what we used to call the old H car--the Heliotrope streetcar. [It] came probably up Third Street, and then it went around the back of the Bimini Baths, and it crossed to the south end of the swamp. It was on a trestle, a perfectly marvelous, old trestle, as it came around the corner there; it was just on the edge of the swamp. The trestle had sunk a little bit; so that the streetcar had to go down to a kind of a U like this and up. You could hear it come chugging around the corner, and it would get up a terrific speed so it could go down over this U and get up over on the other side and not get stuck at the bottom of this trestle, because if it got stuck at the bottom of the trestle, there just wasn't enough power either to back it up or to get it out of the thing, and they would always have to call special help to come and pull themselves out of this little U on the trestle. The reason why I thought about that is that--when was it, '22 or '23, somewhere in there, '23 or '24?--there would be a whole bunch of us kids who used to meet on that side of the swamp. The one night that we all sort of got together and forgot our enmities or the fact that we were knights in shining armor on one side and they were the forces of evil and darkness on the other, or whatever we were doing at that moment, we would all get together and grease the tracks in the U on the trestle on Halloween night, so that the car would come through, and it'd get to the bottom of the trestle, and "whoo, whoo," and it'd get stuck. Then they would have to go and get one of the other things and pull it out. And we would sit in the bottom of the swamp and laugh and laugh and laugh for fifteen or twenty minutes, until the mosquitoes got to us, and then we'd leave. That was one of the things that kids did together. We forgot our enmities on Halloween night, and we got together and did evil things to the people who were traveling the streetcars. I was trying to think: I can't remember when that trestle disappeared, but there were lots of trestles and things like that across strange places. Most people don't know, for instance, that there used to be a stream that ran down Norton, the back between Norton and what is now Irving, I think--no, Norton and Gramercy--that ran from Beverly to Wilshire, I guess; and that stream was still running.

MITCH TUCHMAN: There's still a stream-- Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.

HARRY HAY: Is there still a stream?

MITCH TUCHMAN: I was going to say, there's still a stream between Highland and Rimpau, south of Wilshire, between Wilshire and Olympic.

HARRY HAY: Anyway, the earliest stream that I knew about was the one between Gramercy and Norton, because all the yards sort of sloped down to a common fence at the bottom, and the stream ran along between them. On Third Street between Gramercy and Wilton, I think, there used to be a dip in the street, which, I think, must have been part and parcel of that earlier streambed that I'm talking about.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, there's still a dip there, a paved dip.

HARRY HAY: Well, a paved dip, but it was a very deep dip at that time, and what would happen is that every year in the wintertime, when it would rain heavily--and we would have heavy rains in this area--that dip would fill with water, and people couldn't get across. The streetcar could barely make it, but you couldn't walk it. We had some friends who lived on Gramercy between Second and Third, and they had a boat, and we'd get that boat out. We would do a ferry across Third Street there, and we used to charge people a nickel. If they wanted to walk to Western Avenue to shop, they'd have to ride our boat. We got out there on Saturdays, and we just cleaned up. There'd be four of us. We'd have a dollar apiece at a nickel a ride. We would be ferrying people back and forth over that dip all day long. Oh, there were wonderful ways that kids could make money in those days here in Los Angeles. That's, of course, the period when we had these marvelous wheatfields. All of what we now call Twentieth Century-Fox, which used to be the Fox Studios, before that was nothing except wheatfields. I don't know who it belonged to. The poppies on that hill, looking from Santa Monica Boulevard and from Wilshire west, in the springtime were just heavenly; it was just beautiful. I can remember all those things that are long [gone] now. So, I went to those three schools. My father belonged to the mining engineers' society, and my mother was president many times of the women's auxiliary, the mining engineers' wives kind of thing. Curiously enough, some of the most prominent social families here were all part of that mining engineers' association. For instance, I can remember Mrs. Harvey Mudd was very prominent in that, and Mrs. [Richard] O'Neill. The O'Neills, their uncle, Jerome O'Neill owned a ranch known as the Santa Margarita Ranch. The Santa Margarita Ranch is now known as Camp Pendleton. Laguna Niguel and Mission Viejo are all parts of the old Santa Margarita Ranch. Dick O'Neill had been a mining engineer. So, the O'Neills and the Seeley Mudds and the Honnolds: these are all mining engineers who, as I said to you earlier, are all now patrons of Caltech and of Claremont, Pomona colleges. All those names are all involved out there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you involved in any activities as the son of parents prominent in that?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I was going to say that they had at that time a young people's social organization, a series of dance groups; so that the young, you might say, the Four Hundred of Los Angeles, the young people had a series of balls that would go on, and this was the way by which society was more or less organized. You began with Mr. Smart's dancing class at Cumnock. Now, Cumnock School for girls became later Chouinard's, I think, the art school. It was on Third Street west of Rossmore. It's still there. The building is still there, and it's something else now [Whittier College School of Law]. I can't remember what it is. It's a handsome building. But anyway, that was where Mr. Smart's dancing class was. We all learned to dance. Mr. Smart, who was a real sissy, thought I should go in for ballet, but my father disagreed with that; so, consequently, I didn't go in for ballet.* ["Fancy dancing," my parents would have called it then. A "ballet turn," which acts were often called in vaudeville, would have been billed as "toe-dancing." Miss Poppy Davis, who lives next door to us here on La Cresta, was a toe-dancer in the 1920s and later in films.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: It's curious because, when you said that your father said doctor, lawyer, or engineer, and you couldn't think of that last [profession he mentioned], I was going to ask if it had been ballet dancer.

HARRY HAY: Oh, it couldn't have been. That was something men didn't do, dear. But several people thought I ought to go in for it: ballet dancing, which in those years was known as "fancy dancing." I should go in for fancy dancing, and my father couldn't see that, not at all. Although if you took one look, I think you would have guessed that I probably could have done it very nicely because I was very good. But anyway, I went to Mr. Smart's dancing class, and then we graduated to what was known as the Junior Informal. ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. And the Junior Informal, I think, met and danced on Saturday afternoons. If you've ever read Penrod and Sam [by Booth Tarkington, 1916], you'll realize that America had been introducing its children into proper society through dancing classes all through the nineteenth century, and this is the early twentieth century, and we're doing it here.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It went through the middle of the twentieth century, at least.

HARRY HAY: I suppose it did. I don't know whether or not there isn't something like that of some nature--the informals, the balls, the levees, whatever they call them--still. This is where young ladies are introduced--

1.6. Tape Number: III, Side Two November 3, 1981

HARRY HAY: Yes, as I said, you first went to Mr. Smart's dancing class, and then you graduated to the Junior Informal, which met on Saturday afternoons. I think we must have met at the Beverly Wilshire Country Club, which is here at Rossmore and Beverly. It's still there. The building's still there. Then, the next step from that was the Fortnightly. Now, the Fortnightly met at night. It said "fortnightly," but I think it was once a month rather than every two weeks. You began to be introduced to the idea of attending a dinner before the dance. At the Junior Informal all the boys were taken and all the girls were taken by their respective parents. You went through the proper formalities of a dancing card, and you bowed when you asked your partner to dance, all that stuff, but there wasn't any dating, as it were. At the Fortnightly, you could take a girl, although, generally speaking, all the girls went and all the boys went too; their families were still involved with this thing.* [The girls would be brought by a parent or a member of the family or by a --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. chauffered car and driven home the same way. Most of the boys arrived and departed the same way; some had their own cars, perhaps 25 percent of the oldest ones, the seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds. Our families were still involved with this thing. My mother, for instance, went and sat as a patroness with all the other two hundred patronesses. There were fathers there too, smoking cigars and standing around, looking uncomfortable when they weren't engaged in professional caucuses or working up "deals" when they hoped their wives were looking. They wouldn't have been posing with glass in hand, because this is the height of Prohibition, which means that a sizable percentage of the older boys, even those who didn't yet have cars or permission to drive their family's cars to such events, had their curved silver flasks of hooch in their left hip pockets. (My mother, bless her, were she still alive, would vehemently protest at least half this paragraph; she fervently adhered to all the visible disguises of social hypocrisy.)] But if you went to a dinner ahead of time, your dinner partner was your dance partner for the evening. This was all properly worked out by the mothers in advance and lots of fuss and fuss and fury and all the rest of it. I don't think you did too much of the arrangement. I think most of the arrangement was parental. After the Fortnightly, you graduated to the Winter Assembly. At the Winter Assembly, you were young men and ladies, gentlemen and ladies, and there you did-- You dated for that. You made an arrangement with the young lady. You called for her. You brought her a corsage.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you in formal attire?

HARRY HAY: At the Fortnightly you were in tux, and at the Winter Assembly you were in tails, so that you moved up all the way from there. Junior Informal you just wore a dark suit, as I remember.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The Beverly Wilshire Country Club: now, the building that's there now is new. Are the old buildings still standing?

HARRY HAY: The old building was in exactly the same place as the new building is, and I'm not at all sure in a way that the old building hasn't been incorporated into that new one. I think they just put a new front on it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I see. On the other end of the golf course, if you take whatever is the first residential street at the far end, the farthest extent of the golf course [June Street], there is a home with a tower with a clock. I wondered if that had been some kind of public building.

HARRY HAY: No, no. That building had always been there, and it's one of the houses-- See, the Beverly Wilshire Country Club actually was surrounded by people who used the Beverly Wilshire Country Club as their communal place at that time, because that was an elegant, expensive part of town. A lot of the people who were involved with the country club were the people who lived around the golf course. That tower belonged to-- You know, it's funny.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It's a lovely house, a beautiful house.

HARRY HAY: Just before you mentioned it, I remembered their name [Treanor] because I was going to mention them. And now, the moment you've mentioned the clock tower, I've forgotten the name. Maybe it will come back. But they were people whose kids were part of the people whom I knew at the Fortnightly. We were members. My father and mother were members of the Beverly Wilshire Country Club, too. I mean, you know, we had a club membership. We were interested in it for the tennis courts. My father, although he only had one leg, nevertheless played golf occasionally. He would golf with other mining engineers there in times when they were doing mining engineer--some kind of business, because they acted as a social group and they also acted as a charitable group and they had scholarships and various things, and my father participated in that. My sister and I played tennis there all the time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you an avid athlete, or was it restricted to tennis?

HARRY HAY: My father wanted me to be a football player, naturally. He'd been a football player--and a winning football player at Cal in the nineties. He naturally assumed that I would be a football player, too, and I wasn't. I hated it. But I did go out for football a couple of years and got shoved around a bit, and I didn't like it. But I did play tennis, and I played tennis very well. My sister and I were really quite good players. (My sister still is a good player at this point. She's been teaching professional tennis now for many years.) I was a very good player. I had a magnificent serve, and I had a magnificent backhand. I say magnificent because I used to play-- One of the guys who used to play on the court at our house--I mentioned that on Windsor we had a tennis court--who used to come and play oftentimes, was a man who won the 1936 Olympics by the name of Lester Stoeffer. Lester Stoeffer and I used to play all the time, and I used to just beat the pants off him. Of course, at seventeen and eighteen he hadn't developed his fully style yet. I'm not at all sure that he wasn't gay.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Certainly, if you beat the pants off him.

HARRY HAY: Well, honey, that's an expression. You understand.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I'm sorry.

HARRY HAY: But anyway. I wouldn't beat the pants off him. I was never that rough. Maybe that's part of your fantasy, but it's not part of mine. [laughter] At that point, he wouldn't have been my type, as I remember. But we sort of liked each other, and he used to come very often to play. He had a fairly good service, but my service was one he couldn't return. Being very tall and having done that reaching business that I had learned to do, working in the hayfields and so on, I had a stroke that would sort of catch the ball and turn it right at the top of the racket. It was one of those services where once it hit, it never rose, you know. It would get into the court, into the service court, and you couldn't get the racket underneath it without breaking your racket. It was just an ace service. Later on in my life, about the time when I was about, I guess I must have been twenty-one, one day, after having been playing tennis, I went up to take a shower, and the shower fixture broke in my hand, and it cut this finger, as you can see, cut it terribly in here.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The middle finger of your right hand.

HARRY HAY: Yes, that's right. It cut the nerve and cut the muscle in this finger, rendering the finger relatively useless for many, many years. They didn't know how to sew things back together again in those years as they do now, and it was clamped and so on. But I had totally lost the use of that finger. Well, that's your balance, and with that, my piano playing and my tennis were ruined. It just wiped me out completely; so any chance I might have had of becoming a good tennis player was gone. I was never able to play again. I mean, it didn't come back for about twenty years. That took care of that, as it were. At one point Lester and I were thinking about entering the competitions as doubles, as partners, and that shot that one but good.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What ages were involved from Mr. Smart-- [tape recorder turned off] Actually, I was going to redirect the question I was asking. We were talking about Winter Assembly and the stages that preceded it. This must have taken you up through the time that you were a teenager, and I was curious whether, by this time, going through this practice for courtly heterosexual courting, you had already had either some homosexual experience or at least had begun to have early presexual contact, or whatever, and how that all fits together.

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes. The thing I think all of us know that by the time [we're] six or seven years old--eight, seven, eight, nine, in that period in there--you've gone through the period where all the little boys on the block get together in your treehouse or your pretend house or whatever else you've got put up in the backyard, the clubhouse as little boys usually think of it, and you've all compared those who are cut and those who are uncut, and who's got a long one, who's got a short one, and who can pee in an arc and who can't. You probably even at that point introduce a certain amount of mutual masturbation, or somebody else had introduced you to it. I can remember, I've a memory--so this must be when I'm about nine years old, and I'm already inculcating wicked practices into the younger generation, you know, the ones who were six and seven--by the time when I'm nine, I know a guy by the name of Calvin Criley. (I hope he isn't still alive. But anyway, he did this, and so he got to be responsible for that.) Calvin would have been about twelve at this point, I guess, because everybody was at least three years older than I was that I knew in my grades. I guess we're in the fifth grade, and Calvin said that Marvin and the rest of the boys who live over a couple of blocks from where we do have a back alley in back of their house, and they get together in a clubhouse, which is built on the back alley against one of the garages, and they're going in for-- They're jacking off each other. And Calvin has thought of a much more advanced and much more interesting sexual thing than any of the silly things they're doing. And so what are we doing? Well, we're sucking each other off, and I don't know that so much later this is going to be called "69," but nevertheless this is what we're doing. Now, where Calvin found out about 69, I don't know. Anyway, he introduced me to it. It's kind of fun, and I kind of liked it, and we'd get together a couple of afternoons after school, around four o'clock, and we'd suck each other off for-- You know, nothing happens at that point anyway. Right? We carry on this way. It's a pleasant dalliance, shall I say, for about a half-hour. And Calvin says to me that, if I will get together with him and I suck him off and he sucks me off a couple of days a week, on Fridays he'll invite me to supper, and we'll go to the movies. Now, my family doesn't go to the movies very often; so this is a great-- This is a temptation. This is a real carrot on a stick. So, I get together with Calvin at this point for, I guess, three or four months, and I got invited to supper, and we went to the movies every Friday night at the Embassy Theater, which was right around the corner from his house; he lived between Second and Third on Oxford. So, it was just no problem at all. We would go on Friday nights. We would go to the movie. So, I suppose I'm being kept--aren't I?--at nine. This is my early experience with it, and I found it was very pleasant, and I liked it very much. [tape recorder turned off] I kind of have the sense that it might have been this time or a little later--it could be just around this time--that I had been molested several times by men at Bimini Baths, because I used to like to go to Bimini Baths on Saturdays afternoons when I'm not working. When I wasn't working in the grocery store or I wouldn't be working for my father, I'd go to Bimini, or I'd go to Bimini on Sunday. By this time I'm a fairly good swimmer as a kid, and I like to swim. I like to swim underwater. I'm never going to learn to dive. I can't tell you why. But I never learned to be a good diver. My sister was an excellent diver. I'm not a good diver. But I was a good swimmer. I was very good underwater. I can remember a number of times being—Men--I don't know what--in their twenties, thirties--I don't know their ages, because at twelve I don't think you're accustomed to thinking somebody's twenty or somebody's thirty; he's just an older man--and there were a couple of men who used to want to persuade me how well they could swim underwater and how well they could dive and come between my legs. They would come between my legs, and they'd get my cock in their mouths, and they would do a few things, and then they would-- I didn't mind it. I liked it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you swim in the nude?

HARRY HAY: No, you had a little suit on, but they would slip down. You know, pulled it out underneath or something. No, you had little suits that you got from the bath itself. You didn't bring your own. You got a swimsuit and a towel and your locker. I didn't mind it, as I said, I liked it. I liked being stroked, and I liked them touching my legs, and I certainly liked their sucking my cock. But the thing that bothered me about it was that I had to keep standing in the same place, and I wanted to swim. I wanted to dive, and I wanted to play around. But I didn't mind standing around for five minutes or so. But fifteen got a little bit of a drag. And these guys got a little insistent, and then they got a little pushy. And I didn't like that either. And I say, "I want to play around a little while, and then if you want to do that some more later on, OK. But you know. It's nice, and I don't mind, but I just don't want to stand here forever." These guys were telling me how long they could hold their breath and all this stuff. I suppose, as a matter of fact, I wouldn't mind if they'd said, "Look, just let me go down and suck your cock." I wouldn't have minded that either. But they would go through these elaborate subterfuges instead. There were about three or four of them, and I'd run into them every so often.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Wouldn't they be visible to the other bathers?

HARRY HAY: I don't know. I don't know, and I don't remember them ever being apprehended.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you think that in fact, in retrospect, that the Bimini Baths was a gay establishment?

HARRY HAY: I don't think so. I don't think so because I mentioned it to other kids, and there would be maybe, out of the kids that I would know, maybe one other would have been accosted. But the rest of them seemed not to have been.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did your friends generally go there?

HARRY HAY: All the kids from the neighborhood, everybody that I knew of, generally went there. Lots of people came. There were black people there and Chicano people that came from the east side and the south side; so all kinds of people were there. It was a very heterogeneous place. I think that there were probably more elegant-- The country clubs, for instance, also had swimming pools, and the nicer sort of people didn't go to Bimini Baths. They went to these clubs later on in the twenties. In the early part of the twenties, Bimini was the only one, and everybody went there. They had a pool specifically for ladies. There was a ladies' pool so they wouldn't be accosted by the men, as it were. There were three pools: there was a little pool for the kids, and then there was a middle pool, and then there was an Olympic swimming pool outside, which we all graduated to eventually. It was a fine institution, and I think it had been there for many years. I think it was probably built in the nineties, in the last century. But anyway, it was a real spa. At one time I think it had been more pretentious than it was by the time I knew it. Anyway, I can remember being accosted, as it were. I'm aware at the time--this is the period also, when I'm eight or nine years old, when my father, who, I think, is beginning to know what it is he has spawned and is worried about it, buys a pair of boxing gloves. I can remember standing on the lawn at Kingsley Drive and putting on these boxing gloves. Can you remember when sometimes you were trying to get something out and you feel as though your head is being bound by wires or by leather straps and you're being sort of bound in, and you expand it to find ways and means to explain to somebody something that you can't understand? Well, I had that feeling. My head hurts when I remember how I tried to explain to my father that I couldn't understand why he wanted me to hit him. I got the boxing gloves on, but I still can't understand why he wants me to hit him. I can understand how I'm supposed to guard myself to keep him from hitting me, but I can't imagine trying to hit him. I kept trying to explain to him that I can't do this. I just can't do it. It really almost was, I guess, a physical, psychological thing. I still can't reach across and hit you in the face. I can get my fist in front of your nose, but I can't push it to the place where I make contact. I just can't do it. I couldn't do that with him, even with the boxing gloves. I just couldn't hit him. I couldn't. I tried to explain to him that I can't do it. He didn't understand what I'm trying to say. He couldn't understand what I'm doing at all. He just thought I was wishy-washy or I wasn't putting my mind to it or whatever it was I wasn't doing, but I couldn't do it. I just couldn't make it. My brother, who was four years younger than I am, at this point has no problems with this. My father puts on the boxing gloves, and they just sparred all over the place and had a wonderful time. But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. I could defend myself, but I couldn't hit him. To explain that I can't hurt a person, I can't imagine why you want me to hurt a person: this was just beyond understanding for me. I couldn't make that connection at all. I couldn't do it. I mean, I'm just bringing that in, because the sissy part is already beginning to show. But I also want to say something else. This is six, eight, nine, ten, eleven years old. At this moment I also have mad crushes on girls, but they're all considerably older than I am. I can remember walking when I was about ten or eleven--I guess, ten years old--I can remember walking Rose Diamond home from school. I thought she was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen. Now, at this point Rose must be at least fifteen, and I'm a little smaller than she is. She's a fairly tall girl, very pretty Irish girl but rather tall, and I'm not as tall as she is. But I love to carry her books, and I make her wire jewelry and draw little pictures for her. I was absolutely crazy about Rose Diamond. I'd say, "When I grow up I'm going to marry Rose Diamond." Oh, she was so pretty, but she was--what?--five, six, seven, eight years older than I am. Five anyway.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you make your intentions known to her?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I wrote little letters, I wrote poetry and all these things, and she used to say, "Maybe we can talk about it when you're a little older." I am very definitely her squire. And later on, I'm going to have a number of crushes on girls, and they're always going to be much older than I am. The other girls who are my age, who are interested in boys my age, I am not interested in at all. This is not where it's at.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did any of them pursue you?

HARRY HAY: Yeah. I can remember going to a lot of parties where they used to play spin the bottle and post office and stuff. Yes, I was being pursued all the time. As a matter of fact, there was one girl in particular whom I just loved to go out on the porch and kiss, and we'd just kiss for hours and hours and hours, and it was all very pleasant. But she's the only one. As far as I know, she was the only one ever. And there were a couple of boys-- One night we were-- We would play post office or one of the games where you did it in the dark, and I kissed one of the boys instead of one of the girls. And it was wonderful! And I think he thought it was kind of wonderful, too, but when we both discovered it was a boy, we all pretended to be terribly embarrassed and bashful--"Isn't that terrible?"-- and this and that. We didn't get together again, but I wished we could. Every time that they played one of those darkness games at a party, I always [sighs] thought maybe I could find that boy or another boy just like him.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You described your experience with Calvin Criley or at the Bimini Baths, and in both of those it's the other person who initiates contact. Was there a time, or was that--

HARRY HAY: Oh, that I have to-- In the middle of the Calvin Criley episode, somewhere or other I can remember having introduced the idea of sucking cocks to my brother, who's four years younger than I am, and to his little friend, whose name was Lawrence Lund, who was the same age. I can remember one time getting them to understand this is something that you do in order to become a member of the club that we had built. I had built this little house, the club, and this is the initiation, and so forth; so I'm indoctrinating them, as it were. I can remember one Saturday afternoon, when I couldn't get the-- I realized that this is going to be a dangerous procedure, because I can remember Lawrence Lund, who was the excitable type, saying, "Well, you suck him, and I'll suck him," and all of a sudden I realize this is ringing out over the neighborhood and my mother's going to hear, and I can't get him to understand that this was something that mothers shouldn't know about. I know that this is something that mothers shouldn't know about. I can't get them to understand this is something that mothers shouldn't know about. So I thought, well, we have to stop this because they're going to find out what we're doing, and then they'll come and make us stop, and that would be a fate worse than death. So, I realized right away, quick, that this is something I've got to-- We've got to cancel this, we've just got to cut it out because it's too dangerous. But I always kind of wished, oh, if only Lawrence would have the sense he was born with and realize this is not something to tell the parents about. So, I'm already telling the other little kids in the neighborhood this. Of course, on Saturday afternoons we also had little games where we would play-- One of the games that we loved to play was sort of piercing the frontier. And how did you pierce the frontier? Well, the backyards would have high fences of various sorts. There would be sometimes an area between the back fences, a kind of an alley. It was probably more like a bicycle alley than anything else. It was just a narrow path maybe that separated the two houses. But backyards and garages--and backyards and carriage houses, which are still there in that area--make for almost like crossing the Rocky Mountains. The thing was that you were supposed to be either on garages or fences but you mustn't touch the ground when you went from Second Street to First Street up the back alleys. So, this was quite a task: to be able to scale people's fences and maybe swing from eaves from one place to another; or you had to swing from trees to get across to the chicken coops, for instance, because you can't walk on the wire of the chicken coops (you just go down). So, you'd have to swing some other way or arc from telephone pole to telephone pole. It took three hours to go from Second Street to First Street, even the fastest ones, and the slower ones were longer than that. But it was just one of the games where we challenged each other to sort of go up the backyards from one street to another. So there were maybe ten or eleven or twelve guys who'd come together from maybe four or five blocks all around. They'd kind of all come together and involve themselves, and they were all on the Lewis and Clark expedition or climbing Mount Everest or whatever you do at that point. Sometimes you would stop somewhere along the line and you all have to pee. So, then you'd compare cocks, and you'd compare arcs, and you'd touch each other a little bit, and then somebody shows a new way of masturbating that you hadn't thought of before, and you all try it out, and you all touch each other, and so on. I'm aware of the fact that I am liking this very much, and the others are very, you know, matter-of-fact; either they're slightly ashamed of it or matter-of-fact about it, but they're not lingering in the way I would like to linger, and they're not sort of interested in comparing each other the way I'm comparing each other. So, I'm aware of the fact that I've already got a clandestine sort of appreciation here that the others don't have.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you see that as in any way antithetical to, or did it conflict in any way with your walking home with Rose Diamond? Did the two worlds--

HARRY HAY: They're two entirely separate worlds. It never occurs to me that the two were related.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Does that continue on through the time that you're in Winter Assembly?

HARRY HAY: Oh, no, no. It might be about the same time that I'm going to Mr. Smart's dancing class, but it was not past that. All this kind of thing is going to come to an end by the time I'm about eleven.

MITCH TUCHMAN: All that kind of play?

HARRY HAY: That kind of play, the backyard fences-- The backyard fences certainly are, because I'll be working from there on out. I've been going to boys' camp and working in the summertime; so all of that is going to disappear.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, does that lay absolutely dormant for a number of years, or does it find itself expressed in other activities after age eleven?

HARRY HAY: No, it never-- The longings, the sights, the smells, the tastes are going to be there forever. The patterns will not repeat themselves ever again in my life. That kind of holy innocence will not be allowed to surface again. When did I stop going to Bimini? I guess about the time that I discovered the beach. We all knew the beach, but I went to the beach very frequently, and I loved to swim in the ocean. I will not swim in a pool again, I guess, after Bimini. The Beverly Wilshire Country Club tied us in to the Pacific Coast Club at Long Beach and to the Surf and Sand Beach Club at Hermosa Beach. So we go swimming there on Sundays; the family goes down, and we go swimming in the pools there. So then I don't go to Bimini anymore.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I had started to ask you before about the experiences with-- You in part answered it when I asked you if these experiences were always initiated by someone else, and you said, well, you had brought the practice to your brother and Lawrence Lund.

HARRY HAY: But it didn't catch. It didn't catch with them.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you in fact initiate any sexual activity with other boys? Or not for years?

HARRY HAY: Well, not for a long time because, don't forget, you see, the kids who are in my grade in school are always so much older than I am. So, the idea of a younger person initiating something with an older person doesn't necessarily exist. One thing that did happen is that, when I entered high school--and I will enter high school at eleven, between eleven and twelve--I very soon don't want to be a part of gym. You had to take either gym or ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] for exercise. I don't like gym at all. I don't like gym. I don't like the smell. I just don't like the smell of the locker rooms and the smell of the sweaty people. I will later on learn why, but at the moment I just don't like the smell. I don't like the exercising. I don't like the things that the boys do. It's just rough, and I don't like it. So, I join the ROTC, and I guess all the other sissies did, too, now that I come to think of it. Some of the kids actually joined it because they wanted to be involved with the army and all this stuff, but that wasn't me. I just joined the ROTC because I didn't want to go to gym. At the beginning of every term, they had physical examinations of all the kids, you see. I later understand that this is called in the army the "short-arm inspection"; so I know about that, too. Anyway, it's done in the nude, and I'm aware of the fact that occasionally they'd call us into great big circles, and we'd count off, or we'd check heights, or we'd do something, and I'm aware of the fact that I'm looking at the other boys' genitals, and I'm loving it. I can remember in particular two or three boys whose genitals are just beautiful. I know I want to do something with them, but I'm not at all sure just what it is. I think I want to kiss them, and I think I want to hold them against my face, and I want to be very gentle to them. It doesn't occur to me at this moment that I want to suck them. I just know that I want something, to be close to it or look at it or love it or celebrate it or something. I can remember the boys' names. One's name was Clark Bowles, and the other boy's name was Lindsay Davies. These are memories. I'm remembering boys because of their cocks. I would be about eleven, between eleven and twelve, I guess. So, I look forward to every six months when we will have [these examinations] so I can see them again and see these beautiful cocks and these nice, lithe, young bodies. Incidentally, I am out of sorts with my times. I don't like a hairy body. I never have. My father had a hairy body maybe, but I don't like a hairy body. I like it absolute--as smooth as possible hairless body. I like the beautiful, the shapely bodies that you find in Greek athletes. Of course, in the Greek statues, there's almost no hair, you'll notice. They and I see eye to eye on that particular principle. So, hairy bodies are not going to do anything for me, but beautifully sculptured, hairless bodies are going to do a great deal, and I'm looking at that and for that even at this time. Another thing that I liked about high school very much was the fact that they used to have these semiannuals, as they called them, a semiannual book that comes out each year, which honors the graduating class and tells about all the activities of the school each year. Like I say, I probably even had them in junior high school, but I don't remember those, and I don't have copies of those now. But I did have copies of my high school annuals. I would go through the annual, particularly in the graduating class or the prominent people, and I would put stars: three stars for the most handsome man, and two stars for the one that would do if he's not around. I'm beginning to realize that what I'm doing, even at this point, is going through and picking out jack-off material, you know, because I am going to be masturbating, looking at them and fantasizing them and making lovers out of them in my mind, and so on. I'm doing this by the time I'm about eleven or twelve. And I'm aware of the fact that this is all something that I can't mention to anybody.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I was going to ask you that.

HARRY HAY: I don't know how I know this, but I simply know. I knew this from the time--I think I told you--when I was five or six years old and I saw my father's genitals, and I knew I couldn't tell anybody. Well, it's that same knowledge. But I also know from that thing that I told you about, when I was eight or nine years old, when I found out my father could be wrong. I suddenly realize that I don't have to feel guilty about this; it is beautiful, and someday I'm going to tell people. I'm going to be able to tell them just how beautiful it is, and they're going to understand. This is a knowledge, again, that I carry with me. I'm looking at these things. All of this is becoming that part of my mind. I am not feeling guilty about it. I am not feeling ashamed. I just know that I can't tell anybody why it's so beautiful, but I know that someday I will be able to tell. Also I have gone through this thing that I have now written about in a number of different essays--I probably wrote about it in the essay that I've already given you-- that when I'm eleven years old, I discovered Edward Carpenter.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It doesn't sound familiar to me.

HARRY HAY: Well, again, I used to, at eleven years old, work in the grocery store too. At the corner of Cahuenga and Second Street, right on the corner, there was a library, a public library. Cahuenga Elementary School is on one side, and on the other side of Second Street was the Acme grocery store, where I used to deliver groceries from my bicycle, and right on the corner is the library.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, as I picture Cahuenga, it gets interrupted by the golf course.

HARRY HAY: Oh, that's north. The Cahuenga Elementary School has nothing to do with the street Cahuenga. Why the hell it's called Cahuenga School I can't tell you, because it's bounded on one side by Hobart and on the other side by Harvard, between Second and Third; that's where the school was. It's two and a half blocks from where I lived. Kingsley, Harvard, Hobart, Serrano, Oxford, Western is the way those streets run in that area. And this school happens to be at Second and Hobart.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I see. OK, I've got it now.

HARRY HAY: So, now, on the north side of the street, on the corner is the library, and then there was the Acme grocery store, and then there was a cleaning establishment, and then there was a barbershop and hair place, and then there was a big, old, two-story, wooden-frame building, in which there was a shoe store and bicycle store, what used to be a grocery store, and upstairs there used to live a family. (That was one of the first anti-Semitic things I ever ran into, had to do with that family and the old grocery store that was in that building, and maybe, if we get around to it, I can tell you about that.) But anyway, I have been working in the grocery store, and before I go home I go to the library and get a book. This is [when I am] six, seven, eight years old, this point when we moved into that area. Because of the fact that I work and I don't have friends anyway, I do a lot of reading. So, I read all the books in the children's section. I begin with the A's and read down through Z, and then after you get to the bottom of the children's section, then the adults' [books] begin next. So, I begin with the A's, and I start reading the adults, you know. And I have read Dumas and I have read Balzac and all the stuff—Balzac is in the B and Dumas in the D—and by the time I'm ten years old I've gone through this whole section, you know, read practically everything in the library. I don't much care for the love stuff in Dumas; I find that kind of dull, kind of boring, and so I skip all that and get into the action. But I've read all the books. I know what most of them have to say. I've read Hugo and all the rest of it. So, I'm in the library a lot. Because of the fact that I not only can make change but I work as an adult in the grocery store--I do all the stuff: cut the cheese and weigh out stuff and make complicated things and cash people's checks and all this other thing--I get friendly with the librarian, who's an elderly lady. She keeps saying, "Oh, you know, they've opened up that lovely permanent wave parlor right there next to the shoe store. Oh, how I'd just love to get a permanent wave. I'm just sure that it'd do wonderful things for my hair." It was stringy, gray hair, and she's right: it would do wonderful things for her. I said, "Why don't you go?" "I can't. I can't leave here. And you know they close at 4:30. I just can't go out." I said, "Well, I could take care of it on Saturday for you sometime or maybe Friday afternoon. I can come here after school. I'll come here after school at 2:30, and I'll take care of the desk for you. Why don't you go and have it done?" "Oh, I couldn't do that." And I said, "Watch me. I work in the grocery store, because I've made change for you lots of times in the grocery store, and you know it. I can do it here too; it's just as simple. There I deal with dollars; here it's only just pennies." You know, two cents a day for people when they were late, and so on. She said, "Well, that's interesting." I said, "Let me take it this afternoon. You'll watch me. I'll do all the business for you, and you'll watch and see that I can handle this OK." So, she watches me, and I take care of all the people who come in, and they say, "Oh, what a nice little boy. You make change for us in the Acme grocery store next door. Well, that's fine. Isn't that nice of you to help Miss-- (whatever her name is; I can't remember her name now). How nice of you." So, I'm making out the people, and they stamped it out, and I bring in overdue, and I handle things on the telephone, and everything's going fine. She said, "Well, you're such a bright little boy. Of course, I could trust you with that, at least for an hour." So, the following Friday afternoon apparently she makes an appointment at the Deluxe permanent hair wave [salon] down the street, and at 3:30 she turns it over to me, and I take care of the library for her. Now, the moment she's out of the office-- I've been doing this for a reason, and she doesn't know what that reason is. Behind every librarian's desk in those years used to be a glass case with books in it, and it's locked. The key for that is in the lower left-hand corner of the large desk drawer that's in the middle of the desk, right? Now, I know that there are books by Dumas which are on the shelves out here, and there are books by Dumas that are in the case here. And there are books by a man named Eugene Sue out there on the shelves, and there are also books by him in the glass case. The books by Eugene Sue, the ones that are available on the shelves, have got illustrated engravings and lithographs and so on, and one of the books was called The Mysteries of Paris. The Mysteries of Paris showed a picture of a man peeping through a window, and there's a young lady that's in partial disarray, and one breast is just peeping up over [her bodice]. And that's on the shelves. So, what has the book by Eugene Sue got, the one in the glass case? Maybe it'd even have a picture of a man undressing, and this is what, of course, I'm hoping for. I'm hoping I'll find nude men in there, and this is why I want to look in that glass case. I really want to look at that when she isn't there-- I can't ask her. I could ask her, but I know she won't do it for me. So, consequently, she is now at the permanent wave salon getting her hair done, crimped up, and here I am. The moment that she's out the door, I've got that glass case open, and I'm going through it. So, in the course of reading through the books that are there--and, of course, there were quite a number of Dumas's; the illustrations do show nude men in partial disarray, not as much as I would like as their cocks almost never show, but at least there is something which gives me a sense of swelling muscles and a fine chest and [sighs] things like that, which are useful at least. They're nice. They're in the right direction. One day I come across a book which has just come into the library, having been published in 1921 in London, by a man by the name of Edward Carpenter. It's called Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk; [A Study in Social Evolution]. In the preface of the book, a very long introduction and preface of the book--and I'm reading all through--I come across the word homosexual. I go to look this up in the dictionary. I look up this word in the dictionary, and I look up this word in the encyclopedia, and no matter where I look I cannot find it. There is no mention of what that word is. And I might add that homosexual is not going to make its way into the dictionary until 1950; this is 1922. But I know, I simply know without a shadow of a doubt that it's me, that it's what he's talking about. And I suddenly discover for the first time I'm not alone, that there is someone else; there are other people other times. He talks about Michelangelo, and he talks about William Shakespeare, you know, various things and the various types of people, "the Urnings," as he calls them, or "the Uranians." But I know that he looks at men in the same way I do. It's so wonderful because I know that there's somebody else. I'll never forget this as long as I live now, and it's the great day, because now, all of a sudden, I can fantasize there's going to be another one just like me, and maybe he lives in Chicago, but maybe someday I'll meet him. In the meantime I'll start to dream about him, and he will be the boy who stands on the side of the hill just before dawn. He's only--I can't see him--he's only in silhouette because the first light's in my eyes and he's in the shadow, but he's holding out his hand, and I know that he's telling me, "Come, catch my hand, and we'll run to the top of the hill and see the sunrise, and we'll never have to come home," because he will have cried for the same things and he will have been hurt the same way and he will have been misunderstood and he will have been shamed on the school grounds and humiliated in the streets, and all the things that have gone on, and he will have gone through all those same things. We'll understand each other, and we'll have each other, and we'll never have to go home again. So, I think about him, and it's a great day; it's a great day. Right next to the book by Carpenter is another book about grass by a man called Whitman, and I will eventually read that and read the "Song of Myself," when I'll know that he also is talking about me.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why did libraries collect these books only to keep them behind glass?

HARRY HAY: Because particularly responsible adults, people who were recognized as responsible people in the community, would be allowed to read them: ministers and people who were doctors and people who were college graduates and who could handle this sort of difficult material. But it just sort of wouldn't be out there for the froufrou, for the--

MITCH TUCHMAN: So they did collect the material and keep it and make it all that much more apparent by keeping it behind glass cases, locked.

HARRY HAY: Most people, most kids that I knew knew about it and would say, "Oh, this is stuff for the adults. It's stuff for schoolteachers and ministers and college professors and people like that, but that's not the kind of stuff we're interested in." The other boys in the place weren't the slightest bit interested in what was in the glass case. I was the one that was interested.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you pull this ruse more than once?

HARRY HAY: Oh, she went and had her hair done every week, and I read-- I went back and read the introduction over and over and over until I could have repeated it by heart.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did she look?

HARRY HAY: What?

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did she look? [The librarian?] Did it improve her hair?

HARRY HAY: She had stringy hair, and now she had bent stringy hair. [laughter] It wasn't that much better, but she was absolutely delighted with herself.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I bet you told her how wonderful she looked.

HARRY HAY: Of course, I did. What would happen is, she would come back with this stringy hair bent, you know, crimped, as it were, but she would have this beam on her face. She was just beaming, and her eyes would be shining and sparkling. And she was pretty! What it did to her, what it did was, it made her so beautiful, and she was just pleased as punch with herself. She was so pleased. She knew that she was just a ravishing beauty. And at that moment she was a ravishing beauty simply because of what it did to her own self-esteem. That was what was important. And so I sent her out every week to do this for months.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You were how old at this time?

HARRY HAY: Eleven. The reason I mention this is because the book Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk had been published by G. Alien & Unwin in London in [1919]; so it was only [three years] old when I saw it. But it was so important to me because I found out that I wasn't alone, that there were others. I've never forgotten that day, and I've never forgotten the book, and I have a copy of it. I have a copy of that edition now in my library. For many years I didn't have it. However, this was the thing. But, again, I was reading the "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric," Whitman, by the time I was twelve and thirteen and knowing-- I can feel the electricity in my body and know that he's talking about things that I won't know about for a few years, but he's already touched the nerve, as it were.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What happens in the interim years between when you're eleven and when, in fact, you will know about the things you're reading about? Is there a transition period?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes, there are lots of transitions. In between I'm marking the [school] annual and looking at the boys. This is happening probably when I'm eleven, you see. I'm in junior high school. I haven't gone to high school yet. I will go to ROTC, and I will see the boys naked, and I will be excited by that. Then, a little later on--and I'm not quite sure how old I am; I think maybe thirteen, I guess--one day I meet a boy in the locker room. He's not very attractive, but he is groping himself, and he's looking down at me. We go out in the bushes behind the high school, and we suck each other off. It's the first time I taste come, and I'm wildly excited by this. But he's not a pleasant person. He doesn't wash very often. He doesn't smell very nice. I don't like him as a person, but I am excited by the sexual contact. At this point, then, when I go to boys' camps and so on, I'm aware of the fact-- I'm just quivering: I want to touch the boys. I want to touch them. I want to kiss them and [to do] various things, but I know I can't.* [Have I told the story about Matt, whom I met the summer when I was fourteen, when I worked my way back from San Francisco to Los Angeles by scrubbing deck on a tramp freighter? The summer of 1926, when I met Matt, I was able to explore being held and kissed deeply for long periods at a time. We were together most of one long night. We didn't get into more than mutual masturbation and an amorous cock-sucking dalliance—about four ecstatic, orgasmic high points, as I remember. But the long, unbroken bouts of kissing and caressing in between, which I had never been in a position to explore before, opened up vast subterranean rivers of feelings and sensations. Matt found an erogenous ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. area on my shoulder, where the collar bone ends and the shoulder bone begins. We gnawed hickeys in each other's shoulders, although I'm not going to know about the myriad delights of erogenous zones all over the body until I meet Champ in the late winter of 1930.] At the same time I'm also at this point having crushes on boys. And curiously enough, my crushes seem to lean towards beautiful Jewish boys and sometimes beautiful black boys or Chicano boys. And remember at this point I have this Edwardian mother. So, I bring them home after school to play, and we're going to play in the garage, or we're going to play in my room. We'll play in some kinds of ways so that we can be sort of touching each other. We both seem to be, each one of the ones I happen to have picked, we seem to sort of like to touch each other or be in a position where we have to touch each other so there is an excuse for it without having to explain and without having to apologize. But sooner or later, after the second or third time of bringing them home, my mother forces me to tell them that I can't play with them anymore, because they're black, because they're Jewish, because they're Chicano, or something. But this is not acceptable. She doesn't do it. She doesn't call their mother or whatever it is. I have to do it, and I have to persuade them, of course, that I agree with her. And I don't agree with her at all. I hate this thing. I hate to tell my love affairs that they can't come. It's a heartbreak each time, and I go through a real trauma on this. So, those are the things that I can remember.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you go to their houses as well?

HARRY HAY: I had. I would go to their houses, and then they would come to my house. We'd go back and forth. But when I broke it, I had to break it. It was a dreadful experience to have to go through. I'd like to stop for a moment here. [tape recorder turned off] I do remember about the Fortnightly and, I guess, related to Winter Assembly: the Winter Assembly would have been for people who were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen. I think this was the place where young women were introduced as debutantes; it would be at the Winter Assembly rather than at the Fortnightly. The Fortnightly was usually fourteen through seventeen. I was there at twelve, when the other people were fifteen at my age. But I can remember finding beautiful young men there too and would look forward to being at a dinner or at a dinner dance, for example, where these beautiful young men were. And, of course, a good many of the people whom I thought were beautiful turned out to be gay later on. But they were, let's say, ready to go to the Winter Assembly when I'm just entering the Fortnightly. It's not an age difference, because age difference was never a part of it. It's the social distance that is already different, because they were ready to go into the debutante crowd, and I'm simply part of the scrubs that are just coming up. But, nevertheless, I would simply stand or dance or dance close to them and touch thighs and [sighs] have a wonderful time.

1.7. Tape Number: IV, Side One November 17, 1981

HARRY HAY: You haven't asked a question yet.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, I'll ask an area rather than a question, and this is, simply, the continuance of your formal education at Los Angeles High and later on at Stanford.

HARRY HAY: I can't remember what year I entered L.A. High-- that's the thing that had me a little bothered--but I think it might have been 1924. Anyway, I would have graduated in winter '27. Winter '27 would be actually the end of 1926. So, yeah, I would have to have entered in '24. I would have gone in in the spring of '24. It's a little bit like saying the end of '23. Nineteen twenty-four. So, I'm twelve years old, and everybody else, of course, was about fourteen or fifteen. My father had been pushing me to join the football team. No, I don't want to do this, but how to tell him I don't want to do this? There's one thing I definitely don't want to do: I don't want to go to gym. I don't want to be involved in the gym. I don't like that. So, I did what all the rest of the sissies did, I joined the ROTC. I was kind of miserable in that too, but it had one redeeming feature--it seems to me I already told you this on tape, but since we're talking about my formal education I'll put it in again--at the beginning of every semester, they had a physical examination. Did I tell you about that already?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Uh-huh, I remember.

HARRY HAY: Then I don't have to put this in. OK, we'll leave that out. Well, anyway, as I say, that was the redeeming feature about ROTC at that point: seeing all those other lovely boys in the nude. Well, I don't know. My high school education is not that interesting. There was a literary-cultural club called the Pythians, I think, and I joined that by playing nicely on the piano, which I did by this time. Then, later on I wrote poetry, and I eventually became president of the club. Then I graduated and went on to the Forum, which was the big, cultural, debating-- I suppose you could call it the conspicuous cultural club of the school.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What sorts of things would be debated? Would they be aesthetic issues or sort of social issues?

HARRY HAY: No, they would have been the political thinking of the times. For instance, one of the big things that is "heavy thinking" in the twenties is what was known as world friendship; there was an awful lot of that going on. The League of Nations had been established at the end of the First World War, and all the middle-class do-gooders and idealists and so on all felt that this was going to be the way by which all wars would be ended from here on out. There was a lot of naivete about the goodwill of people and so on. We hadn't begun to look at our repressions yet. We're still caught, really, in the thinking of the nineteenth century. We're still under the impression, with Dewey and others, that education is going to be the thing that will solve all problems. I'll have to admit at this point that even the Marxists think that education is going to solve all problems, and this is why they're big on working-class education. But education is the big number. World friendship is the be-all at which we're all aiming. There were world-friendship oratorical competitions, and there were world-friendship poetry competitions, and people were writing operas about it, and all of it was crap. It has not survived, and thank heavens, because most of it was pretty pallid stuff.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did you feel about it at that time?

HARRY HAY: I thought it was great. I was all caught up in it. I wrote some poems, and I think there were even some probably-- Jim Kepner, going through my papers one of these days, is going to find the poem I won a prize for on world friendship in about 1925. It was pretty awful, but, nevertheless, these were the things that these people were doing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you also acting at that time, or was that--

HARRY HAY: I won't get into acting until later. No, at this point I'm not acting. At this point I'm thirteen years old with a body far too big for that age, and clumsy. Well, I'm not clumsy on the ballroom floor. I'm "airy-fairy Lillian" there, you see, but that's an embarrassment. Otherwise I'm not ready to handle my emotions yet. I do take some pantomime, and I do take some public speaking, and I'm no good at it, not at this point.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I know that you don't really major in anything in high school, but did you have particular fields of interest that you pursued?

HARRY HAY: Well, what you did in high school in those years-- I might add, in light of all the "froufra" on public education that's going on now, I'd like to say that probably-- I don't know. I think it was true of California generally, but it certainly was true of Los Angeles in particular that the school systems were wonderful. They were just wonderful in the twenties. We've still got at this point dedicated teachers who probably entered the educational process in the nineties, about the same time my father was graduated from college, because some of the teachers at L.A. High-- He had gone to L.A. High when it was the old, not the brick building on the hill, but the whitewashed wooden building down on Fort Moore. Then it had moved to an elegant yellow brick building out on Olympic and Rimpau, which is where I went. And it was a magnificent school, with this great Oxford tower on it. You'd see this tower practically over the western part of the city. It all fell down in the 1933 earthquake, but it was beautiful at that time. About the time that--oh, I don't know, I must have been there a couple of years--they got some carillon that were added, bells that were played in the tower. You could hear them ringing out all over everywhere. So, it was a handsome pile. It was a handsome school. It was the main high school for the city of Los Angeles, and it was a handsome thing. The guy who was principal, a man by the name of [Ernest W.] Oliver, I think, had been in my father's high school graduating class. He had been graduated in my father's class in high school. His sister had been teaching, was still teaching at L.A. High--I've forgotten what Bertha taught now--Latin, I guess, among other things. She had been in that graduating class. And Belle Cooper, who was still in the English department, teaching English poetry, had been in my father's graduating class. They had all graduated from L.A. High between 1894 and 1896, I guess, and so they were all still there. Other teachers who were in that classification were the kind who were dedicated, lifelong teachers, and they loved teaching, and they loved kids. And anybody who showed any kind of brightness at all, these are the teachers who'd go out of their way; they'd spend time after school, or at night or otherwise, cultivating people.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you have that experience then?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I had this experience, and I knew most of these teachers, and I loved them. I loved them, and I loved what they taught. It was very exciting. To learn in school in that period was an exciting time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In what kind of subjects did you either excel or have the greatest interest?

HARRY HAY: Well, I was very good in algebra and geometry and trigonometry; so I followed those things up simply because they were fascinating and I liked the people who were teaching them. I was very good in history and very good in English and any one of the intellectual things: civics, English, any of these things. I've forgotten. But anyway, I liked school, I liked school very much, and I liked learning, and I loved the library, and I knew every book in the library. I could handle the library when I couldn't handle the school grounds; this is really what it amounted to.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Basically, then, you were there six years. Is that--

HARRY HAY: Well, I guess I was basically there five years, I guess: three regular years and two extra.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I see. Did any of that indicate to you, you know, a course of interest or study to follow school? I mean, what you wanted to be?

HARRY HAY: No, I still didn't know what I wanted to do even at the end of all that. I was jammed full of a lot of stuff by this time, but I still didn't have a direction in which I wanted to go. I think probably I would like very much to have gone into research history. If I'd had a choice of anything, that's probably what it would have been, something in the field of historical research.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is that how you feel about it now, or did you feel about it that way then?

HARRY HAY: Well, this is where my reading all went even in that time. But there was absolutely no field in that. I mean, there was no way by which you could make a living in a field like that in those years. That was not on the horizon yet. At least, it was not on the horizon for me. So, therefore, all that was in front of me were professions. And the teaching profession-- In this period, as I said, we had these wonderful, dedicated people, and it was notorious that they were terribly underpaid--and this indeed they were. College professors: there weren't that many colleges in the country at this point, and so, consequently, one would think that there was a lot of competition for a college profession. And they were terribly paid. Most of them lived on the verge of starvation most of the time. So that didn't seem to offer anything particularly. What you did was you either went to college or you went to what was known as a technical school, a vocational school. I was always being pushed to go to college, not to vocational school; so I just moved in the college directions. An example of the type of incitement I would get: in the twelfth grade, going through the second time, I took solid geometry. Whereas plane geometry had been terribly difficult for me--and I can't tell you why, but I couldn't get the hang of it, I couldn't get the vision of what it was that I'm supposed to be working with-- (I'm later going to discover that I have a visual mind, and unless I can picture what I'm learning about, I have trouble. But I wasn't going to know that then. I wouldn't know that for a long time.) But when I came to solid, the man who was teaching solid geometry was very good. I caught the hang of it almost at once. And I'm in my prime by this time. I'm having a wonderful time in school. Everybody was only a couple of years older than me instead of four or five years older than me, and I'm feeling my oats, and I'm doing fine at this point. So that I take solid geometry, and about halfway through the course, one day the guy put on the blackboard a proposition. He said, "Of course, for a few of you, you might be interested in this: the theorem of Pythagoras is derived from this proposition. But," he said, "I don't expect you to work that out. That's much too difficult, beyond anybody in this class." He gave that on a Friday afternoon. There were five of us, I think, who said, "The hell with you, buster. We'll show you." You know, that kind of thing. I spent all weekend making the derivation, one from the other. I finally worked it all out, and I came to a place which I thought was a little lumpy, but I made a proposition. I made a jump across in my equations, and I kind of worked it out Sunday night, and I really wasn't very happy when I'd done. I was pretty sure I'd cut a corner, and I'm not at all sure that that corner was "cutable," you know. At four o'clock in the morning I awakened, you know, out of a dream: I did cut a corner, and I know what I should have done. I went down, and I reworked the last half of it, which took me a couple of hours. But I worked it out to what I was pretty sure was correct. I rush in, and I can't wait. My geometry class is at two o'clock in the afternoon, and I can't wait to get into geometry to put my proposition on the board. As it turned out, there were two girls and another boy and me who had done this. When we got in there, Mr. Bergman looked around and said, "[Was] anybody by any chance interested in what I said last Friday afternoon at four?" and our hands went up. He said, "Aha! I thought that would happen. Howard, you take this corner, and you take this--" He knew that I was going to do it. At least, he hoped that I was going to do it. That was obvious. So, I put my proposition up, and the other ones did. The other three had cut the same corner I had. They'd all gone through the same thing, and they had not found the answer. So, my waking up at four o'clock Monday morning with the right answer was the only right answer that was on the board. He looked them all over, and he said, "You're all pretty good. Harry didn't cut a corner, and you did." I said, "Oh, yes, I did. I cut that corner, too, just like everybody else did," and I told them about the dream and waking up at four o'clock in the morning. He said, "That's wonderful." He said, "That's inspiration." He said, "That's where all the ideas in creativity always come from. Wherever that came from with you, that's where it came from for everybody else. You can't work it out logically. You have to come through it at the point." And so he said, "But the four of you obviously, at this point, have learned all I can teach you in solid geometry; so the four of you don't have to come to class for the rest of the semester." This was early spring; we all went to the beach. He said, "You will automatically all get A's. You don't have to worry about ever coming back. But," he said, "I'd like to see you from time to time, just to see what you're doing. And have fun at the beach." So, this is my solid geometry class. This happened to me in the middle of May. From the middle of May to the middle of June I didn't go to geometry class anymore.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that your last period of the day?

HARRY HAY: My last period of the day. So, we went to the beach, as he said. But, I mean, that kind of experience in high school-- So, the four of us were able to do that. But the rest of the class all of a sudden got the point, and he set a couple of other propositions before the end of the term came along, and other people aspired for the same thing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: As an engineer, had your father also been excellent in math?

HARRY HAY: Yes, yes, yes. Excellent in math, excellent in physics.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But you didn't consider that as a profession?

HARRY HAY: I wouldn't consider it as a profession. I wouldn't consider anything about mining engineering as a profession simply because I hated my father. My relationship with him was absolutely-- All mining engineers were automatically damned in my mind.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How was your social life in high school? Did you participate, or did you find any conflicts?

HARRY HAY: No. By this time, this second time, when I'm in B12--this is the top of twelfth grade--I'm flying. I'm really having a wonderful time. At this point I belonged to a gang--and we called ourselves a gang. Who are the gang? Well-- At this point I'm president, the first president, of the California Scholarship Federation. It doesn't mean a damned thing, of course; it was just one of these things they dreamed up in the twenties. But they set up a scholarship federation in California, which meant that you had to have had-- You couldn't have had more than one B (and the rest A's) for at least four of your six terms in high school. Automatically you entered the scholarship federation. They were making a great thing of scholarship at that time. Because of the fact that I had gone through, at this point I had gone through four years of high school, or eight terms, and in that whole time, at that period, I had only gotten two B's, that put me way ahead of everybody else. Somebody from L.A. High was to be the president of the first scholarship federation, set it up. And so they asked me to do it, and I did it. So I'm that. I'm moving up in the ROTC. I'm second lieutenant, I think, at this point, and doing fairly well and liked by the guys there. By this time I'm the bass soloist for the glee club. We've gone out on a lot of concerts, and I've enjoyed that. I mean, all manner of little things of this sort. I'm one of the best debaters in the forum, the cultural club. I'm also a whiz at parliamentary procedure; this I know very well, and I'm the parliamentarian for them. What you do in those clubs is that you work out complicated deals: you know, amendments to amendments to amendments to bypasses to this and that. You set the situation out, and then you invite everybody to get themselves out of the situation. As parliamentarian, you lead them along in those directions. So, it's kind of fun, and you work out impossible situations and then kind of lick your way through them slowly. Oh, now we get back to the gang. The gang was composed of-- When we all would get to our final senior year, our A12--we're ready to graduate--we will have the major of the brigade--that's the head of the ROTC--and the three line captains.* [One of whom is me. I had the biggest company because I had the rookies: the new sissies who had just signed up, and the toughies, who were hung up on the army.] We will have the president of the Forum Society, which is me, and the eight or nine top scholars. We will have the two valedictorians of our graduating class. And all these people consist of a gang. What does the gang do? Well, we meet on Friday nights and have dinner at somebody's house, one of the kids' houses. We all wear our ROTC uniforms, full dress, with honors and medals and everybody spit and polish. It's a very formal dinner. And the moment that the dinner's over, we all rush upstairs to whatever house bedroom we are, and we get out of those clothes, and we get into cords and blue shirts and white shirts with little black ties that were on a rubber band thing--you know, bow ties--and little black, velvet hats, and we go out and raise hell. Really, I mean, we were probably the scourge of the neighborhood. If we went to a movie house, anything that wasn't nailed down disappeared automatically. We made a point of carrying off everything we could lay our hands on: the backs of chairs, the belt that held the portieres up. You know, the drapes, the portieres, the little belt that holds the things back? --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. We got all the belts. They were just beginning to get these fancy, new, little lamps, that looked like-- "Living flame" they used to call them. They were carefully molded to kind of look like flame. We would get all of those. We'd get all the red lights out of the exit fixtures.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What would you do with all this loot?

HARRY HAY: Well, we would get all the loot and giggle and laugh and scream and tell each other the stories of how we got away with all this stuff, because you're getting away with it from under the noses of ushers, in front of managers, and all of this kind of stuff. We would put it all in a very big cardboard box and send it back. The point was we were getting away with it. We didn't want it. We were not thieves, in other words. We didn't want the loot. We wanted to see if we could get it. It was the same business as-- It's the parliamentarian, but not as a commercial, let's say, at a material level.* [When I said "parliamentarian," I was referring to a popular intellectual exercise in school. The big senior literary debating society at L.A. was called the Forum. One of the exercises at every meeting was to tackle and learn to use a new complication in parliamentary procedure through the exercising of Robert's Rules of Order. Smartasses like me would have --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Robert's Rules of Order down pat by the time we were in B12, and then we'd have a ball seeing how much we could get away with in snarling up the chairperson, who would be a senior or an A12. When I was in A12, I was president, and I took equal joy in outfoxing the smarter uppers. Well, getting away with a complete tea service and tray for twenty people at the Ambassador Hotel the night of our graduation or swiping the countertops on the west side of the local drugstore or getting all the lights off both the stairs down to the smoking loges in the Fox Venice Boulevard balcony were all more or less applications of the same challenge. They were for parliamentarian rather than for material gains.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: How long did this carry on?

HARRY HAY: This went on until I graduated from high school. Of course, there's one awfully funny story that has to do with that a little later on. This is a period--1929--this is a period of a lot of public works and street fixing and street widening or new streets being put in. Streets [are] being paved in Los Angeles; areas are being paved that now you would think of as always being part of the city. In earlier days [they] had not been paved, like La Brea south of Olympic, for instance, which wasn't paved, or even certain sections of Pico Boulevard, which were not paved in those years. South of Olympic and west of Fairfax, there were quite a lot of places that still were not paved. Well, anyway, so there was a lot of street fixing. This is the period also when they had those lovely kerosene lamps, those nice, big, red kerosene lamps. So, we would always find a particular excavation or some place, and we'd say, you know, "There are far too many lamps there. They don't need all those lamps." So, we'd take every other one. This is 1929, and this is the period when you're just beginning to find out about red-light districts. So, we were always busy spreading red-light districts all over the place, usually over churches. We would find some church, and we would put red lights all over it, because red lights automatically meant a whorehouse. People are now just beginning to be aware of the fact that there are such places, and there are stories about this in the papers. There was a story about the fact that there's obviously an underground, a professional underground, commercial underground.* [Not only the guys in my class but even the L.A. Times is beginning to hint that maybe the "redlight district"--Spring Street south of Tenth (Olympic wasn't in yet)--isn't just a few helter-skelter cathouses. Maybe it's got organized gambling and booze running going on too.] We're beginning to know who these ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. men are: Guy McAfee is known as one of the underground bosses of the area, and so on. Then I found out that another guy, named Bernard Coyne, was also part of that. It was interesting to me because Bernard Coyne was also president of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society at the church I went to. That means he's at church. On Sundays he was one of the pillars of respectability, one of the chairmen of virtue, but during the week he operated an illegal, one-armed bandit coin operation, and he also had a string of B-houses, prostitute houses, as they were called, on South Spring Street. So, I'm beginning to find out something about, to get the cynical attitude about who the pillars of respectability are and what they really do. So, as I said, red light automatically means whorehouse; so, consequently, in this period we pick out all the Protestant and Presbyterian churches we can find, and we've got red lights all over them for Saturday and Sunday. In those years nobody went to church on Saturday, and then the minister showed up on Sunday. So, anything that went up in front of the church Saturday would stay until Sunday morning. That was right. That was the important thing. So, an awful lot of churches had red lights on them all of Saturday and Saturday night for people to giggle at. The officer of the day: his first job would be to run the flag up at eight o'clock in the morning while they played the salute to the flag. It would be a little military ceremony, and it would be done at eight o'clock in the morning.* [The ceremony was always quite serious, complete with a rifle-toting color guard and a bugler giving the army "Call to Colors." Presumably all the kids sashaying around at that moment would do a civilian salute to the colors, and, as I remember, almost everybody did.] It would be done at eight o'clock in the morning unless there were three kerosene lamps at the top of the flagpole, and then they'd have to bring the goddamned things down and then put the flag up. If the officer of the day was someone we didn't like and his particular day would be Monday, you could count on the fact that there would be three kerosene lamps at the top of the flagpole, which would have been there since Friday night.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was there anything gay about this gang? You mentioned that ROTC attracted those kids in high school.

HARRY HAY: Well, as a matter of fact, it was the kind of craziness, kind of campy craziness in a way, which would suggest-- I have thought about it many times since then, because I don't know this for sure, but I think that out of that group--there were ten of us--and out of those ten, there were probably four of us who were gay. ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But there was no overt sexual activity?

HARRY HAY: No overt sexual activity, but an awful lot of hugging and sitting in cars packed together with one another; so there was an awful lot of body contact that was going on all the time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you also dating in this period?

HARRY HAY: Yes. Very heavy dating. Each one of them had their girl.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was there a lot of pressure to do that, or did you do it because you wanted to?

HARRY HAY: No, there was pressure. Well, I don't know. They did it because they wanted to, I think, and I did it because, if I didn't, it would stand out. I wouldn't be part of that group, I knew that. At this period I also thought, well, this is the way you go, and this is what you're supposed to do, because I still don't know about-- I mean, I know that to my secret soul, my own secret way of seeing, that there were other people like me, and I know about the people whom Carpenter mentions, but I don't know of any real people. There are conversations between the boys of various types of activities that go on. I know that, for instance, the guy who was my first lieutenant-- When I was in my last year in high school, my last semester in high school, I was the senior line captain. I had the rookies, and so I had the largest company. My first lieutenant was a guy who at night worked as an usher in one of the Fox movie houses. Apparently there was a little hanky-panky going on between the manager and the ushers at the theater he worked at. I used to find ways and means to get him to talk about what was going on because it sounded-- I kind of thought, "Oh, I wish I could become an usher there, because it sounds to me like whatever they're doing, however they're patting each other behind the curtains--" This guy--I can't remember his first name [Warren]; his last name was Stone--Stone didn't like what would happen, and he hated it when they patted him on the ass, but, oh, dear, if I were in his place, I wouldn't not like it; I would like it. "I wonder if they touch each other anyplace else besides on the ass, because that would be nice too." But I never could get him to tell-- He never found out whether they groped in front, you see. He only would tell me about being pinched on the ass or patted on the ass.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you have a steady girlfriend or anything like that?

HARRY HAY: Well, yes. There were a couple of girls with whom I went around quite a lot. We were all, again, part of sort of a general group, and the girls were part of that group, and if they didn't go with me, they would go with somebody else within the group. But, no, I didn't. I thought I was trying awfully hard, but I guess I really wasn't. But as far as the boys were concerned, as far as the boys within the group were concerned, there were some of us who were at that moment assuming that we were going to be lifelong friends, yes. Not only did I do things with them all during the school term but in the summer--yes, it was the early summer of '29--after we graduated from high school, I went up to-- They used to have what they called a citizens' military training camp. This was a thing that young men could do, sort of like an army reserve. This one was held at Del Monte, which was what we would now call a suburb of Monterey. It had been--what do they call it?--a racing area. It was a racing turf, which had been popular at one point and now had fallen into disarray, and the United States Army had taken it over in relation to what is now, I think, called Fort Ord.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, I was going to say, there's a base up there somewhere.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, there is a base. This was the base. This was the old base, and the old fort at Monterey was connected with it. They had an army hospital there, and it was general connection. This was the infantry. Two or three guys in the gang had been to CMTC the year before, and they'd had a lot of fun, and so they couldn't wait to get a couple of us to go too. So, there were about five or six of us. Out of the gang of ten, there were six of us who went that second year there, 1929. They were a machine gun company, and so I was in that too. That was interesting because I could see there were a lot of things that were already going on, and there were already things that were apparent to me that were happening within the-- The men who were the professional soldiers and these reserve or the volunteer soldiers-- For instance, they would set up a company clerk, and the company clerk would be one of the kids who would do a certain amount of typing, and this and that, and he would be working with a master sergeant generally. Our company clerk was a cutie, a real cutie. He and the master sergeant were inseparable, and when they would go off base a couple of nights a week, and then they would go off on weekends, this guy and the master sergeant were always together, never separated; so that it was pretty obvious that this was an affair that was going on. It was accepted protocol, and everybody else-- So, you kind of kidded around that the master sergeant, and so on, that this was his special friend. And the kidding that was done by all the professionals, I mean, the regular soldiers that were there, they took it and kidded around about it, and they handled the young boy as though he were the master sergeant's girlfriend. We who were sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds went along with this too. Now, what the other guys actually knew or thought, I don't know. But the point was that it was all up-and-up and buddy-buddy; it was all very fine. There were a lot of movies that were being made of the First World War, and there was an awful lot of buddy-buddy system in each single one of them showing, and so this was supposed to be the way men always got together. But presumably they all had girlfriends. Presumably the master sergeant and this young kid--I can't remember his name either; at this moment I can see his face and other parts of him, but I can't remember his name--presumably they went to town, and they picked up girls together; this was the theory. I suspected myself that they didn't. At this moment I would say I hoped they didn't, but I wasn't sure.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How about you though? Did you have any--

HARRY HAY: No. At this point I was dying for at this moment to have some kind of relationship.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you have any kind of sexual experiences after the Bimini Baths period?

HARRY HAY: No. Well, yes, I did. I had one in high school one afternoon. I guess I would have been about fourteen; I think about fourteen. It's vague in my mind as to what year this happened, but it was before my good period; so I guess it would have to have been just about the time I was ready to-- Oh, no, it would have been when I went back to the Bll. Okay. That would have been the fall of 1926.* [There is another episode, a rather important one, in September of 1926. It concerns a young guy, maybe twenty-three or twenty-five, named Matt. He was a regular deckhand on an old scow of a freighter that coughed and grumbled up and down the West Coast from Juneau to Panama. The summer of 1926 I had felt good working in the hayfields in Nevada. So when I came down to San Francisco, I stayed with my aunt Kate and my cousin Lucie for a week. Then I decided to go back to Los Angeles by freighter. Lucie worked for the W. R. Grace Company, and somehow she found out about a ship that was temporarily short-handed. Anyhow the first mate took me on, figuring that I was eighteen since I looked wind-burned and tough. The boat was going to port for extensive overhaul by the time it got to San Diego, so the mate didn't really care that I just wanted to go to San Pedro. Mostly I was given brass fixtures to scrape the green off and bring to some kind of polish. There was some deck swabbing too, but nothing very hard. We left Alameda about noon, I guess, and the first night we put into Monterey. (Apparently we had some cargo --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. to discharge at Monterey, just as we had some more stuff the next night at Santa Barbara. But we didn't dock. Instead, I think, one of those barges they used to call a lighter came out and tethered alongside. Since I wasn't involved in this part, I don't recall this very clearly.) The crew wanted to go into the cribs, just as the haying crews always wanted to do on Saturday nights. So about ten of them rowed into town and insisted that I come along. Remember, to this mob I'm twenty-one. So we go to a bar, and I demonstrate my talent for being able to retrieve a full shot glass even though the bartender had sent it skimming back twenty feet or more. Well, the guys ducked out of the speakeasy in twos and threes to go to the cribs, and I managed not connecting with any batch till it was time to go back to the ship. I remember being a little looped and tossing some cookies, as they used to say, over the side. I was dimly aware of a rather gentle young guy helping me back on board. I seem to remember that he also hadn't wanted to go to the cribs either. Next day I found myself several times working next to this guy. He wasn't handsome, but he was pleasant looking, and his eyes were kind, sometimes searching, sometimes sparkling. His name was Matt, and he was going to sign up in the Coast Guard when he got back up to Seattle. He told me we would be lying off Santa Barbara again that night and that the crew would want to go into town again, just like before. He said, "I noticed you didn't go to the cathouse last night. Will you want to go tonight?" I think when I shuddered a little as I said, "Oh, no," his eyes watered a little. Anyway, he looked deep into my eyes and said, "Maybe you'd like to take a little walk along the beach with me instead." I said, "Oh, yes. I'd like that." We managed to slip away just beyond the dock. I don't know where we walked. I know my blood was tingling all over my body, and my mouth was totally dry. I was suddenly aware that my right hand hanging down my side was inches away from his hand hanging down his side. Without thinking, I suddenly interlaced my fingers with his. As our palms passed together, he suddenly froze, and I thought, "Oh my God, I've done the wrong thing, and he's going to beat me up." But even while I'm thinking this, suddenly he pulls on my arm, swinging my body around full on his, and kisses me hard on the mouth. I'm shocked because I've never been kissed that way before. His tongue seems to be knocking on my lips as if telling me to open my mouth. So I do. And wow! Did I find out what that was all about fast! I remember we found a little eucalyptus grove not far from the beach. He said we'd have until about midnight. We lay in a long embrace and kissed and kissed. Then he took me, and that was tremendous. But after a while, when he wanted me to take him, I discovered that Calvin Criley five years before really hadn't been any preparation. His cock was beautiful, but it was very big, and I realized I didn't quite know what to do besides kiss it and hold it ecstatically against my cheek. Suddenly he sat up and said, "You've never taken another man before, have you?" When I said no, he said, "How old are you?" As he said later, he thought I'd say nineteen or twenty, which would have been bad enough because the legal age then was twenty-one. When I, still all ecstasy and unthinking, said fourteen, he nearly had a shit hemmorhage. He tried to get up and dress himself, but I, now almost hysterical, grabbed him around the legs and held on for dear life and wouldn't let go. Then he told me about the law and that it would mean twenty-three years in San Quentin if we were caught. Later, when we had both calmed down considerably, he consented to rest in my arms again. He was a little smaller and more slender than I, now fourteen years old, six-foot-three, and 175 pounds, and a man's wages of a summer season in my pocket. In between kisses and sighs, he told me many things: that there were people like us in many cities and almost always in seaports. There were signs by which we knew each other, but he wouldn't tell me what they were. "There are good guys among us," he said, "who would see the dream in your eyes and teach you good ways to go. But there are bad guys too, who would want to destroy you. When you're of age," he told me, "and handle such situations, then you'll learn about the signs and the places where you watch for them." We got back to the dock in time to meet the crew ready to shove off. But back on the steamer, we neither one of us wanted to sleep. There was cargo on deck that had to go down one of the hatches. After all this was finished and the deck tidied up, folks went below, and Matt and I stayed up on deck. We spent the night in one of the lifeboats, pressing against one another, touching and talking now and again. He wouldn't tell me his last name. After we docked at San Pedro, I never saw him again except in my dreams. The next summer, again in San Francisco, I applied for a working berth on a tramp coming south. But this time, no such luck. I bought passage: seven meals and a second-class cabin, five bucks. The cabin had two bunks. Who and what would I draw for a mate? Nineteen twenty-seven was not my year. I not only had the cabin to myself but who had to be among the passengers but the spinster sisters Schmidt, who had directed the children's choir in which I'd been the star soprano and who taught us catechism at Saint Kevin's parish. "How overjoyed we are," they chirped, "that we are on this boat to chaperone you. We are told that there are terrible, sinful dangers for boys traveling these boats alone these days." Of course, Matt, whom I had dreamed I would find, wasn't aboard. But the Schmidt sisters very determinedly saw to it that I was never within touching distance of two other quite acceptable deckhands, enough to even suggest that maybe I might be on deck around midnight. I have to explain that this boat, having been the little passenger-carrying freighter that had brought me and my family to San Pedro from Panama in November of 1916, did not put into the coastal roadsteads at night as had the nonpassenger-bearing freighter the year before. Two nights in a row my horny fifteen-year-oldness paced that deck from ten p.m. to midnight, and no one showed up to keep me company.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: But at least it wasn't a very active period, or anything like that.

HARRY HAY: No, just once. Just once. One afternoon I'm late going to my locker or something--I remember it was a gray day--and down the line there was another guy whom I knew, who was also in the ROTC, and whom I didn't much like one way or the other. I didn't like him. I didn't dislike him. It was just I didn't know very much about him. I don't know how it happened, but we were kind of standing close to each other, or something, and he reached out and groped me. Of course, nobody else had touched me by this time, and nobody had ever touched me on top of the water, let's say, after Calvin. (Remember Calvin Criley, with whom I had had 69 when I was nine?) Bimini Baths came between that, that period and this one. So that this guy, Alfred whatever-his-name-was, groped me, and the first thing you know I was groping him. I remember this tremendous excitement, and we figured that-- He said, "We should do something," and I wasn't quite sure just what we were going to do, what was going to come of it. I knew that I was rather interested in him. I wanted to see what his cock would be like, and I wanted to take it out. I wanted to feel it and caress it, but I didn't want to kiss him.* [I realize now that I would have been remembering kissing Matt two or three months before. Next to that memory, kissing Alfred would have been monstrous. Something in his personality repelled me, but I was caught up by the sexual thing that was going on.] --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But this was never repeated? This was just that one--

HARRY HAY: However, it had a strange consequence. We went out. We couldn't get together in the locker room; that was too public. So, we decided to go out in the bushes that surrounded the building itself. We were in the bushes, and, as a matter of fact, I think I was going down on him at the moment, when all of a sudden two other guys showed up. They were two guys whom I knew. They were in the ROTC too. They said, well, they wouldn't tell if we would pay them fifty cents a week. And so for six months in there I put up the blackmail. I was particularly boiled by this because here I am, going down on a guy I don't like, but it's the only other person I've ever had an opportunity to do this with.* [I had bungled going down on Matt because he was so big, and I'd never thought of how to do it. Later that night, when I'd have loved to try again, Matt, reacting to my age, wouldn't let me. Now, with Alfred it is no big problem. Alfred's has an interesting, even exciting size, but I can handle it.] I guess I'm not sorry. I'm just sorry they caught us. So, anyway I was caught in a bind like that. --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Other than the fifty cents a week, did that have any other inhibiting--

HARRY HAY: On me?

MITCH TUCHMAN: On you, yeah.

HARRY HAY: No, I only wished I could get rid of him. I wished he'd go somewhere else. I wished he would drop dead. You know, various things. But it didn't deter me, sexually speaking, no. The only thing that deterred me in that regard was that I didn't like Alfred, and I only wished that it was somebody else that I had been caught with. I would have enjoyed it much more. No, I'm not having any problems in that regard, but it seems to me that the only people that I hear about and the only ones that I see or that I get any feeling about are people whom I wouldn't like myself personally. This begins to disturb me a bit, until I went to CMTC, and then I saw the master sergeant with this guy. The master sergeant I didn't much care for either, but the young guy he was with I would have liked very much.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But that didn't bear fruit, as it were.

HARRY HAY: No, it didn't bear any fruit. Nobody made a pass at me at that point. There was a very nice ranker. He was a private in regular life, but in the summer in the CMTC he was a specialist who was teaching us machine gun practice and so on. But he had his eye for one of the other guys in the gang, but not me. And, oh, how I wished he would have his eye out for me, but I was not his type. So, he didn't make a pass at me. He did make a pass at Ned Eads, who punched him in the nose. He made a pass at the one guy he shouldn't have, and that didn't help. Then he didn't come around anymore, and then I was sorry, too, because he was the kind of-- I just liked to look at him and used to like to look at his crotch; his crotch was rather attractive. Oh, I really didn't know what any of this meant yet. I really didn't know all the things that you did yet, but I sure was wanting to know awful bad.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Maybe you could put things in order if I asked you: there was a period between high school and college.

HARRY HAY: Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I believe it was in that period that there was someone named Champ Simmons that I've seen references to.

HARRY HAY: Right, right, right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is that the proper sequence?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, that's the proper sequence. That does come in that period.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why is it that there was a period between high school and college? You were being directed toward college.

HARRY HAY: Well, all right. So, I go through graduation. Graduation was an enormous experience. It was one of the largest graduating classes in the history of schooling at that time: 575 is a lot of people from a graduating class. I was one of the speakers for my graduating class, what they called one of the valedictory people, and a great fuss and froufra about all of that. I was supposed to make up my mind, my father said I was to make up my mind what I was supposed to do before I went to college. I had the possibility of a scholarship at Stanford. I had the possibility of a scholarship at Caltech. They would be two different directions. One would be sort of a liberal arts, obviously, direction, which would be Stanford, and Caltech had definitely been a scientific in some measure.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In what way did you have this possibility? Had you applied, or were these through friends of your father's?

HARRY HAY: No, the woman who was the head of the mathematics department at L.A. High and who also taught trig--I took trig from her, and I was one of her pets--she wanted me to go to Caltech. She had been working on me to go to Caltech for over a year. I had been out to Caltech, and I had interviewed a number of people, and I had an idea that the thing I wanted to do was paleontology, which is the historical part of geology. See, when I went back the second time, I took physics one year, and I took chemistry the next. The only science I didn't take was biology. I didn't have time for that. But physics and chemistry I had, and I excelled in those. I loved them very dearly, and I thought it was very exciting. My physics professor was a wonderful old guy, an old dodderer. He was the head of the science department at L.A. In the second year, in physics, it was so easy. It was so easy, and I had no problems with it, and I used to work out my experiments and everything fine. A guy by the name of Hugh Nibley and I used to sit next to each other. Hugh was one of the bookworms like me. (My guess is that he probably was gay, too, but he was a Mormon. Whatever happened to him I don't know, but his family were heavy Mormon people in this area.) Hugh was reading Beowulf in the original, in the runic original, Icelandic, as it were. He would be reading it in physics class, and I would be reading it over his shoulder. We didn't know that Mr. Hanna knew what we were doing, but obviously Mr. Hanna had passed by our chairs every so often, and he would look over, too, because one day he said, "And what is Beowulf doing now?" [laughter] So, at one point he said, "I know perfectly well that you guys are going to get A's again, and you're excellent students, and you really need more activity. I am starting a class after school in geology, and I want you both to be there." Now, the course he was starting would give no credit at the start. He just wanted to get a bunch of people who might be interested in geology. But he took us on field trips, and he did a whole bunch of things, and at the end of our first term, we put on an exhibit of what we were interested in. I made one of these exhibits showing the five stages of paleontology and how it develops in terms of what we knew about the history of the earth and so on. That was my particular interest. Other people took oil, and other people did other things, but I was interested in illustrating the five stages: finding fossils and then making fossils when I couldn't find them, you see, making reasonable facsimiles. (It was a very interesting thing.) What happened was, we had taken it without credit, and all of a sudden it turned out that, because the exhibit was so good, and the L.A. school system saw it and liked it so much, that they gave us credits, but it was sort of credits after the fact rather than during the time. So, as a result of that I thought paleontology is where I wanted to go, and if my father's going to push me into any kind of mining engineering and geology, this is where I want to go, is paleontology. So, I went out to Caltech, and I was accepted as a scholarship student in paleontology.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The scholarship would have been based, not on your economic need, because you wouldn't have had any economic need.

HARRY HAY: Well, don't forget that I'm the little boy who also earned every cent he ever [got], too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, that's right, too.

HARRY HAY: OK. So that my father is not offering me anything as far as college is concerned.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Ah, so this is going to be your responsibility.

HARRY HAY: It's going to be my responsibility, right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And yet he insists that you go, doesn't he?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes, he insists that I go, and he's worth three-quarters of a million at that point, and I'm doing his bookkeeping for him, because I took bookkeeping in high school just to do this, and I'm working on all these papers for him, but nevertheless he's not paying for it. OK. Well, this is not coddling the children. I mentioned that to you before. That's part of the good, old, nineteenth-century "spare the rod and spoil the child" stuff. So, if I'm going to go to college, I have to get a scholarship, and this I know; I take this for granted. Remember, all the rest of the kids that I know in the gang, several of them have got cars; all of them have allowances. But I'm the one who works, and my allowance is the money that I have parceled out for [myself] for the week, and that's all I have. But I keep up with them, you know. Anyway, so paleontology I'm interested in. I've gone to--I can't remember the man's name now; he was a charming little man from Switzerland, I think, who was in paleontology at Caltech at that time. I like him, and I made friends with him, and I'm going to have a scholarship in his department, and I'm going to enter the following year. My father said, "No. If you're going to go into geology, you will take oil geology. That's the field." It just so happened that everyone was taking oil geology in 1928 and '29 and '30, and when the Depression came in 1932, '33, you pick up geologists who were probably hookers on every corner. You know, there were geologists to burn! But not in this period. This is the high point. This is where everybody's making the money.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had you gone to Stanford, though, you would have followed a different course entirely, is that right?

HARRY HAY: Well, this is the point. The thing is that I'm supposed to decide what I'm supposed to do or, at least, know some of the things that I'm not going to do. Medicine I've ruled out. I'm not going to become a doctor. I don't want to move in that field. I could have, but I didn't, not at that time. So, then my father said, "Well, what about law?" And I said, "Well, I don't know anything about law." So, what happened was, he got me a job--it didn't pay anything--he got me a job studying law, or "prelaw" as it would be called, in a lawyer's office, again, a man who was a friend of his and who, again, had been one of the people he had known in high school in an earlier time, a man by the name of Walter Haas. Walter Haas was a wonderful, little man, who was half California-Spanish, half German. He himself was a specialist in water law, in constitutional water law, which in the latter part of the nineteenth century, earlier part of the twentieth century was one of the important fields in that time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Office here in Los Angeles?

HARRY HAY: Yes, an office here in Los Angeles. Haas and Dunnigan was probably one of the well-known law firms at that time. I have to tell you some funny stories about that, too, which may give you some oral history stuff because of its connections, again, with the old Spanish families here.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Water resources is an entire series in the Oral History Program that they've pursued because it is such a central question to the history of Southern California.

HARRY HAY: Well, in the early decisions on water, the name Walter Haas is going to show up.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I'll look in the indexes to see if we have material on him.

HARRY HAY: OK. Well, anyway. So, I was given an opportunity to read law in Walter Haas's law library and make myself generally useful in his office. The idea was that I would do that for a year, and then I would go to Stanford the following year. At this point I'm willing enough because I'm sixteen and I'm not too sure that I want to go to college right away. I did want to look around; so I'm going to do this for a year. So, this is how I happen to be on Spring Street the day of the great Wall Street Crash, because I'm now-- At this point I will serve papers for the law office. I will carry papers back and forth. I will be a process server. I will take care of probate service and all that kind of thing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What's the significance of being on Spring Street? Is that where the Pacific Stock Exchange was?

HARRY HAY: Well, Spring Street was our Wall Street in that period.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And what happened that day? What was that like?

HARRY HAY: How to explain a thing like that?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was it truly a memorable day?

HARRY HAY: It was a horrifying day. Spring Street was always a busy street. There were lots of people going and coming. Probably all of the financial buildings and most of the lawyers' office were up and down Spring Street.

1.8. Tape Number: IV, Side Two November 17, 1981

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yes, Spring Street, 1929.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, October 29, was it?

MITCH TUCHMAN: I think October 29, 1929.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, that's what I think it was. It's a busy, thronging street, but it's a respectable street; respectable to the extent that all of the people who pass up and down the street are mostly men. They're usually fairly well-heeled businessmen with coats and ties and hats. I didn't wear a hat, generally speaking, but otherwise I would have been-- Sometimes I wore sport clothes, and it was forgivable because I was obviously a young person. But anybody over thirty was always suited and nearly always carried a cane or an umbrella and always briefcases and always looking very busy and brisk. As you think of Wall Street or Pine Street in New York, you think of Spring Street here. So that you were accustomed to this type of sort of "busyness" and people being involved, heavily involved; so there was a certain sort of high-keyed briskness about the street at all times. And as I said, the financial institutions are there. The title insurance is there. There are heavy banks on almost all the corners. The banks are involved with foreign trade and so on. There's a feeling of busyness, of things going on, of high levels and many levels of things happening at the same time. October 29, all of that comes to-- It's as though it were frozen, and there is a quiet on the street.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are the people there but not talking, or they're not even out on the street?

HARRY HAY: Well, as a matter of fact, there are people on the street, but they're not talking. You get the sense that they're rather passing each other. They're kind of ghosts. I have to describe it only that way because I was aware that something tremendous was going on. It wasn't a throbbing. Everything had suddenly stopped as if somebody had pulled out the plug.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you know what was going on?

HARRY HAY: No, I didn't

MITCH TUCHMAN: The news hadn't struck?

HARRY HAY: When the news began to come through, it wasn't anything that was going to mean a great deal to me at sixteen.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Hadn't there been bad days-- Well, I think that was a Tuesday, but do you happen to know if Monday had also seen a lot of selling?

HARRY HAY: There had been a series of flurries all that year.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, in general business was poor, but that was a particularly horrible day.

HARRY HAY: Business was poor on Broadway, for instance, which is a commercial street. Business had been frenetic and poor, but on Spring Street, because of the fact that you've got lawyers and banks and so on, business is poor but it's not affecting people's climate in a way. I mean, there are more suits. Lawyers are even busier. You've got a sense of people being busy but not frantic. They're just terribly busy and working overtime, and there's a "high-keyedness" about it. Our office was at Fifth and Spring, and I had gone down to Ninth, the southern edge of the district, which was a long way from First, which is where the courts were. [If] you go down to Ninth, you're reaching down towards the outer part of town. I remember I had gone to Ninth to do something or other, and I'm walking back, and I'm suddenly aware of the fact that it's as though all of a sudden everything had stopped, and nothing was happening. It was as though nobody was breathing either. I had the feeling that the streetcars were going by, and they weren't going clang, clang, clang, as they usually did. They were all very quiet and sort of restrained. You get a feeling of butterflies in the pit of your stomach. Well, it's that kind of thing. And I thought, well, that's strange. I think somebody hopped out of a window, but I'm not sure of this. I'm not sure whether I read about it or I saw it, but I think someone hopped out of a window here. It must have happened just before I came into the block. Someone had committed suicide. It was, again, a little bit as though it were a dream, a bad dream that you're into: these things happen, and you hear about them, and you know that you should be terribly hurt by them, and you are not because you're not feeling anything.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had your year just begun there? Did you start, like, in the summer of '29?

HARRY HAY: No, when did I come back? I guess I went to work the first of September; so I had been there-- This was the end of the second month. I remember coming back into the office. There were a couple of secretaries whom I knew. By this time I'd been there two months; for God's sakes, I knew all the secretaries. I was doing all their work for them. I mean, I wasn't going out with them. I was identifying with the secretaries. You know, it wasn't a man-woman thing; we were all sort of girls-together kind of thing. There was a young woman who operated the switchboard, and she was not terribly good. I had figured out the switchboard the end of the first week, and so I was operating the thing, and I would do long-distance calls and all kinds of complicated things on that switchboard by the end of the second week, and so I was doing all that, too. I remember coming back into the office, and one of the little secretaries is in tears in the middle of the floor. I mean, this was a staid, respectable, almost puritanical office, where everybody sort of walked up and down in whispers. The women, I don't think they tiptoed, but you had the feeling that they sort of did. They were always properly dressed, and they never raised their voices above a whisper. I come back in the middle of the afternoon, and one of the young women, one of the secretaries, Bonnie, is in tears in the middle of the floor, which is, you know, like all protocol has suddenly been broken; everything's come to an end. She's in tears in the middle of the floor. It turns out that she and her sister had been-- One of the clients who came into that office, who had been dating them, had persuaded them to take their money out of a savings account and put it in stock, and they were suddenly wiped out. All of a sudden everything was gone, and they were sitting in the middle of the floor weeping. Mr. Haas, who was a spidery, restrained, very prim, precise, little man, very private little person--and I knew nothing about his life whatsoever, but you had a feeling that you didn't [speak above a] whisper because he was brittle and he might break--suddenly came out of his office and saw what was happening and went back in and slammed the door and then came out again. I said, "Mr. Haas, should I ask Bonnie to go into the library or somewhere else?" And he said, "Oh, no, no, no. This is terrible. This is terrible. This is a disaster. It's a disaster for her, too. No, we must leave her where she is." That was almost as though he had turned his life inside out. It was such a shock to all of us that he should say such a thing or that he would even concern himself with such a thing. It was as though an automobile had suddenly driven through the office, and, of course, on the fifth floor that would be somewhat difficult. It was as though the entire city simply turned inside out. Whatever it was before, it was now exactly the opposite. You went down the street, and women were weeping, men were weeping.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was there any reason to believe the market wouldn't rally the next day?

HARRY HAY: It isn't that thinking. It was the fact that all of a sudden things had been totally wiped out. That was what happened because, you know, it really plummeted. When it really plummeted, all kinds of things went. These are the people who suddenly have gone in the morning and may be worth $100,000 and are worth nothing now or who owed; if they had bought on margin, they now owed; they owed, and they didn't have it to owe with.

MITCH TUCHMAN: There was no way to see how you were going to settle your debts.

HARRY HAY: Yeah. And these were, particularly, little people; you know, I would say not well-heeled people but office clerks. Like Bonnie and her sister, they owed. They had just begun to buy a little house, on which they had a heavy mortgage and maybe a small equity, but now this would be wiped out totally. It meant that their mother and an uncle and an unmarried brother, who were all in this house together, would all be out on the street. None of them knew what they were going to do. They were all down there saying, "What are we going to do? What are we going to do?" So, it was that kind of franticness. We hadn't had anything like that in the United States before. At least, we had had it in the [eighteen] nineties, but we'd had nothing like that since the First World War. The twenties had been relatively-- They had been mad and feverish and frenetic and so on, but there wasn't that kind of stark tragedy all of a sudden [staring you] in the face.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How was your family affected?

HARRY HAY: We were badly affected. My father was wiped out. But his wiping out probably came over the next two or three years.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It wasn't an instantaneous thing.

HARRY HAY: Well, I don't think he was instantaneous, because I don't think he was involved in stocks.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was he doing at that point? Did he have the orchard still?

HARRY HAY: He had the orchard, and he owned a big piece of property. He had had quite a lot of property at one time. For instance, when we were little kids, he owned a farm in a valley known as Beverly Glen. That ranch went from the crest of the hills to the east over to the crest of the hills to the west. At the top was the Bell mansion, which becomes Bel-Air, but that wasn't what it was called then. The Bells, I think it was Alonso Bell [Alphonzo Edward Bell]--he was gay, incidentally, I think--had the big house out in front, this house that now belongs to Nina Anderton, I think. But anyway, that was the house. We had the farm. We had a little old farm in Beverly Glen, and my father was simply holding this because he thought that one of these fine days that the property would be worth something for residences and so on. I can remember going out there for picnics on Sunday. There was a nice cave right up the street from where the street ended and the fence began. Let's see. He sold that in '24. He sold that to the Janss Company, but with that money he bought another piece of property, which was Hollywood Boulevard and Gower to—I don't know what the next street east is--whatever it is--but it was a very large block in there between Hollywood Boulevard and the next street down [Brokaw Place]. From Gower to [Brokaw], he had a big piece of property, and they had some houses on it and some buildings and stuff. The building on the corner was a drugstore, a brick building, and then next to it was one of the great old three-story, six- or ten-bedroom residences, which by this time was being used for dance studios and things like that. He had stocks in the Bernal Dias Building, which becomes the Broadway Hollywood, there on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. And believe it or not, that particular building, the stock in that building-- If you owned stocks in the building, you owed on them. By 1933 the stocks weren't paying anything. You had an obligation to pay off because the buildings all went broke. Everything was wiped out. So, these became obligations. They were of no asset [value] whatsoever. I don't know what stocks he was in. I've forgotten. I went through all these things, but I don't remember them now.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You continued working then for Haas through the following fall?

HARRY HAY: I had taken on the business; I would be there for a year. I was supposed to be reading law--and wasn't getting much law read, I might add, but I was learning all kinds of other things. I was all over the street. Oh, there were some riots in the city late in '29, early '30. I'm not quite sure what those riots were. They were probably unemployed riots. I remember the machine gun positions being up around the new city hall, which at this time was not finished. That's the city hall with the tower on it. It was in the process of being built. [The exterior of the city hall was completed in 1928. --Ed.] I remember one day I had to serve some papers in the municipal court on the third or fourth floor, something like that. I think the building itself went up to the ninth floor at this point, and then there were just empty spaces above. Anyway, when I went up to make that service--and this would have been when? About November, December, I guess, of 1929--I was wearing-- My mother had gotten me some wild clothes, and I wasn't quite sure how I can handle them. This was the period of knickers. We used to have knickers, and we used to have what we called plus fours. The knickers were ordinary golfing knickers, and they were knicker pants that fastened on a belt just below your kneecap. But the plus fours went down to the middle of your calf and were kind of real droopy. (If you can't remember what they looked like, Rudy Vallee was always wearing stuff like this.) My mother, on sale she had bought two pairs of sweater and socks to match, which you wore with the plus fours. These were a bright scarlet. I thought, "Oh, Mother, if you only knew what that color meant." I was wearing it that day, I remember, with a pair of brown, what they called salt-and-pepper knickers. I was standing in a crowd. I remember all of a sudden we were swept into the bottom of the city hall by police and by militia; so there was some kind of riot going on outside. I was not too clear on just what had happened. As I was standing there, just sort of peering to look out over the crowd, I was suddenly aware of the fact that the man in front of me was running his finger up and down my crotch. That was, of course, the first contact of this sort that I'd had since getting caught in the bushes two or three years before. I'm at this point where all you have to do is sneeze, let alone touch, and you immediately have an immediate erection, and I had an immediate erection; so that guy in front of me was practically leaning on me, taking full advantage of the full erection. Suddenly he whispered (so it was just through whispering up to me), he said, "Back up and go to the elevator." So, I backed up and went to the elevator, and the elevator took us-- It only went to the ninth floor; so we went to the ninth floor and then wandered around. We were in an area with a lot of sand, a lot of brick; so that it was still in the process of being finished and floored out. We stumbled around in there and found a place. So, he took out my cock and went down on me. Now, this is interesting. I couldn't see him--he had sort of a body odor that I didn't much care for--but I knew immediately, the moment he went down on me, I wanted to touch him. I wanted to go down on him. And it was not a thought. It was a trigger reaction. It was an automatic reaction. Automatic reaction I guess you'd call it. [It was] immediately what I wanted to do also--which I did. I was clumsy because I really didn't know what to do. He was excited and a premature ejaculator. So, I have just barely gotten his cock out of his pants--we didn't have zippers yet; these were still the button pants--I've just barely gotten his cock out and was just about to kiss him, or kiss it, when all of a sudden he came, and that sort of took care of that. It was messy, and the moment that this happened, he couldn't think of anything else but escaping at that moment. So, he had found himself keyed up, and he couldn't wait to get away. Well, of course, in this period I can understand it, because, having been caught, I think the penalty was twenty-three years, or something like that, and no questions asked and no question of appeal, and so on. So, these were frightening times. But anyway, because this happened, I now then had a new interest in life, and I began watching things. Several times, for instance, I made eye contact with several people on streetcars, but nothing came of it. Nothing came of it yet. One day I went out to serve a paper, and I remember it brought me out to Third and Western. I was on the old Third Street streetcar. (It went down Sixth Street to Western, then it went up Western to Third, and then it turned west on Third Street to La Brea. This was the way that trolley went.) So, I'm on this car, and I've made eye contact with someone just before we got to Western Avenue and Sixth. And he's beautiful! Oh, he's so exciting. This is wonderful. He's one of these people--I call them charismatic--with the eyes that I'm absolutely sure are the hottest things I've ever seen. He's at one end of the streetcar, and I'm at the other end, and there are all kinds of people in the middle, and here are these eyes just boring into me. He's got what we would call today a natural, a headfull of curls. I would guess he would be a man of maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, with this passionate face and this beautiful, full, soft mouth, and these eyes. I really do have to serve these papers. I have to get these papers served, and I have to serve them before four-thirty, and it's quarter after four now, and I've got to go through to La Brea, and all of a sudden he gets off at Saint Andrews and Third Street. I almost-- But, no, I can't. I've got to serve these papers. It isn't-- I'm just hanging onto the streetcar and watching him, watching him. I go out to La Brea, and I serve it, and I rush back to Saint Andrews, but he isn't there. He didn't wait. Of course, it was a half hour later, too. But he was just beautiful! And, you know, I eventually found out his name. I figured that he was a Catholic. There was a Catholic church there that I used to go to, and I went one time to mass, and I found out his name was Jim MacDonald. But anyway, I never was able to get together with him, but it shook me up. This must have been January, late January. I had been told things in the past. While I was still in high school, I knew that all kinds of these awful, perverted people and drunks and perverted people were running around Pershing Square, but I didn't know where or how. I'd heard some stories, all of them impossible stories told to me by fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who didn't know what the hell they were saying; they were repeating stories they'd heard about the awful things that went on in Pershing Square: how people went into Pershing Square and never came out again, were never seen again, you know, all kinds of horror stories that were involved. But the experience on the streetcar with this guy--the eye contact, and the fact that I came in my pants as a result of just sitting there on the streetcar and that contact--I began to realize I really have to explore some of these things. I've got to go farther than this. This can't stop now. I've got to know what this is all about.* [It's time now for me to begin learning what Matt nearly four years before had said would be there for me to learn when I was old enough to take care of myself. Of course, I'm still not of age. That guy up in City Hall had been one of the baddies that Matt had warned me about. But I have the sense about myself that I probably can begin to venture a little. I already have inadvertently learned some signs. Matt had told me about eye-lock. He couldn't describe it entirely, but he said that once I had experienced it, I would never mistake it. I can still hear him saying almost with tears in his eyes, "You're in a strange port in a far off land. The customs are utterly strange to you. The languages are so different they are frightening. Then suddenly a pair of eyes appear, looking deeply, powerfully, pleadingly, caressingly, desperately into yours. Your eyes are locked to each other's, and in that moment, though you may never understand a word he says, you know you are home and safe. -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Dear Matt, maybe the loveliest thing you ever gave was the kiss of life you brought to the fourteen-year-old who seduced you.] I've got to find out what you do. I've got to find out how you meet people. I've got to find what you do when you meet people. In other words, you just can't meet them. There has to be a next step: what do you do then? I've got to know. It's time. It's time I've got to find out. So, I figured out a way. Normally speaking, I would go to work, and I would take the L Streetcar, and I would come home at night, and I'd be home for supper. But I thought, "Why don't I decide that I will go to the library a few times?" The library would mean that I would take maybe a sandwich to work or something like that, and I would have it for supper, and I would go to the library, and then I would come home maybe nine o'clock at night instead of five-thirty. So, I started doing this. I'd go to the library a couple of times. I find it interesting and so on. And then one night, instead of going to the library, I wait until it's dark, and then I go to Pershing Square. I had been to Pershing Square many times because, just like you have now, there's a crisscross: you can go from Fifth to Sixth across [the square] either way you want to go. But in those years, different from what it is now, it had marvelous old trees, trees that had probably been there forty or fifty years. There were all kinds of bushes. There was lots of grass. Then there were dirt paths that went through. They didn't go straight; they meandered. I think there was probably a fountain in the center. But there were a lot of bushes, and there were benches, of course, in the bushes, but there were also a lot of spaces under the bushes where the children played in the daytime, and where, obviously, people could play at night if they wanted to. This occurred to me: this is what happened, and this is what it would be like. There weren't very many lights in it; so there were a lot of dark areas in the park. So, I go to Pershing Square, and it's already night. All of a sudden I'm aware of the fact that there are people passing me back and forth quietly and silently, but I don't really know-- All of a sudden I don't know what to do. I'm all of a sudden there, and I'm filled with a lot of fear and a lot of uncertainty, and I suddenly realize I don't know. I don't know what to do, and I'm almost ready to cry, [sighs] but I decide that, among other things, I guess I do have to go to the can. The can is where it still is; it's the corner of Sixth and Hill, and it's down underneath in the basement, or one of them is. So, I go to the can underneath the basement. I go to one of the stalls. I'm aware that there are a lot of men down there also, and men are looking at each other. All of a sudden I'm, again, a little uneasy, and I don't know what this all means. And so I think, well, just to kind of calm down, I'll go into one of the stalls. I also need the services of the stalls anyway. So, I'm sitting on the can and sort of thinking, and while I'm kind of idly thinking, I look down, and I'm aware all of a sudden that a foot has appeared from under the wall to my left.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In the next stall?

HARRY HAY: In the next stall. I don't think I remember that foot was there before. It's just odd. I see a foot. Then all of a sudden I see it move towards me, maybe an inch. It moves over. All of a sudden the hackles go up on the back of my neck, and all of a sudden I've got butterflies in my stomach, and I'm aware of the fact that something is happening and I don't know what it is. I'm not sure, but I think it's leading to something: all these thoughts that you have, that you're not sure whether this is all happening, except you're aware that all of a sudden you're plugged into something. Then, all of a sudden the foot moves another inch--and sits there. So, I thought, well, supposing I move my foot, I wonder what would happen. So I move it. Then the foot moves again, and then I move again. And it moves again, and I move again until our feet are about this far apart. We're really kind of stretched out here at this point. Then all of a sudden he pats; so I pat. So, then he pats twice; so I pat twice.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Pats what? The wall?

HARRY HAY: No, the foot. He taps his toe, as it were.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I see.

HARRY HAY: He does it once. So, oh-- [sighs]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Like a board game: foot checkers.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, it's the beginning of that. I wait a long time, and he'll start to move his foot back, and all of a sudden I pat. I thought, well--

MITCH TUCHMAN: It's like learning a language, isn't it?

HARRY HAY: By that pat I suddenly realize I'm at the point of no return because, if I've done it, then I've invited something. I don't know what I've invited, and I can't tell who he is or anything about that. I can't tell from the shoe who he is either. It's a worn shoe. I can't tell much about it. So, anyway. But the foot comes back, and he pats again. Then I pat, and then he moves over, and he pats twice. Then I move over, and I pat twice. [laughter] So, then the two feet are touching, and they're kind of rubbing against each other. It's contact between feet, but nevertheless I'm in full erection and a cold sweat all at the same time. So, I dress, as it were, get myself ready, and I come out of the stall, and he comes out of the stall. He's not the most prepossessing man I've ever-- He's not the man I would necessarily have picked on the street. He's plain looking, let's say, but [with] very bright eyes. He looks at me, and I think he decides that I'm probably, maybe twenty-one, but he's not sure.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Does that make a difference, twenty-one? Is there a legal--

HARRY HAY: Yes, anything under twenty-one would have been what we called Quentin quail. I think he decides to take a chance. We talk, and we make conversation for the moment, and I find out that he's not working. He's unemployed. He's just recently here from Saint Louis. I said, "Well, I can't always get away in the daytime, but maybe I could get away around noon." So, I make a date to meet him at an address on the east side of Los Angeles the next day at twelve o'clock. It turns out that this is his sister's house, and that's when she's away at work, and that's the only time that he can see people, as it were. So, I make a date to go out and see him the next day. I don't know what all this is going to come to. I have no idea what's going to happen. I think maybe we're going to talk, and maybe he'll tell me some things. Champ has no such ideas in mind. There's not going to be very much talk. There's going to be a lot of action on his part--and on my part. I do go out the next day, and it is a long way to East L.A., and it's difficult on the streetcars. It takes quite a while. It takes longer to get there than I thought it was going to take. I can't be away more than a couple of hours from the office, and it takes me a half hour to get there. But nevertheless I meet him the next day, and he initiates me into the joys of male sex, such lovely things as 69 and rimming. It is all of it terrific and wonderful and exciting, and I'm finding out what I wanted to know. Then, in the course of that afternoon, he discovers that I'm seventeen, and he just about has a fit; he doesn't know what he's going to do.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How old is he?

HARRY HAY: Thirty-three. But you see, the point is that I'm seventeen; so I'm four years under the age, and that would be real trouble, you know, if I wanted to make that kind of trouble. But I manage to persuade him that this is not my intention. My intention in molesting him was to find out exactly what it is we're finding out, and it's wonderful, except I have a hard time swallowing the stuff. I've never done that before. I mean, as we all recognize, it's difficult to handle a cock the first time, and the first time in your throat you have some problems, and you have some problems about whether or not you're to swallow come, and so on. But you also know that the drive and the urge and the need is so great that you learn to handle these little difficulties very quickly. I can't wait to repeat the process. So, therefore, I have a date the following day at noon and the following day after that at noon, so that I assume that I'm having a love affair, because that's what you have, that's what you do in those years.* [You have affairs if you're a sophisticate. If you are a romantic, you have love affairs.] Champ was, I'm sure, having a love affair, but in my case he would not have been the person I would have fallen in love with.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How long did this relationship continue?

HARRY HAY: Well, this relationship continued for the rest of the year until I went to Stanford, because, after all, I had made a contact. This is the period, a period like any period, when a guy connects up with a young man like this, it's considered a steady relationship. It's what the heteros do, and you have a steady relationship, too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, two things occur to me. I'll ask them both --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. at the same time. Did you continue your explorations, or did that cease now that you had someone?

HARRY HAY: No, now that I'd made the contact, I didn't go exploring again. I assumed that I was supposed to be remaining steady with Champ, and I had no one to ask that; so I assume that's what it was.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Then the other one was: Did you meet for anything other than sexual activity? Did you become friends and go out together in public, and anything like that?

HARRY HAY: No, because in the first place, I don't think that would have occurred to me. He was much older than I, and I wouldn't know how to explain him to the people I knew. I also was aware of the fact that I wouldn't explain him in any situation anyway because my feeling about what is now happening to me and how I'm feeling about him is not anything I can connect with my past, and so I can't see how to fet them all together. So I'm not thinking in those terms at all.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did it cause you any problems at all, either embarrassment or discomfort either to yourself or--

HARRY HAY: Yeah. Well, I found it embarrassing because--

MITCH TUCHMAN: I mean, you were regularly disappearing. Your pattern of behavior in the office must have changed somewhat as to when and how--

HARRY HAY: I would be out of the office two or three hours at a time anyway because, after all, I had a lot of services to make. I was running up and down the street from one lawyer's office to another or going to the courts. Lots of times papers have to be processed. You have to check them with the county clerk. You have to file them in and file them out when you go up and set the dates for calendars, for trials, and things like that. These are all papers that you go up and file. You use a certain amount of money to file things with. There's a whole procedure that you go through. I oftentimes had to go up to check people's estates, and I would be going through old county records and property records. And I would have to go to different parts of the city to find these property records. All responsibilities that I had, too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, this didn't particularly affect the performance of your job or make you--

HARRY HAY: I seldom would be gone more than an hour and a half or two hours, and when I went to Champ's I'd be gone three hours; so I couldn't do it as often as I would like, but nevertheless it didn't raise too many questions. He did come to the office a couple of times, and I was a little bit embarrassed because he had a decided lisp and he was a little bit obvious, and therefore his manner was quite different from the uptight manners of most of the people who came to the office, and I was afraid that would show. As it turned out, of course, it didn't show, but I was aware of the fact that it was different, and it frightened me. But that's about all I can say in that regard. I think I wouldn't have been so upset if he had been a more attractive man to me, but he wasn't. I had a certain feeling of propriety about this, but I don't think I would have been as uncomfortable if he had been more beautiful.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did he come by this nickname?

HARRY HAY: That wasn't his nickname. That was his name. That was the name his folks had given him, Champ Simmons.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, he wasn't an ex-boxer or something.

HARRY HAY: No, no, he wasn't. But I think his father, for instance, had named him Champ because, after all, this is what his son was going to be: you know, the champ thing. I think that he was stuck with it because a more "unchamplike" person you never saw. However, I have to say this: he was a very decent guy. He was a very kind, decent, patient man. He taught me many things. I'm sure that I must have given him a lot of trouble. He was unemployed. He had no job. He was living with a sister, and she gave him a little pocket money, but he didn't have much; so we couldn't go anywhere. I didn't have any money either. The money that I would pick up occasionally from process serving was not very much, and it would just about take care of lunches, and maybe, if I didn't eat for a couple of days, he and I could go have lunch together.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Weren't you being paid by Haas?

HARRY HAY: No. Oh, no. Oh, no. In those years, to read in a law office was in itself a great honor. This is not anything they paid for. Now you're thinking in "crass materialism," dear, which doesn't come into anybody's thinking till after the Second World War. In this earlier period, it was a great honor to be in a lawyer's office. You were lucky to be able to read law for free. Otherwise you had to pay.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you getting interested in law? I mean, did you begin to find law at all appealing?

HARRY HAY: I was already finding out law was the one place I didn't want to be. And after I'm finding all of this out, I'm going to talk to my father's older sister, my aunt Alice [Hay], who will tell me-- About the time she's asking me what do I think about law and what do I think about the work that I'm doing in the lawyer's office, and I eventually tell her very frankly what I think about the whole thing, and she said, "Well, now that you have said this, I can tell you that my father [William Hay] studied for the law at the University of Edinburgh." He would have been at the University of Edinburgh between 1845 and 1850, somewhere around in there. He graduated in the law and set up as a solicitor in Edinburgh with a firm and in that period discovered that he was not there to pursue and protect and enhance the law but to help people break it. This was something that had never occurred to him as what a lawyer was all about. He had thought it was to enhance the law, to explore the law, to find new ways to apply the law. In other words, an idealist. And when he found out that he was to help people to find out how they could break the law or how to make the law bend in their cases, it shocked him so that he left his job and he left Scotland. He worked enough so that he was able to make enough money to pay passage, and he took passage to New Zealand. He went to New Zealand with the idea of becoming a farmer there in that area, because this was a whole brand-new area and would be a different kind of farming from what he had been accustomed to at home in Brigg-of-Erran, in Perth, which was where the Hays had been farmers since-- I think it's 834 A.D.. I think that's when the first patent was given to the Hay clan. I think it was 834 A.D., something like that. It was under King David. Anyway, so he would go, and he would find out about sheep farming, and he would find out about wheat farming in New Zealand. He never went back to the law again. My aunt Alice, who admired that in her father, is telling me this with glee. She said, "I couldn't tell you that until after you had told me that the law was not for you either. I am so glad."

MITCH TUCHMAN: Nevertheless you did complete this year.

HARRY HAY: I had said that I would stay until June, and so I stayed until June. In June of that year I went back into the cow country, where I had gone every summer by this time since 1925. This is the year when I would build the great stack, the stack that would win all the prizes. That will be my summer. (Oh, no, no, no. I'm not sure at this point whether that was the year-- No, that's right.) I went to Nevada. I drove ray aunt Alice up there, and I went to Nevada, and that was the year I built the stack. I had a wonderful summer. This was the year I learned to stack hay, and I went from working on three to working by myself on a stack at twenty dollars a day and board--and then will go to Stanford the following fall.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And you matriculated with the notion of just taking a general, liberal arts education, or did you have a major in mind at the time?

HARRY HAY: Well, you see, at Stanford you wouldn't have picked it until your junior year anyway. They required that you took two years of general undergraduate cultural work and sort of prepared for liberal arts. What I did know was that I couldn't go into geology the way I wanted to do. I definitely didn't want to be a mining engineer. I couldn't go into paleontology. I'd have to go into oil. So, therefore, geology was out.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why did you have to? I mean, why did your father have this authority in that matter?

HARRY HAY: I could have defied him there, I think, but I don't know. He knew too many people at Caltech.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, you mean you couldn't have done geology at Stanford?

HARRY HAY: Well, I could have done geology at Stanford, and I did do some, but they were not a famous place for that. And for paleontology? No. Stanford would have been structural and oil geology. It wouldn't have been paleontology at all. If I wanted to go into paleontology, I'd have to go to Caltech. I knew that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How about through the Herbert Hoover connection? Did you have through your father-- Was there any connection to Stanford that way?

HARRY HAY: No, there could have been, except that I didn't go that way. What Stanford always did, they would go-- My connections here in the Four Hundred had a lot to do with Stanford because a lot of the regents came from the same Four Hundred crowd in Southern California and in San Francisco, and they were cross-connected that way. So that the board of regents for Stanford generally went over a group of people whom they sort of approved of. Then out of a class, out of a group of maybe a thousand applicants, there were entrance examinations and matriculation examinations given for Stanford. Stanford had a certain kind of a series of intelligence tests that they gave for their people. I've forgotten whether they had a regular name for them, and they were always held every year in March here. They graded people by thirds: there was an upper third, a middle third, and a lower third. The upper third automatically went through and were available for scholarships. The middle third were held on call. There were so many spots that were available, and if somebody turned it down, you were on a waiting list in the middle third. The lower third, you flunked; there was no chance. So, I passed easily in the upper third and automatically was assured the opportunity of going to Stanford the following fall, in the fall quarter of 1930, and that I would have a scholarship to go with it. In the course of that summer, working on the big stack-- The early part of the summer, there had been three men working on a stack. I was still pitching hay. This was the first crop, and it would have been about the first or the second week in June. We had these three men who were working on a stack, and they didn't do very well, and the stack fell down a couple of times, and they were drunk a couple of times and didn't make it back. It was merely because of the fact that they were not really very reliable that my cousin decided that he would use the excess strength I was beginning to show by this time. I was a bit of an embarrassment in the hayfields because I was working with hay pitchers and I was running over, taking all their shocks and all of mine and putting them all up at the same time, and they wouldn't stay; they'd all quit. So, my cousin figured, you're going to have to do something; you're going to have to harness this somehow. So, he said, "You and I will stack from here on out. We just won't bother trying to get stackers. We're not going to have any problems. We're going to have trouble getting stackers this year; so you and I will stack." I said, "Well, there are only two of us. There were three before." He said, "Don't worry about it. Two is fine. We can do two very well." He said, "You should be happy anyway because that will pay you fifteen dollars a day instead of nine, which is what would happen if you were three." So, it was kind of hard work, but I did it with my cousin for the rest of that cutting.* [The haying season in Nevada had three cuttings: one in the middle of June, one from the middle of July to the first of August, and one from the end of August to the middle of September. I had never been able to work the third cutting; I'd always had to come back to school just as it started. But this year, since I didn't start school until October 1, I was planning to work it.] The stacks which these other guys had built we kind of left up in one of the fields and went on down somewhere else. Right at the end of the summer, the third crop--the big stack, by the way, by this time has already been built, and everything's fine, and we come to the third crop--and we're back up in this first field where we were before, and we decided at this point what we would do: if a stack is built part way, we will cover it, but if there is going to be enough alfalfa left after all the stacks are capped out, I will attempt to rearrange its middle, where it had collapsed before, and then cap it out like all the rest. So, we decided that all the other stacks are rounded off and there was just enough hay left to cap this last one --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. off. So, I've got the stack going up. I've got it about eighty-five feet off the ground, and I'm ready to cap it out. I'm just about ten days before the end of the season. All of a sudden something happened--and I never did know exactly what happened--but all of a sudden the entire stack collapsed because it had been badly built and even topping it out wasn't any help. I fell eighty-five feet from the top of the stack onto the stackyard. The stackyard is such heavy-packed clay by this time because it had had so many weights on it that it's about the same buoyancy as concrete. So, I landed on my feet on the concrete, having fallen eighty-five feet. I didn't fall. I landed on my feet, and I'm sort of forced into a crouching position. I'm stunned for a moment, I can't move, and I'm not able to think of anything. I can't move at all. My cousin comes over to me, and he touched me, and I just kind of collapsed over, but I was still in this crouched position. After about fifteen minutes, I come to, and people are massaging me and pulling me out, and this, that, and the other thing, and I can shake myself, and I look around, and nothing's broken, and nothing seems to be bruised, and I'm feeling strange, but otherwise I don't notice anything, and I say, "I guess I'm all right." So, we pull the whole stack down, and we build it all over again. And I go home that night, and I'm aware of the fact that-- I wake up the next morning, and I feel as though I hadn't slept. I'm terribly tired. I'm just as tired as when I went to bed. Otherwise nothing. I've slept ten hours. This goes on to the end of the week, and all of a sudden I'm aware that I'm just-- I'm getting so tired, and I'm getting all worn down because I'm not resting. For some reason, I sleep but nothing happens; I don't rest. By the time I get back home again--and I've ridden in the train a couple or three days, and I've been in San Francisco for four or five days--I'm hurting by this time. I bend over, and I can't get back up again. A lot of strange things are happening. So, I told my father about the accident that I've had, and he said, "Well, we'd better have you looked at. Certainly before you go to Stanford, we have to have you looked at. There's a guy out in Covina who owes me some money for rent. So, why don't I take you out there for treatment?" So, he takes me to this chiropractor out in Covina, and the guy does the usual business: you know, putting you on the table that divides out and punching you up and down and jumping up and down on your spine, and so on. The result of whatever treatments he gave me, the result was that when I got home that night, I could stand for fifteen minutes, then I had to kneel for fifteen minutes, and then I could sit down for fifteen minutes, and then I could lie down for fifteen minutes, and then I had to get back up again. The cramps were so terrible. That was the way I got through the first night. It was just disastrous, and I told my father I can't go through this again. I just can't. But I went back for more treatments and more massage and more--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did they decide what the problem was?

HARRY HAY: Well, apparently he had felt that the fourth and fifth lumbar--the little bones, the lumbar sections of the spine--were out of place.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you ever have that confirmed by X ray or something?

HARRY HAY: Well, actually I found out eventually that [diagnosis] isn't possible. This is chiropractic stuff. If those were out of place, you'd be dead. The spine doesn't go out that far. But what I had done, I had fractured the lumbar thing and had chipped it a couple of places, and I had torn all the stomach muscles loose from the back of the spine; so I was really in pretty bad shape. But anyway, the chiropractor got me into some kind of condition, and about a week later I was able to take off for Stanford, which is what I was supposed to do. And when I went to Stanford, I signed up for water polo; this was going to be my gym-- The gym problem came up again. What am I going to do? Well, the sport I'll take is water polo because I love to swim, and by this time I spent as much time underwater as on top of the water, and I thought, well, this is something I'd like to do; so I'll take water polo. I'm playing water polo one day after school, and all of a sudden I reach up out of the water to throw the ball, and I suddenly go into a spasm, and I bend double. Well, bending double in the water is not a good idea because your ass is up and your feet are [down] and your head is down. So they were aware of the fact that there was trouble, and they pulled me out of the water, and I'm in this jackknife position, and I can't get out of it. So, they immediately rush me to the infirmary, and there an X ray is taken. That's where the X ray is taken for the first time. This is what happens. The guy says, "Oh, you're in bad trouble. Had we seen this six weeks ago, we could have done something about this, but as it is, you will probably never control those stomach muscles again, you will always have a little bit of a pot because you have torn those muscles loose." They didn't have traction in those years, which is what I really needed, but that wasn't known then. So, I get strapped into sticking plaster.

1.9. Tape Number: V, Side One November 17, 1981

HARRY HAY: One of the reasons I was thinking about that: I went by L.A. High the other day, and I was shocked at the building now. Even the old building that they had before has now been torn down, and it now looks like a real jail, either a jail or an armory or something. It's awful.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It's dreadful. I live two blocks behind that building right now.

HARRY HAY: Oh, you do? The only thing in front of it that's left--and this is something we were involved with--right across the street is the little Memorial Library. My class, our gift to the school was involved with that little library.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that originally part of the school?

HARRY HAY: No, that had been a private house. The property was bought by the class just before us, I think. The money from our graduating class was the money for the little building. It was to be named for Mr. [William H.] Housh, who had been the principal and had just died.* [The three- acre site was purchased with student funds to establish a park in 1922. The library, built during 1929-30, was to -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. have been named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, departing from the local tradition of naming libraries for California historical figures. Students at the high school objected, recommending perhaps a memorial to Housh instead. Ultimately the building was dedicated (April 29, 1930) as a memorial to First World War dead.] Snow Longley, who had been our poetry teacher, married him, and so this was all part of the thing that we were all interested in. By this time I had written a lot of poetry. Poetry anthologies had been put out, and I had a lot of poetry written and published and stuff like that. When I go to Stanford, this is also going to be part and parcel of my activity there too, because they put out an annual of poetry and short stories and essays and things, the Stanford activity of the English club. At the end of my first year at Stanford, I had a poem put out. It was published in the anthology for that year. It just so happened that the guy who won the poetry contest that year had written a poem about our love affair; that was the winning poem that year.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You were how long at Stanford? I thought you were only there one year.

HARRY HAY: I was there almost two years. I went through the usual things that you did at Stanford. At the end of my first quarter, that would have been the fall quarter of 1930, it was announced that Stanford was going to participate, or involve itself, in a whole new process of education which would be called the Oxford method, which would later be called independent study. This is the beginning of independent study, and it was being done at Stanford, and there were a couple of people who were coming from Oxford to Stanford as fellows to institute this program. As I said, this is the autumn quarter of 1930. In the winter quarter of 1930-31, people would be chosen from all four years--the freshmen, juniors, seniors, and sophomores--

MITCH TUCHMAN: They had quarters rather than semesters at that time?

HARRY HAY: Yes, they had quarters. The school year was divided into four quarters, and you went any three. It didn't matter which three you went, so long as you went three out of the four. In history, in the various types of civics, or orientation, and English, I guess, and political science: those would be the fields in which independent study would be developed. I had a political science thing, and I had a history, and I had an English; so I was on independent study in those three. That was pretty fascinating. My history work in independent study I found totally fascinating and very challenging, very interesting.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why didn't you stay--

HARRY HAY: Why didn't I stay?

MITCH TUCHMAN: --all four years?

HARRY HAY: At the end of the winter quarter of 1931, I came down with a massive case of sinus, a frontal sinus attack, and it was so bad that I was in the hospital for about two or three weeks. Coming towards the finals of the winter quarter, I couldn't handle the winter quarter. I was out that long, and I couldn't do it. I was told then that I had to get away from the fogbound coast. I had to get to a high, dry interior somewhere. They didn't care where I went. I thought, of course, of going to Nevada, which I would understand. I didn't recognize that I was going to go from the fogbound coast to an area where I was going to run into alfalfa dust, which itself is almost as bad in the other direction, but I didn't realize that then. I left the end of February or the first of March, around in the end of the quarter, which [would have] been the end of March, for Nevada. Because of the fact that this is the depths of the Depression, in so doing, I lost the job that I had at Stanford--I'm working as secretary for the engineering department--and I would have lost my scholarship, and I would have lost my fund. They had a scholarship fund, and then you had loan funds. I would have lost my place in the loan fund line, and I would have lost my scholarship; so that, financially speaking, I couldn't go back. Also I have not finished the end of my second quarter, and I wouldn't be able to take the exams. Although I could have taken the exams later, I couldn't have done it at that time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You had a medical reason.

HARRY HAY: Yes. I had to leave, and I realized that I probably would have to be away and in the desert area for at least a year before I could come back from health reasons at all. So, this is the reason why I left.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you stay in the desert a year?

HARRY HAY: Well, I went up to Nevada, to the ranch country where I had always worked, which was right on the edge of the desert, and I was there until September of that year. Then I came back down to L.A. In coming back down to L.A. and knowing that I wouldn't be going back to Stanford because I wouldn't be able to afford it, I was presumably going to be looking for a job. And this is when I came across-- My mother came across a call in the paper for actors to show up at the Hollywood Repertory Theater for a play that was being done, and I went up there to answer that call.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had you had any interest in acting, or did you just go there to respond to a job opportunity?

HARRY HAY: No, in the winter and spring of 1930-31, my first year at Stanford-- You had to take a certain number of cultural courses, and I saw that they had a course in drama. So, I signed up for the theater course, the drama course. It turned out that in the first quarter--it was a two-quarter course; a two-quarter survey, they called it-- and in the first quarter you prepared as an actor, and in the second quarter you prepared either as a writer or director. So, the actors were the material that the writers and the directors worked with, you see; in other words, you'd follow through on that particular thing. So that the people who were the writer-directors when I was in there as an actor had taken it the [quarter] before and had been actors themselves and come through on that process. So, I had taken this course, and I had thought that maybe I'd be fairly good at it. I expected to be. I turned out to be rotten. I turned out to be lousy. My pantomime was poor. My invention was poor. I just didn't do well at all in any of the little things, the beginning actors' exercises that were done. I'm just no good at any of this. And not only that, I didn't respond well. I didn't fit. It was just a mess. And then I remember at the fifth session--there were ten sessions or twelve sessions in the course--in the fifth session we were told to take a piece of a play script--this is the first time that we would have taken script and worked from it--and we were to set the stage for it. You'd be working alone; so, consequently, you would take a section where you would be able to set the stage for yourself and carry a portion of the scene through, based upon either dialogue which you handled yourself or a particular speech. The winter before I had seen Eugene O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed, and I had been just knocked off my feet. I had not seen the experimental theater before. This was just to me one of the greatest experiences of my life. So, I took a section out of Lazarus Laughed. It was a scene with Caligula. I set the stage, and I carried this thing through. At the end of my doing it, as I came down on stage, everybody stood up and clapped. I was bowled over. I didn't know what had happened or what this meant because I had been lousy up to this moment and all of a sudden something is happening. At the end of that session, about four of the directors came up to me and said, "Would you be in one of my plays?" And I said, "Well, yeah, I guess so. I don't know." And I started to work in people's plays. Then one guy in particular--I don't remember him very well--he picked a little play by Anton Chekhov, a one-act play, which is an old actor at his--and I've lost the word--but it was a benefit for him right at the end of-- He is past his prime, and he needs money in order to carry him through. So, there was a benefit being given in his honor, and he is to appear in the middle of the benefit and do some of the famous scenes for which he was famous in his acting career. He gets drunk in his dressing room, and he misses the performance. He comes out on stage to do his performances, and everybody has gone, and there is nobody left there. The only person who's left is the old prompter to tell him, who had been waiting for him to come out, and say, that I knew you would do this. I know that you're drunk. But anyway, there's nobody here, nothing but the ghosts. The play is called Swan Song. So, the old man then reminisces and goes through alternate rages and frustrations and the things that have happened to him in the past and why people don't love him. You can see that he's probably one of these temperamental guys who probably played every inch he was given, and overplayed it, and has probably alienated more people than he needs to have, and now he's a mess, and he's a drunk, and he's past his prime, and nobody's going to hire him anymore, and heaven knows what's going to happen to him. In other words, he's shot his wad. He goes through this whole business, and he then, because of the fact that he's drunk and a little bit crazy, he imagines that the house is full of people, and he does the two scenes he was supposed to do. One of them is the "Blow, blow, thou winter wind" from Lear; it's quite impressive. It's quite a tour de force for an actor to do. So, this is what I was to do. I remember the day that I did it on stage. Our class was at four o'clock in the afternoon; it ran from four to six, or something like that. We were the first in the season. There would be three or four weeks of just these, nothing but plays given from there on out. Ours was the opening gun, and we did it. And I was offered every play that came up because it was an enormous success. It was an instant hit, and all of a sudden I realized that I was an actor, and everybody else did too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What did the acting mean for you? What did you enjoy about it, or what was it giving you? Did you immediately think you wanted to be an actor?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes, I did. I did. All of a sudden I knew why I had never been able to answer any of the questions of my father, because I all of a sudden knew where I belonged, and I didn't know, really didn't know before. But it opened up the possibility. All of a sudden I felt that I was flying. This was the world. This was what I really understood. I was not particularly good ever-- At that point I wasn't any good as a director, and I wouldn't find out that I could be a writer until much later, but the theater-- I knew it was the theater. And therefore as an actor, I could be into the thing. I don't know how these things happened or why they did it. Oh, yes, I do. Anyway, as I said, I got offered four other plays to do at once as a result of this one.* [I did get two immediate offers from the O'Neill performance, one was for Chekhov's Swan Song and one was opposite a girl in some sort of antebellum, nostalgic ghost story. (I don't have much of a memory of this item.) Although the actress was superb, the one-act play hadn't been theatrically realized in the writing; it never really worked. After Swan Song made its debut, I got two more offers, both from student directors who were scrapping whatever they had been working on previously in order to have me work with them. As I remember now, they were not too successful. Working this way meant we were starting out too late, and there wasn't time, what with finals hovering, to wholly encompass new roles and hone them as I had been able to do with Swan Song. The two directors didn't suffer for this. The professor himself pointed out what was happening, giving us all A's for effort in the process. ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. The balance of my spring sashay into histrionics turned out to be "good classwork," but not necessarily "good theater." However, in the fall quarter of 1931 Stanford mainstage theater had elected to produce John Drinkwater's Bird in Hand. As a result of all this, I was invited to play the innkeeper, a pious and priggish man whose provincial yeoman's pride is that his inn, the Bird in Hand, has been inherited, without debt, from his father, and he from his father back three hundred years or more. Drinkwater's play was probably powerful for the London stage of the middle 1920s, and perhaps even a novelty for the New York stage of 1930. But for Stanford of the fall of 1931, where no one as yet is that familiar with the peasant stock of Thomas Hardy's rural England nor yet with just how irrevocably Britain's utter incapacity to cope with the reality of World War I had undermined forever the foundations of empire, our production director as well as actors were largely unable to bring it to life.] Apparently it was the custom of the drama department at Stanford to watch the series of plays and pick out about four of them and put them on the main stage for the people of Palo Alto. It would run three nights. This [Swan Song], of course, was picked. It was also picked as the crux play with the other plays around it. Critics came from San Francisco and from Portland and a couple of other places for that particular event because it was something that they apparently watched; the Stanford Theater was apparently fairly well known at that time. So we were offered to do that play and one other play at the Geary Street [Theater] in San Francisco in June, I think, just at the end of the quarter. I played it up there, and I played it a couple more times, different places. The following fall, when I came back to Stanford, I was going to major in English and theater. This is where I was going to go, because this is what I wanted to do. But I also was kind of interested in history too. I would still be a general undergraduate, but I had an idea I was going to be moving toward history and theater and, possibly, Renaissance development, something of that nature, which was just beginning to open up in those years. So, that was already something that had happened to me. Oh, one thing that I do have to mention is that by this time, I have been-- Let's see, how many by this time? I'd had about four or five affairs by this time. And, as you know perfectly well, what happens when you're just brand new and you're in college and you've had a success, such as a theatrical success, and you've had four or five different affairs by this time, you know everything! And I knew everything. The one thing that I hated--I just hated it--was this business of pretending. I couldn't pretend, and I couldn't remember who I'd lied to, and I couldn't remember how many hats I was wearing at what time; it was just too confusing. I was by this time aware of the fact that I had a theatrical type of personality anyway, and I wanted to be involved in the theater, but I didn't want to be involved playing theater in straight roles because that didn't suit me very well. So, I decided I wasn't going to lie anymore: I'm going to find out what living as a homosexual meant. So, I decided to come out on campus. And I did. I came out on campus in the fall, let's say, October 1931.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this an utterly unprecedented event?

HARRY HAY: Yes. Well, largely unprecedented event, because there were lots and lots of closet cases on campus, of course; and they were horrified and shocked.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you know what to do or say?

HARRY HAY: No!

MITCH TUCHMAN: What did you do? I guess that's what I was going to ask you.

HARRY HAY: I just told everybody. I told everybody I knew.

MITCH TUCHMAN: As it came up in conversation, or did you go up and initiate the conversation?

HARRY HAY: No, no. At Stanford in those years--and this is still a very prim time as far as most people are concerned; so coming out is a little different than coming out would be today-- I had been rushed by a number of fraternities at Stanford. I had been rushed in the spring, but I was still being rushed in the early fall, and so I just told all of them. That for most of them was disastrous, and as a matter of fact, a lot of them were terribly shocked, and I think the closet cases just climbed the walls: "He'll expose me too." I didn't realize all this until much later, of course, but this is what was happening. I belonged to an eating club, which I had joined in the spring of the year before, and I told them. Now, this eating club wouldn't throw me out, because after all an eating club is simply a way by which you got your meals. It was a process. It was an institution at Stanford. I think half the eating club were gay anyway. But, anyway, they were startled, and they were a little shocked, and they said, "Well, just keep it to yourself," and "So long as you don't disturb or bother anybody else, it'll be OK." I knew quite a number of people with whom I had been associated here in L.A. before I'd gone up there, and they went through the usual business of "You'll understand if we don't come around too often, because we just can't afford to be seen in certain situations. I hope you'll understand." They went into that little number. I had about four friends, four or five friends, who were very dear friends, with whom I would spend most of my days: a woman by the name of Jeanne Hay (same name as mine, and we called ourselves cousins by preference, although we probably might be very distant relatives by that time). There were not too many Hays in the United States--I knew which line she came out of; she knew which line I came out of--but, anyway, we were devoted friends. We loved each other dearly. I loved to dance with her. She was a magnificent dancer. We won all kinds of prizes from all kinds of different places. We danced together a great deal. I loved to dance. I didn't find out until-- The spring of '31 was the time when I danced with a man for the first time and discovered that that was real heaven. But next to a man, Jeanne was the best I ever danced with. But, anyway, so, there was Jeanne Hay; there was David Hawkins. David and I had fallen into each other's company the first day of our freshman year at Stanford. And I guess, until I left Stanford, I probably spent at least eight hours of every day in his company. We were total best friends immediately, at once.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did he feel about this? Did that affect your friendship?

HARRY HAY: I'll come to that, but-- I forgot to mention the fact that David and I saw each other all the time, and because of the fact that we were freshmen and bright, we were in independent study in the same groups in many cases, so that we were together in classes, and we were together before school, and we were together after school and until bedtime. We were just with each other all the time. He had the same kind of humor that I had: he was a very zany, gay, effervescent, bubbling sort of a person and always thinking of all kinds of fun. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and a sense of humor that matched mine. We hit it off beautifully. He had come to Stanford with a set of records, knowing that one of his roommates would have a windup phonograph, one of the little flat things. The set of records that he had come to Stanford with was [Maurice] Ravel's Bolero, played by Ravel himself and the Concerts Lamoreux Orchestra on a Brunswick Gold Seal set. This is the fall of 1930, and the Bolero has just hit the art world, and it's the rage in all directions, and everybody's making recordings of it.* [Ravel debuted the work in Paris, November 22, 1928. The first American performance was November 14, 1929.] [Serge] Koussevitsky had a recording which was three records, and Ravel's was four. It was the longest of the sets. The moment that [David] played that, the first -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. time I'd ever heard it, it opened up the whole world of modern music and art to me. That was my gateway, through Ravel's Bolero. I'd never heard anything like it before, and I would never be the same after that. I would immediately begin to understand and want to know about [Claude] Debussy and [Erik] Satie and others, [Francis] Poulenc. I also wanted to know about the modern artists who were connected with them. I learned about Ida Rubenstein, who was the dancer for whom Ravel had written the thing. David and I had a ritual: every day after school, I went to his room at four o'clock in the afternoon, and we played Ravel's Bolero every single day. We played it at least once, maybe twice. There was a guy [who] was a graduate [student] who was up on the fifth floor--this is Encina; Encina is the place where all freshmen live, and on the fifth floor the graduates live, or some of them do. It's a huge, old, red brick barn, and it was built-- One of these barns that was built with a main section, main arm, and then two arms on either side, and they're connected by a bar across the thing. So, you've got these central courtyards, and the bottom of the courtyard was concrete, so that anything that happens in that courtyard just reverberates through this entire red brick building, which was metal and concrete. So, here we are busy playing Ravel's Bolero down on the first floor, and it's reverberating up through the whole hall. If you remember how the thing-- It's simply a series of repeats over and over again. Finally, one day one of the guys upstairs hollers down, "If you don't quit playing that goddamned record over and over and over and over again, I'm going to come down and bust the goddamned thing." We realized that he didn't know it was four records long, not just one record that we were playing over and over and over again. We used to laugh about that. [David and I] were always together, and if we weren't together, people would look around to see where the other one was, because we were inseparable. The way that we kept track of each other was that I would whistle the oboe section, and he would answer with the bassoon, not the main passage, but one of the other passages in between. Because we knew the thing so well, we probably could have orchestrated it, and so, consequently, we could use any one of those passages, and we'd call each other. David was one of these guys who was an attractive, charismatic, almost like a Peter Pan-type of personality, and so he always had at least four or five girls on the string, and they were all madly in love with him one way or another. It got kind of messy and kind of difficult. He couldn't remember what he'd told one girl and the other. He was always getting himself into terrible trouble. He used to say to me, "You know, if I had the sense I was born with, I would simply drop all of that and fall in love with you," because we were together all the time; so "if I fell in love with you, all our problems would be solved."

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this before you had come out?

HARRY HAY: Oh, no, no. You remember, I had come out with Champ before this.

MITCH TUCHMAN: No, I mean publicly at Stanford.

HARRY HAY: Oh, before I came out at Stanford? I think this was before, because I had told him at once. You know, I told him immediately that I was gay. I think I told David everything about me by the time we had been together maybe a month. So, I mean, I didn't know too much about being gay, but I also knew that that wasn't possible. I simply said, "It isn't that easy, David. That's not the way it works," because I knew that he was not gay, and I knew that he never would be gay. It was one of these things-- It was a heartbreak. It would have been an absolute perfect solution had he been gay, but he wasn't gay. The mere fact that we could settle down sexually was not something I wanted to do.

MITCH TUCHMAN: When you made this announcement, or continuing series--

HARRY HAY: Oh, hold on. That brings me back. There was Jeanne. There was David. There was a guy by the name of Billy Leslie. The three of us, the four of us were inseparable, I guess.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I just wondered if you had any reason to regret it or wish you hadn't said anything.

HARRY HAY: No, I don't think I ever did, because those four and one or two others around sort of said, "Well, we knew this all along. We suspected it was probably true. And now that you've gotten that off your chest, and you say you're feeling fine about it, now we'll tell you what we have to do for the weekend."

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were there other gays on campus? Well, surely there were, but did they make contact with you? I mean, were they wishing they had the nerve to make this announcement too? What was the situation generally with the gay students?

HARRY HAY: There was one guy with whom I used to have sex, who was a kind of a nice guy, who regretted the fact that I had done this because, he said, "Now I can't be seen with you on campus because it would expose me." That made me feel dirty because I didn't understand why he had to feel ashamed. If he was gay, why didn't he come out too? I didn't understand why he didn't come out.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you the only one who did while you were there, to your knowledge?

HARRY HAY: Yes, yes, as far as I know. I thought, "Well, you can be seen with me, because David is not gay, and he's seen with me, and Jeanne's not gay, and she's seen with me, and Billy's not gay," and then I thought, "Well, I'm not sure about Billy." But, anyway, Billy or not, whether he was gay or not, they're still seen with me. "They don't have any problems. Why do you have to have problems?" I had kind of liked this guy. Because of the fact that he couldn't see himself being seen with me, it made me feel badly--for him. And I felt dirty because I had let him touch me. There was a beautiful man by the name of Leo Gantner, who was out of the Gantner-Smith suit family. His mother was one of the Vallejos of Vallejo, which is one of the areas in the North Bay region. He was obviously very gay on campus, and I saw him a couple of times. I found him a very attractive person. There were other gay people on campus with whom I'd had some contact.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But you were the only one who'd done this remarkable thing.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, but as far as they were concerned, it didn't make any difference. No, that didn't affect them. What did affect was that an awful lot of the straight people whom I knew immediately also shied away.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you have any reprimand from the university itself in any way?

HARRY HAY: No, the university never raised its eyebrows.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And did the word get down through friends and L.A. residents at Stanford to your parents?

HARRY HAY: No. It had no repercussions of that sort, at least not that I know of. However, it's true that a lot of people cut a wide berth. Whenever I came across campus, they'd always get interested in the bush on the other side of the road.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you become extreme in any fashion to act out this role, to go along with the announcement? Affecting any manner of dress or mannerism?

HARRY HAY: No. No, I don't think so. I don't think I did. I had a pair of violent blue pants--I recall that because they were almost what we would call fluorescent blue--which I used to love to wear. It was a heavy material. They were warm, but they were not exactly what the conservative college person would wear. I would wear that with brightly colored shirts and stuff. David would always say, "It's wonderful. I think the next time we go to San Francisco, I'm going to buy you a pair of iron shoes, because if you don't wear them, you'll take off." So, there would be comments of this sort going on, but I felt that I had a right now to do this because I was free. One of the important things that happened to me during that period was that-- Well, let's see, I guess it would have been October. I've just signed up for gym, and I'm looking around the gym; we're taking exercise on one dappled afternoon. The light that came in through the gym windows would have a dappling effect on the floor; it was kind of pretty. There was a lovely fairy standing about, oh, four spaces in front of me and about five spaces to my left. So, I very carefully memorized the spot where I thought he was, and then I went over and looked at the number that probably was in there, and then I went and checked out and found out his name that way. At least, I thought I was pretty sure that was the one who he was. So, then I wrote him a little note and invited him to tea, to come to my apartment--because by this time I had an apartment, a room of my own--and I invited him to tea. His name was James Broughton. I mention that because he's a very well-known poet now.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Uh-huh, and filmmaker.

HARRY HAY: And filmmaker, yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And former husband of-- Oh, no, I don't think they were married.

HARRY HAY: Of Pauline Kael?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Of Pauline Kael. I don't think they were married.

HARRY HAY: They have a child together.

MITCH TUCHMAN: They have a child, but I don't think they were married.

HARRY HAY: He was married, however. He does have a son. (I've got to find out what happened anyway.) So, I seduced him on campus, and we had a mad, passionate love affair for about a month. He had a friend by the name of Neil, who came to me and told me that James had had some difficulty with "this sort of thing," being a sissy, and the family was very concerned, and his aunt in particular was terribly concerned, and the family would appreciate it very much if I would find a way to give him up. So, actually pressure was brought to bear. He said, "At least let him know the kind of life you are heading him into." So, I thought, well, I don't know what that means, but maybe what they mean is something about what the gay life is about in San Francisco. I had by this time had some good experiences in the gay life in San Francisco, and I also knew the seedy, the cruddy side of it too. So, one Saturday night I made it a point: we were going to spend the weekend in San Francisco. His folks were away, and so we were going to spend the weekend in the house he had there in San Francisco. I took him and showed him all the seedy places that I knew of and the rough places and the kind of nasty places and so on. At the end of the evening, he said to me, "I'd just as soon you didn't stay." And I go, "Nobody's expecting me here in San Francisco." He said, "Well, I don't want you to stay. I don't want you to stay. What I've seen, I don't want to go on with this life at all." So, there was nothing I could do except take the milk train home to Palo Alto, which I did. I got home by four in the morning. I wrote to him a couple of times and got the brush-off. And I didn't see him again until the Faerie gathering in Colorado last year. We immediately fell in love all over again. No. No, but we are very great friends now. We hadn't seen each other in fifty years. That was one of the highlights, one of the events of the Colorado gathering, that the two oldest men in the place should see each other after not having seen each other in fifty years but had been lovers fifty years before. So, a lot of the kids were very delighted with that: that we could be good friends. Well, we are friends now. He's been down here several times with his lover. John and I have been north to see him. So, we have now, I would say, a very good and enduring relationship at this point.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At this point we could either bring you back down to L.A.--

HARRY HAY: Why don't we stop for the moment? [tape recorder turned off] While I was at Stanford, I followed up the same thing that I had done with my experiences in Los Angeles. Here in L.A. I had been a soloist for the glee club in L.A. at the high school, and at Stanford I was bass soloist for the glee club at Stanford too in addition to my work on stage, as it were. (I never did any musical plays at Stanford. I don't know why, but I just never got into that.) However, one of the incidents I might mention is that in the interim between my getting well, or getting well enough to travel from the hospital experience in sinus--that would be in February of 1931--and when I knew that I was going to be going to Nevada, I had a certain amount of business that I had to take care of. I had to take care of my clothing and the books and stuff and get myself in a position where I could travel. Also I couldn't get into Nevada at this point; they'd had a heavy snowstorm, and I wouldn't be able to get in for about three weeks. So, I was just kind of stalling until I could leave Stanford and go on up there. I spent a little time in San Francisco. While I was in San Francisco, I remember there was a young man who was making up his mind whether or not-- He had been-- He had gone-- Let me put it this-- His name was Robert Hunt. He was the son of Myron Hunt, an architect, a well-known architect in Pasadena. Bob Hunt the previous summer had gone to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he had been picked up or--shall we say?--fallen into a relationship with the poet Witter Binner. And Witter Binner had fallen madly in love with Bob Hunt, and nothing would do but that Bob Hunt should forthwith and withforth rush back to Santa Fe and become Witter Binner's private secretary. Bob Hunt had been given six months to make up his mind whether or not he wanted to leave "Babylon-by-the-Sea," either the San Francisco variety or the Los Angeles one, and go to the hinterlands of Santa Fe. So he was in San Francisco making up his mind when I met him in January or February of 1931. Bob Hunt, again, was one of these people who to me was sort of an important experience, because he was very kind. He was very good to me. He acted as an older brother and sort of a mentor, showing me various things, explaining to me, telling me background--again, I began to get some of the historical background that I would find useful later on--and introducing me to a wide variety of types of experience. He was one of the people who suggested that I go and see the great German dancer Mary Wigman, and that for me was another one of the eye-opening experiences of my life. Bob also introduced me to the kinds of goings-on that the young Gumps would be involved with. Richard Gump and his brother both were gay, and they had a variety of events and soirees. One night, I remember, we went to a party that they gave in the kind of upper warehouse of their building. There were a whole bunch of dancers there from Tahiti who had come in a party with a woman whose name was "the Princess Stevenson." (I think she was a daughter of Robert Louis Stevenson. Princess was simply the name that was given because she had certain connections with the island Tahiti by this time. I don't think it was anything more than that.) But, nevertheless, it was the first time that I'd ever seen beautiful men, beautiful Tahitian men, dance with each other, and this was a very exciting, exotic experience. So, this is something I remember from Bob Hunt.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the rest of that life like? Were there bars and cruising places then, or was it a different sort of thing?

HARRY HAY: In San Francisco?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah.

HARRY HAY: San Francisco in that period in a way-- It had one or two magnificent spots in it. There was one club, there was one experience that I would wish every young man could go through. Of course, this is Prohibition period; so, therefore, this was a speakeasy. The speakeasy was right near the tunnel-- I think it's the Bush Street Tunnel at Stockton and Bush. Or it was the Stockton Tunnel where Bush Street crosses, or something like that. Anyway, the name of the club was Finocchio's.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I've heard that name.

HARRY HAY: Yes, but you have heard it in an entirely different way. The original club belonged to Madame Finocchio. Joe was the bouncer. She had married him simply because this was a convenience thing, and he acted as the bouncer for her. Madame Finocchio was a magnificent, statuesque lesbian. I would say that she easily stood six feet in her stocking feet, and she had a lovely hourglass figure. She loved huge hats with all kinds of feathers and furbelows and things on them. She would sit at the cash register, this marvelous, statuesque figure with these great hats, and these very handsome young women all around her at all times, and, as I said, Joe was the bouncer. Finocchio's in that period was run, was more or less organized by a maitre d'hotel by the name of Roy. Roy was the one who organized what went on in the place and sort of checked out everybody. In order to go to Finocchio's, you had to be taken by people who were already accepted members there. It wasn't a formal membership; it was an informal thing. You met Roy on a given afternoon, and he would interview you, and he would talk to you, and he would decide whether or not you were the sort of people that he would want at his club. I was introduced to him by Bob Hunt and by Frank Fenton, who was a professor of English at San Francisco University in that time (had a lovely little house on Maiden Lane on Russian Hill). So, Frank and Bob took me there, and Roy said, "Well, now, we'd be delighted if you'd be one of our patrons. Why don't you give me a call before you come up from Stanford on a given weekend, and I will tell you when to come." Now, then, what he did was this: I would call him up on a given Thursday, or something, and say, "I'm coming up for the weekend," and he would say, "Well, don't come in Friday. Come in Saturday. Come in around, oh, maybe eleven o'clock." Now, what he was doing, he was tying people together whom he thought would like each other and would get along with each other. If there were rough people or if there were people who were looking around for new meat, or something like that, if he put you in that classification, he'd put you in the time when they would be there. But he decided that that was not where I belonged, and so, consequently, he had me classified in an entirely different way.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did he not want anyone solo in there at all? Did he want everybody paired up somehow in this fashion?

HARRY HAY: No, no, but people who would be compatible with other people who were coming in whom you might not necessarily know. But this is the time when, in order to meet a man from another table, you always sent a glass of wine or a bottle of wine and your card. Roy took it from one place to another, and you either accepted it or you didn't. That was the way those pickups were made. There were also pickups made at the bars too, at the bar itself, you know, cruising the bars, but it's handled in a social way. Roy ran as cool a ship-- He was not allowing people in there he wasn't sure of. He knew who they were, because after all it was a speak. And it was a gay speak at that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did it have drag entertainment, as it came to be known later on?

HARRY HAY: Not then. Not then, oh, no. Well, there was drag entertainment, yes, but it wasn't commercial. The entertainment was what you brought into the place. People came and played the piano or sang, or people came and danced. People did acts. People did performances. This was still the time of vaudeville.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was it gay men and lesbians?

HARRY HAY: Yes, gay men and lesbians, but only gay men, as far as I know. In other words, I don't think there were any heteros in there ever.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It drags real estate prices down.

HARRY HAY: [laughter] Yes, of course. Whenever, for instance, the Abbey Theater, the Irish Abbey Theater, was in town, half the cast would be at Roy's. (As a matter of fact, it wasn't known as Finocchio's. Half the time it was known as Roy's, the bar itself. It was quite a large place. It probably held at least three hundred people. It was a very large place.) Abbey Theater would show up about midnight, after theater, and they would have supper sent up there in the establishment. I remember one night I called, and Roy said, "Don't come in Friday. Come in Saturday about midnight." He said the Abbey Theater was coming in, and Barry, who was a very tall, beautiful, statuesque blond, one of the young guys--now I can't remember what his last name was--he said, "Barry's coming in [Saturday], and he wants to do Romeo and Juliet with you. So," he said, "you'd better brush up on it, and you'd better remember all the--" And I said, "Well, what parts?" He said, "Well, Romeo, of course, silly. Barry wants to be Juliet." Barry was much bigger than I was, a great big, ham-handed blond. [sighs] He was going to be Juliet to my Romeo. So, I said, "Well, what scene?" And he said, "Well, do the balcony scene. Get that up, and be up on it." So, I did. He and I did the balcony scene, dressing ourselves up with tableclothes and bedspreads and curtains from various places and plumes from here and there. This was not an uncommon thing to do. There were all kinds of people who knew about it. We had an audience of about three hundred people, but they were, again, people whom Roy had picked. He knew who'd be coming and knew there wouldn't be any rough stuff. He knew the people who would be compatible and who would enjoy that, or might even participate, as many of the people did, because we decided to do the ballroom scene later on, just for the hell of it, and half the audience was in it, you see. So that it became a joyous sort of bubbling, fairylike affair. It was really great. And this was not uncommon to have happen. Various people would be involved. So, many of the nights at Roy's were wonderful. I met all kinds of interesting people there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: By the time you were at Stanford, was your life, say, fully gay?

HARRY HAY: Yeah. Well, all of this happened the spring of '31, and then the following fall, when I came out, and into the winter was my San Francisco life as far as Roy's was concerned. It was fully gay and wonderful and exciting and the normal, natural thing to do and be. By this time I had met all kinds of people. He was very smart. I learned lots of things from Roy, and Roy was very kind. I can only wish that any young gay man could go through the handlings of an older person like Roy and have things worked out by him, because, for example, one night--I don't think I can put a date on it-- oh, yes, I can: it must have been November of 1931--Roy came over to me with a bottle of wine, not a glass, but a bottle of wine and a glass and a card, and he said, "I have been told to bring this over to you, and I want you to return it."

MITCH TUCHMAN: Return it? Like reject it?

HARRY HAY: Reject it, yes. I said, "Well, whom am I rejecting, Roy?" And he said, "Two tables in front of you and two to the right"; there was a man with dark hair in a pompadour, a rather shining pompadour. I looked over, and he looked a man in his thirties perhaps, looked rather interesting, sort of piercing eyes, a little pushy, a little sort of thrusting, but I thought, well, why, no, I don't think I want to return it. He said, "I won't say anything more, but I strongly urge you to return this. I'm afraid this is just not good for you, and I'm afraid you'll be hurt." I said, "Roy, I think you're underestimating me." He said, "Shh," like this, "shh," in fury, and he put the bottle down, and he said, "Shall I return the card to the gentleman?" And I said, "If you please." So, he returned the card to the gentleman, and the gentleman came over to my table, and we finished the bottle of wine together. He was an Englishman, upper-class Englishman by his accent and by his cut, which I recognized immediately since it was the same speech my mother had. I went with him to his suite--not room, dear, suite-- at the St. Francis [Hotel]. It was on the second floor, and it was an enormous suite. I would have thought it was like the bridal suite, but it wasn't. It was a suite for a visiting VIP obviously, because it had a very large bedroom and bath, and then there was a sitting room, and then there was a sort of a dining, not a dining room, but it had a dining table, and a balcony that overlooked the square, Union Square. When we got back--and this is like two o'clock in the morning or two-thirty in the morning--he had a Welsh rarebit and some champagne sent up, and so we had a little supper, as it were, before we went to bed. Then we went to bed, and his sex wasn't that good. As a matter of fact, I felt it was a little on the dull side. He didn't give himself over. His kissing was not what I wanted it to be. I was the sort of full-blown, effervescent sort at this point, and I loved to kiss, and I loved to caress, and I loved the full-body contact. I liked every kind of sex you can think of, in all kinds of directions, and he was a little on the prim side.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, did you find out what Roy's reservation was?

HARRY HAY: You're rushing me.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I'm sorry.

HARRY HAY: At this point I have to--

MITCH TUCHMAN: But so is the machine. That's what I'm concerned about. So is the machine.

HARRY HAY: Oh, I see, OK. He was very cagey about himself. He was immediately aligning me up for not only a weekend but for three weekends in San Francisco: what we're going to do here and what we're going to do there, and we'd have dinner at the Princess so-and-so's, and we're going to have lunch the following day, and we'll do something else. He said, "Of course, you will need a morning coat for the reception tomorrow morning." And I said, "Well, I don't have clothes like that. I'm just up from Stanford, and all I have is what I've got on." [tape recorder turned off] --a morning coat and striped trousers I had to have for the occasion. That would mean I'd also have to have a little gray waistcoat too. I simply said that I didn't have clothes like that. I didn't own such clothes.

1.10. Tape Number: V, Side Two November 17, 1981

HARRY HAY: So, I said, "Well, I don't have clothes like that." And he said, "Well, you'll have to go back down to Stanford and get them." And I said, "Well, I don't own clothes like that. I don't live that kind of a life." And he said, "Well, you're a beautiful young man, and you're very well bred, and you're obviously well born, and why don't you have clothes like that?" And I didn't know what to answer, and not only that but he was making me feel like a fool. I felt so very strange about all of this. And he said, "Oh, well, that being the case, undoubtedly all these engagements that I have been making in your name, we simply have to call them off because you haven't got proper clothes. You simply can't be going around that way, and I can't afford to be seen in the presence of people who aren't properly dressed." So that was how that ended. He went into one of the other rooms, probably the bathroom, and I was there in the bedroom, sort of feeling nonplussed and feeling like, you know, all of a sudden I had three heads. I felt very strange. He had been very rough about this. I wasn't accustomed to actually being treated this way or being handled that way and thinking of myself that way. It hadn't been a particularly exciting evening. I hadn't been very pleased with that, but I thought he was pleasant enough company. He was sort of intriguing in a variety of ways, and I thought I would like to be in his company a little while, but I wasn't accustomed to this kind of a rough sort of brush-off. At least, I had never run into a brush-off of that nature. I was looking around, and I suddenly thought, well, I wonder who he really is. I think he's different than he's told me about. I don't really know him. I don't know his last name. I wonder who he is, I thought idly. I was sitting at the dressing table, and I opened the middle drawer, and in it was what we call a dressing case. In those years it was something that almost all people had. My father had a dressing case, for instance. My mother had a dressing case. It would have brushes in it and a comb, and it would have manicure things, and it would have maybe pomade; if you had a mustache, mustache wax. The various things you needed for grooming your head and your face and things would be in a dressing case, and it was nearly always on a dressing table. I saw this dressing case, but I also saw the coronet and the crest on the cover of it, and I knew that he was connected with the royal family.* [I wondered if perhaps he might be the Duke of Kent. But I guess he was just one of the royal cousins, one of King George's brothers' boys.] Eventually, when I was in the theater, I always spoke of myself as the duchess, and so this, of course, was the start of that little amorous fantasy on my part. But anyway, as soon as he came back into the room, he said, "Well, we must be on our way." I said, "Well, aren't we going to have any breakfast?" We had had champagne and Welsh rarebit the night before. I thought at least we would have some coffee and some toast or something. I was quite hungry. He said, "Well, you'll have to arrange that for yourself." So, I found myself sort of being shown out of the suite. I felt like I had been cast out. I really didn't know how to handle this or what to do about it. So, I thought, well, the first thing I should do is go back and apologize to Roy. He was right: I shouldn't have gone through this. This was an embarrassing and humiliating experience for me, and he was quite right. -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. This was a Saturday morning. I knew Roy wouldn't be there until about three o'clock in the afternoon, which is when he got there, and he would begin to arrange things for the evening; if there was to be any catering to be done, he would be ordering it at that time, and so on. So, I waited until about three o'clock, and I went down there to Finocchio's. I rang, and Roy came to the door, he said, "Oh, it's you." I said, "Roy, I need to talk to you, and I need to apologize." So, he let me into the little sitting room, and I apologized, and I told him how badly I felt about having crossed him up. He said, "My dear, I knew who this person was, and he's very rough on people. I am not in the position that I can refuse him entry, or I certainly would. But because I'm not able to do that, the next best thing I can do is guard to see that he doesn't hurt some of my precious people." (This is the way he said it.) He said, "I didn't want you to be hurt, and I knew that he would be rough on you, and I knew that you would feel badly as a result of it. And so I hope you've learned your lesson." And I said, "Yes, I have." So that there were future times when people would send me a card with a bottle, and I'd look at Roy, he'd say, "It's OK," but other times he would say, "Send it back," and I would send it back without any argument. SECOND PART DECEMBER 1, 1981

MITCH TUCHMAN: OK, we were at the point of beginning an acting career for you, an acting career that leads to political consciousness.

HARRY HAY: Well, not remembering what I said last, we will now plunge into the unknown future. I had been talking about the fact that I did come [back] to L.A. and simply that my mother had noticed the ad in the paper calling for people to go to the Hollywood Playhouse for a new production. I suppose I had said that the company that was moving in there had been known at the Copley Square Theater in Boston, and they had been a repertory company. They had come here--they were mostly English actors and actresses--and they had come here to get careers in the movies. They felt that to do these plays onstage would bring in a little money and would show them; so they would be before the people and they would get ideas of types and the types of things they could do. This was primarily what they were doing it for. They decided to open doing Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, because Philip Merivale, whom they had known in Boston and also in England, was to be here to work on a film with Universal, I suppose. The film he was working on-- I've forgotten what it was, although it may have been Death Takes a Holiday. I think he did that. He may have been out here to do that, nevertheless he would work on main stage, and he would do the part of Sidney Carton. So, then they would cast the whole play around him. The other people who were involved there: Elspeth Dudgeon was a magnificent--one of these skinny, craggy, spinster-type English women, with a face that looked a little bit like the profile of England onto the Irish Sea. I am sure in her time she was really quite a fine actress, but she didn't really make it here in Hollywood. She did a lot of tiny sort of cameo parts, vignettes here and there, but she never had any large roles to do. But she had a marvelous speaking voice, and it's really too bad they didn't do more with her. She took me under her wing while I was there [as] male understudy for that company. And actually by training me, she raised my speaking voice an entire octave, which was wonderful for me--and for which I could never thank her enough. The other people in that company who probably amounted to anything: Doris Lloyd, George K. Arthur, E. E. Clive, who ended up doing a lot of stuff for Universal, and Arthur Treacher, "Pip" Treacher. I guess there were some other people around there too, but at the moment I don't even remember their names. I can see their faces. I don't think they came to much. Oh, wait a minute. The Morgan brothers were involved: Henry Morgan and--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Frank?

HARRY HAY: Well, Frank wasn't. Frank by this time was already well known, but Henry hadn't done a great deal, and he would move in and out of the Hollywood Repertory Theater every so often. And a couple of others whom I can't remember anymore. Oh, wait a minute. Oh, dear, what was her name? The woman who played the mother for years and years and years in Life with Father on TV [Lurene Tuttle]. (That was the Clarence Day story.) No, I simply can't remember her name. Anyway, she was the ingenue in the Hollywood Repertory Theater. She belonged in that company. Then I didn't see her again for years, and then all of a sudden she did this part in Life with Father, and it went on every Sunday night for two years, that kind of thing. It was the thing that made her, and I'm so glad that she got that part because she was great in that. But she was a sort of a bouncy ingenue in our time. OK. Other faces but their names escape me now. Anyway, I got the job as First Citizen--

MITCH TUCHMAN: A job as what? I'm sorry.

HARRY HAY: Did I tell you what happened to me on stage that day when I went up for the rehearsal? Or maybe that was just when you were stopping.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Possibly.

HARRY HAY: We're well into the Depression at this point, and so there are thousands of people here who are looking for work. And there are thousands of people who would like to use the theater as a showcase, just to show their figure if nothing else, something on stage, anything to call attention to the producers, who are obviously going to throng into the theaters to see them. Oh, boy, what lovely, grand illusions everybody had. Anyway. So, I go to the theater the day of the call-- and the theater is a good size, as theaters were built in that time; it probably held 1,300 to 1,500 people: say, 850 downstairs and then a sizable balcony--and the place was full. So, what they did was, they ran us up in batches. In the same way they used to dispatch batches of people to the guillotine, they would run us up in batches onstage in order to dispatch us further on. I got there at nine o'clock in the morning--and the batch I was in was called to the stage about three o'clock in the afternoon. We come up in groups of forty or maybe thirty people at a time, something like that, and they would run through a scene. By this time, by the time we went up on stage, we'd heard this scene about ninety thousand times. We almost didn't need the sides [pages of script]; we almost knew what we were supposed to do, see. We got up on stage, and somebody got the lines of First Citizen (First Citizen would be Citizen Defarge), and he would have maybe eight sides, something like that. I've forgotten how many of them did Citizen Defarge before I did it. Finally somebody, Clivey [E. E. Clive] took the thing from one person and gave it to me and said, "Now you do this part, and we'll rerun it again." They would rerun what was known as the tumbrel scene, the guillotine scene: Madame Defarge sits there by the guillotine, and she knits, and she counts as the heads fall. I am to be her husband. I am Citizen Defarge. I have certain lines, and I'm the one who's kind of a cheerleader, leading the crowd on, that kind of thing. [That] is the part that was involved with that. Not what you'd call one of the great histrionic parts of all time by any means, but anyway. We were about halfway through the scene, I guess, and I'd turned four of the pages at this point, when all of a sudden Clivey stops the whole rehearsal. He turns to the audience, the people who are out in the audience, and he said, "You can all go home," and then he turns back onstage, and he said, "I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but in the batch that came on stage now, an actor came on this stage, the actor we're looking for." (They had been wanting a Citizen Defarge.) He said, "The actor who's onstage knows whom I'm talking to, and so now we'll continue the scene." I went on reading the Citizen Defarge, and it was me he was talking about, which was nice because I hadn't had that kind of recognition.* [Since my surprises on Stanford mainstage nearly eighteen months before. Also this was my first recognition by seasoned professionals in the commercial theater milieu. So this is how I landed the bit part of Citizen Defarge.] In the company, in that same company, as a matter of fact, was a very great actor, who was at that moment a drama student at what is now LACC [Los Angeles City College], but in those days was UCLA. UCLA used to be down here [on Vermont Avenue] where LACC is now. His name was Laird Cregar. Laird Cregar became a very well-known actor later on, but Laird at this moment is one of the soldiers, one of the revolutionary soldiers in red, white, and blue --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. uniform, who is guarding the jail where the famous name was La Conciergerie. He figures in this scene to some extent. The play ran a couple of months in the summer and was really quite successful. Philip Merivale's Sidney Carton was a marvelously introspective projection. I just loved his invention. Since my big scene came just prior to his Conciergerie scene, I simply stayed on stage to be able to see it each night. I used to watch it and weep and weep. I just loved every moment of the interplay. There were a couple of other parts that I really liked in that sequence also. I liked the part Arthur Treacher played: an aristocrat who suddenly comprehends the sacrifice for love and integrity that Sidney Carton is about to make. He had that wonderful line: "Hereafter, in another world than this, I shall require more love and knowledge of you." I always watched that scene and spritzed tears all over the place when they came to that line. [One] Saturday afternoon, I think, we had just finished the Saturday afternoon matinee--that's what it was--and we were just all going offstage, and all of a sudden the stage manager stopped me, and he said, "Pip was looking for you"--that's Arthur Treacher. I said, "Well, I went down to take some props down to the basement." He said, "OK, well, it doesn't matter. Pip had to leave. Pip won't be able to be at the performance tonight, and so you'll have to step in in his place." I said, "But Pip has--" It was probably twenty sides or thirty sides; he was in two or three different scenes, and his important scene is the Conciergerie scene, the jail scene. He's the one that makes the speech. He's the one who has the conversation with Carton, I mean, with Philip Merivale. I said, "Well, I can't do this!" "Well, you're to do it. Clive says that probably you can do it, and you can probably do it very well. So, here are the sides. You go study now, and you've got to be ready to have your makeup put on at eight o'clock." Well, there were two other people who were still hanging around. One of them was Laird, and the other was the little guy that he was in love with at the time. They were sort of a couple--great, big, fat guy and little, tiny guy--and they both were guards, and they were both in the guard uniforms. They said, "We'll help. We're on in that [scene] every night." I said, "You know, Pip does most of this stuff away from the audience in a place where I can't see him," because you could see him from this side, but you couldn't see him from that side from the way the stage was built. I said, "I've never seen his face in this performance. I don't know what he does." Laird said, "Well, I do, because I stand right by the guard. I'm the scenery over on that side. He plays it almost in my face every night." So, he said, "I'll help you with this, and we'll work together on it." I said, "Oh, I can't. I can't." He said, "Yes, you can. Yes, you can." So, Laird and his friend took me up to one of the top dressing rooms, and we played the scene over and over and over and over again until finally I did have it down. And they were wonderful. They were just swell with this. Then Laird said, "Now you're going to pay us back." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, as Citizen Defarge, you put on a marvelous makeup every night, and we want to know how you do it." I said, "Elspeth is the one who helped me with it." He said, "Well, I don't care. You put on our makeup tonight, and we'll watch you, and you tell us what you do: why you use three colors in one place instead of one, what it all does." So, then I told them all about what I had learned about makeup from Elspeth Dudgeon, this old woman I told you about, who by this time I had found out had been in traveling repertory theaters in England ever since she was a little girl, and her parents had been actors before her; so she was probably born on the stage. At that time she was probably in her fifties, I guess. She was giving me fifty years of [experience in] traveling repertory theater in England--not main stage, not London, but the provinces; they used to call them the counties--and experiences of the theaters. So, she had taught me makeup, and she taught me makeup in terms of the various levels of makeup from the times that they used candles and then kerosene lanterns, and then finally they got to the gaslights, and just after the First World War, a lot of the traveling theaters in England would be able to work with electric lights for the first time. There'd always been, you know, the other kinds of lights. So, she had taught me the makeup, because when you use a candle makeup, when you have candle footlights, you use one kind of makeup; when you used kerosene lamps, you used another one; when you have gas lamps, you use a third one; and then the electric lights are the most complicated of all to make a young guy--and I was very young at that point--look like he's middle-aged or old or decrepit or whatever. So, here I am, going to make myself into an elegant gentleman, an aristocrat of maybe forty at this point. So, I figured out what I thought would be a proper makeup for the occasion. I would be wearing a powdered wig and a light blue costume with a salmon-colored waistcoat, satin waistcoat; so, therefore, I adjusted my makeup to fit that for my face. I am at this point--this is late '32--I'm twenty, and Pip by this time is already in his late thirties, early forties, and he has a craggy face, and I'm going to have to do something similar to that. Because if I'm going to be very different and I haven't rehearsed with the people onstage, they are going to be upset enough by a new person stepping in there, and if the face is different, they're going to be very upset because the light will change on the face, and so the expressions will change. So, I do, and I play the part, and I get through it, and I get one or two reactions from the audience as that part is supposed to get; you get an applause when you exit because it's a great line you give. And I got the applause. I can't remember a thing onstage. I'm absolutely, totally blank about what that experience was that night. Merivale came to me afterwards, and he said, "You're absolutely wonderful. And the next time that Pip is going to be out, we'll hear about it; we'll insist on hearing about it twenty-four hours in advance, and you and I will rehearse. You're all right. You don't have to worry about a thing. We'll just punch up certain things, and we'll make up certain places. You do certain things that Pip doesn't do, and I like that, and we'll work out something." Well, as fate turned out, I never did it again. It just didn't work out that way. But I did get the job [of understudy]--at this time I didn't have it--I did get the job. Clive came to me and said, "You do this very well. That was fine. That was just fine. So, would you like to be the understudy for our company?" I said, "Sure." So, all of a sudden here I am the understudy for eight men who are-- Not all eight men are in all plays all the time, but I was understudy for all of them. No matter who was out one night, I would play that part. So, that meant that I was doing anything from twenty-four-year-old parts, because occasionally "Georgie" K. Arthur, who was the young ingenu, I would do his fill-in, or I'd do Clivey, who oftentimes would do parts of old men of sixty-five and seventy. So, I got this wide gamut to work with.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At this point had you decided on a stage career, or were you, too, hopeful of having a producer see you for films?

HARRY HAY: Of course, honey. Well, naturally.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you actively pursuing a Hollywood acting career?

HARRY HAY: As a matter of fact, I liked acting very much, but I will tell you this much: this is a period when, in order to get people into a house in this period, you had to put out what we used to call passes. You sent out passes by the thousands--to church groups in South Gate and I don't know where all, anywhere to get people to come in, any body in there. We almost didn't care if they paid, so long as they were in there to react, because it's awfully hard to play to an empty house. So, the amount of money that was coming in at that time was zilch. If the actors got a check for twenty-five dollars for a week, they were lucky. Lucky. Those were the good nights.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you determine that you--

HARRY HAY: So, I was not going to be able to survive by living as an actor at that point unless I got a major job with a major company. There were companies that were majors, but they were few and far between. So that everybody was looking to-- What I was looking forward to was getting work in pictures, which would be able to pay my wages while I worked onstage. I wasn't looking forward to a life in pictures. I was looking forward to becoming an actor on the stage, but I knew that unless I got work in pictures, I couldn't continue to do work on the stage, for which you got a lot of love but not any money. So, it was that way.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, how were these goals fulfilled, or what occurred?

HARRY HAY: Well, let's say, to cut a long story very short, they never were fulfilled. I didn't make it as an actor. I probably worked at the Repertory Theater-- I learned a great deal, I did a great many parts. As I said, I got from it a new voice from Elspeth Dudgeon, which was wonderful. I got a certain confidence that I could handle a great many different things, which I think I could. I think it would be the late spring--I'm trying to remember these dates, but it seems to me that it must be the early spring, early February, of 1934--again I saw in the paper that a new company was forming and a new theater was being built, and they were going to call it the Tony Pastor Theater. It was going to be on Sunset Boulevard, and it would be just east of Gower. They were going to cast one of the great nineteenth-century melodramas. The play they were doing was a play called The Ticket-of-Leave Man; or, Hawkshaw the Detective. In that play were a lot of the stereotypes that peppered the--what do you call them?--the dime novels that were commonplace in the late nineteenth century. Hawkshaw, the detective, Jack Dalton, the villain, were all names that would show up in all kinds of things that would probably be serialized long past the original play. Jack Dalton finally became the villain to end all villains, the one with the long handlebar mustaches, all in black, always wore black and black head and black hats. He would always be the kind [who would say], "I've got you, my beauty!" and then he would tie her to the railroad tracks, and she decided to give in or the family would lose the farm or they would lose the daughter, because she'd get run over by the railroad train. Hawkshaw, the detective, who was probably the original of Sherlock Holmes, because he had a meerschaum pipe, one of those curved meerschaum pipes, and he wore a deerstalker cap and one of those coats that would have an overcape, and it would always be in houndstooth cloth, and he had gaiters and little pants that had an elastic at the bottom that held them down tightly-- Well, this is all part of the original Hawkshaw costume, which dates-- I think the opening of that play would have been around 1850, 1855, somewhere in there. So all these characters show up. So, this is the original play, and this was the one we're going to do. So, in it was what was known as a comedy pair. They would have a comedy pair who would do a song-and-dance act; they would do a little patter step, and they would have little song routines together. I've forgotten how they got into it. They were probably distant relatives who show up in a couple of scenes. We were supposed to come in and lighten up the atmosphere when the melodrama got either too heavy or the sentiment got too sticky. Then all of a sudden they would introduce these things to kind of lighten up everything. What was very interesting was that, as it turned out, when the cast was finally assembled, when the play was finally put on, the one thing in that entire performance which was absolutely unfunny was the comedy pair. It went over like a lead balloon. There was no way by which it was funny. It was the one place when there was deadly dullness in the whole thing. When the hero and the heroine got sentimental and sticky, the audience fell apart; it was so funny. When Jack Dalton came out, they would all hiss the villain; and when Hawkshaw would come on, they'd all clap the detective. They'd have a wonderful time, and in all of this they found great humor. They didn't find anything sad or serious. They didn't weep with the heroine; they laughed with the heroine. This was all funny. The only thing in which everybody went to sleep was the comedy pair. So, I would say after about the third week, we just simply carefully excised the comedy pair entirely. I've forgotten what happened: the young woman who was my partner went on to something else, I guess. There were about four little parts throughout the play which you'd never get anybody to stay in because it didn't amount to anything, and therefore their cut of whatever we took in was too low to keep them. There was a landlord in one scene who ran a bar in the basement of his little tenement apartment house, where a lot of the people, not of the cast, but of the play, lived. He figures in about three or four scenes, and he figures prominently in one of those four. So, I played him. They make the point that he's seventy-three or seventy-four at one point. Then there are a couple of other little parts that could be thrown in, and I played those too. So, I did all of these parts, and that gave me a reason to stay; it gave me a fairly good responsibility within the cast. Let's see, there were two, the hero and heroine. Then there was Hawkshaw. Then there was Jack Dalton and his slimy assistant, who was a nasty little man, who turned out to be the director of the play incidentally. Then there was the woman who acted as the mother to all the little children, various children of various kinds who need help, the motherly sort who gives out the motherly advice. Then there was the landlord. So that was about the fifth or the sixth in line. In other words, I was always on the bill, the bottom one, of course, but nevertheless the bill. Then there would be assorted this and assorted that, but no names. So, it was a small part, but nevertheless I got that. Here I learned a great deal, because these were all people-- The people who were in this company were, again, people who had figured prominently in traveling companies in the United States. Sheldon Lewis, who played Jack Dalton, had been a leading man. I guess he'd even been a leading man, which meant he played the hero parts for maybe the first twenty years of his [professional] life, and then he had sort of moved from there to villain parts because he had lost his looks, and so therefore he moved then into character parts, or villain parts. He had been on his uppers for quite a while before he got this particular part, which brought him back into some prominence again, and he got a lot of film work as a result of it. The guy who played Hawkshaw, the detective, had probably gone through the same thing, but he had not ever made big time. Sheldon Lewis had played Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. I don't think that Ted--and I can't remember his last name at the moment--had probably ever played anything bigger than maybe Davenport or Des Moines.* [This would be what we would have called the tank-town circuit or, at best, second-string circuits. They usually represented steady, low-paying work, but the performances didn't help your career.] --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Then the other people who'd been in the plays were people who had had experience. Maude Alien, who played the big grandmotherly part, had been a character actress onstage in New York, and she played vaudeville a lot. Just before she had come out here, she had run sort of a rooming house off-Broadway and had sort of helped young actors who were just beginning to come up onstage have a place to live and get a good meal. [She was] sewing their clothes and taking care of them. Two of the people who had been taken care of by her and who had been, according to her, lovers in her rooming house were Henry Fonda and Archie Leach. Now, Archie Leach, when he came to Hollywood, changed his name to Gary Grant, but she always referred to him as Archie. They were living in her house, and she always insisted that they had been lovers. This we didn't know; this was just simply Maude talking. I'm sure at this point nobody's going to be very happy that that one's in there, but nevertheless I have to say this. I always remember it because Maude used to make a point of talking about what a cute pair they were: Henry and Archie. She never called him anything else but Archie; she couldn't get used to the Gary Grant name. Maude at that time lived in what was then a nice, big, old house. It was a very well-known house here in Hollywood. It was the Mountainview Hotel, which was on Hollywood Boulevard just east of Gower. Between Gower and Bronson [on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard] was one long, unbroken block. On the corner was a building, which was a two-story building, which was the drugstore, and so on; and that belonged to my father at one time. It still did at that point. Then, right next to it was a house that was part of his property. Then there was something else. Then there was the Mountainview Hotel. It was one of these great big, old houses that, I guess, had always been a rooming house for actors because it was quite big and broad. It was one of the old shingle-style buildings-- three, four, maybe five stories. It was quite a big building. It had been divided into spacious apartments at one time. Since that time the spacious apartments had been divided into less spacious apartments that had been divided into-- You finally got people living in closets and stuff. In that house lived a whole variety of people, but perhaps the most notorious person, the most famous person who lived at that time in that house, and went on living there, I guess, until about the Second World War anyway, was a woman by the name of Frankie Bailey. Frankie Bailey had been famous in vaudeville times--yes, vaudeville; I don't think she ever did anything else beyond that--as the girl with the million-dollar legs. She was the pretty woman, the good figure. All vaudeville acts, when they possibly could, would have one particular person who would either be the fall guy, the pratfall, the one who danced, the one who sang, or the pretty woman. Frankie Bailey had been the pretty woman for Webber and Fields, who were a very famous vaudeville team. She was known as the girl with the million-dollar legs. Frankie at this point was about, well, in her early seventies, and she still had beautiful legs. She was a sweet, lovely person and, again, one of the motherly people who took care of a lot of itinerant younger people.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Let me bring you back to your own career at this point.

HARRY HAY: Oh, right. [laughter] I mentioned the Mountainview Hotel because at the Mountainview Hotel, in addition to Frankie Bailey and Maude Alien, the motherly woman that I mentioned, lived the guy who was the lead actor in The Ticket-of-Leave Man, this play, whose name was Will Geer. Will had come out to do the part of Brooke with Katie Hepburn in Little Women. I guess it must have had something to do with his politics or something, because Will at this point was well known as a radical leftist who was already doing pieces, recitations and stuff, for radical demonstrations, which were going on at this point among the unemployed, and all the rest of it, here in L.A. [He was] involving himself with the black community and a lot of other things. So, for some reason or other he didn't get the part [in Little Women]. So, here he had removed himself to Los Angeles to get going--he hadn't planned to come out except to do that particular part--and because she promised him that, if he didn't get that part, he would get another part, which eventually he did, but it took maybe an extra year. So, he had to do something with himself in that time, and he took the part of the young hero in The Ticket-of-Leave Man.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you friendly with him?

HARRY HAY: Yeah. Well, as a matter of fact we were lovers. I've forgotten whether or not this began, whether it began before we opened or whether it was still in the major rehearsals, because we rehearsed for about, at this point we rehearsed maybe six or eight--about two months before we opened, I guess. I can't remember at this moment now whether our relationship began before we opened onstage or after. I think maybe a little bit before. It was he who recruited me into the Communist Party.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did that happen?

HARRY HAY: Well, I spent an awful lot of time with Will. I lived at home, but I used to trudge up to the Mountainview every morning. I would get there around eight o'clock and have coffee, and sometimes I would have been able to get some money together, this and that, and I'd have a little money, and I would bring some coffeecake in or something, and he'd have the coffee, and so we had breakfast in his room, and sometimes the two of us would go down and either have breakfast with Maude Alien, the motherly woman of the play, or Frankie Bailey. Somebody would have coffee or cake or rolls, or they would have gone to a day-old bread place, and we would all have a spread for the whole house. People kind of threw food together in those years that way. But lots of times during the intense love affair, I would be furiously jealous whenever he would say, "Well, now, we're going down to Frankie's for breakfast this morning," and I'd be very mad because I had been looking forward to spending some time alone with Will, and maybe that's what I had come for, and I hadn't come necessarily to chitchat in Frankie Bailey's office, but nevertheless this is what happened. He would always have little tracts around, or he would have leaflets around, and I read the material, and I was frankly very interested in these various things. I had the same number of misconceptions everybody else had. When I had been in college, I had gotten fascinated with what was going on in Europe in 1930, '31, and for political science I had written a term paper on the rise of benevolent dictatorships, or despotisms, as I called them. So, I had gotten into the story of Hitler from 1930 or '31--was looming as a threatening possibility in Germany, but the Weimar Republic was still creakily going along at this point, and he hadn't come to full power, and as a matter of fact he'd been defeated a few times. But Mussolini was very much in power at this point. There were voices like-- oh, dear, who was the Fascist-minded person in Britain who was already beginning to be heard from and was beginning to make noises? [Oswald Mosley] I had gotten heavily interested at this point in rereviewing the general strike in Britain in '27-28 and the great policemen's strike in Boston, because, you see, Katie Hepburn's mother was heavily involved in the Palmer raids--she was one of the radicals--and as a matter of fact had gone to prison through the Palmer raids. So I knew all of these stories because Will had told them to me. Not only had he told me about them but Maude Alien had told me about them. Almost all of the actors and actresses at this time knew a lot about this because the acting profession had been very much involved. All these people had been heavily on the side of Sacco and Vanzetti, for example, and that wasn't that far back by then. Maybe they even came to know each other as a result of some of these demonstrations that had gone on in New York. The people who were the left all knew each other very well and knew all the various things that were happening. It happened that that was the nest I landed into; so I was able to, at least of the young people from here, I knew enough about this because I knew the people they were talking about in Europe, and I knew something about Sacco and Vanzetti here on my own. I was beginning already to think, well, maybe this is how I begin to relate myself to the other oppressed people. I was already arguing with Will that maybe one of these fine days maybe these people would help us, gay people--we didn't have the word gay then; we used the word temperamental if we used it at all--that maybe they would begin to help us become legitimate and be recognized for the good people that we were. Will always said, "No, there isn't a chance. Not a chance." I said, "Well, I don't know. I think there could be." I didn't get much help from him. I did get help from the women, because Maude would say, "Yes, I think this could happen. I think that's right." She said, "Maybe you're going to be the person who's going to have to do it." I said, "Well, I can't do that by myself. I can't possibly. But I think we have to think about it. We have to talk about it." But I never could find other men. I found older women and I found younger women over the years, during the thirties.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Older and younger lesbian women or just any women?

HARRY HAY: No, no-- Well, I don't know.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But at least that wasn't at issue.

HARRY HAY: Yes, that wasn't an issue. There were women who said yes, particularly-- I'm talking now in the acting profession--they were the only ones I knew then--who were around the stage in one form or another, either as dressers, as they called the costume women in those years, or as makeup people or as artists or as dancers or as photographers. Photographer women were beginning to come up at that time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, you were discussing these things and were completely open about your own homosexuality.

HARRY HAY: Sure. Of course. In the theater I always have been. One of the things I didn't mention to you was that in my--or maybe I did, I've forgotten; maybe I got this in some other time--one of the things I did learn, one of the traditions was at the Hollywood Playhouse that we would have supper backstage after performances. Usually one night a week, like Friday night or Saturday, usually after the Friday night performance--Saturday night most people wanted to get away, but Friday they did--we'd go over the business of the play, of the week. This was when I learned, among other things, that the problem, the responsibility of the gay men is to help the women of the company not upstage each other or help them to get out of developing business, which they would do, which would call attention to themselves at times when nobody's supposed to be looking at them. For instance, in the middle thirties, late thirties, and early forties, Bette Davis began to develop some characteristics as an actress. She would swing her keys on a ring like this, and it became a nervous habit in a way, but it also became a characteristic thing. Well, for instance, at one point Doris Lloyd developed a business of-- I think she was doing embroidery, and she got to tapping with her finger on the side of the embroidery hoop, and you could hear it. Well, all of a sudden she's supposed to be back here doing embroidery, and somebody else has got an important scene, you know, forward stage, and here's Doris Lloyd tapping on this thing, and all of a sudden everybody's watching and watching the finger tap and not paying attention to what's happening. So this is what we called upstaging. Things like that can happen, and the people are not aware that they're doing it. At the same time, another actress doesn't like to tell the first actress, "Honey, you're upstaging me." If they did, the tension would probably build into a fight of some sort, and this would be very bad. So, the people tried not to do this if they possibly could because they tried to stay on an even keel with one another. So, it was up to the queer, I mean, the gay boy, to find a way of introducing it at supper in a parody, in a camp that would simply tell Doris what she was doing and how bad it was, but do it in a mocking, loving way so that it wouldn't be destructive; so they could all laugh at it while they did it, and she could say, "You mean, I was really that bad?"* [This happened six or seven times during the Tale of Two Cities run. I remember Philip Merivale stepping up several times to help me. "Honey," he'd say to the particular actress, "the Little Duchess has done this very nicely. Actually it was somewhat worse." But he could also camp it up in the same way I was doing], and he would sometimes say, "He's just being a little gentleman, and he shouldn't be, because it really is worse than that." But then we could get into a discussion of the whole thing, because it had been introduced, and it was fun, and it was loving; nobody's pointing the finger at anybody.* [The truth was that occasionally the whole company liked to take down its hair and camp a little bit. This wouldn't --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. necessarily mean that all were gay. It did mean that, gay or straight, they were, by the climate of the Victorian era, only then dying away, horribly repressed. They had to be given permission to step out of their practical, everyday worlds. It was like they had to be invited first to the Mad Hatter's tea party. Somehow they had to be bewitched into being transported there. Once that transpired, they all could camp like crazy, even the more conventional of the men. Most of the time, during my period in the theater, if I went into my Duchess of Devonshire number, this bit of flouncy-pouncy seemed to be sufficient to give them the permission they needed. One of the men--it might have been Merivale--named me the Little Duchess during Tale of Two Cities. I hung onto it. "Queens can come to their titles through the marriage bed, but duchesses are born to the purple."] So, I was the Little Duchess. Little, I don't know why, because I was bigger than most of them, but nevertheless.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You've said often that you were tall.

HARRY HAY: But I was also very much younger than anybody else in the company; so that made me diminutive in terms of age. They were all, let's say, past forty, and here I am just barely twenty; so really I'm the only young one around. So, then I began to learn from other actors that this had been traditionally the role of gay people, that this is what they were supposed to do, and that camp-- The word camp itself, I think, is not very old. I learned from Champ, the guy who'd brought me out, who himself had been old enough to have seen-- (I suffer from this now, I lose names, and I lose words.) Bert Savoy. Bert Savoy, who was a British vaudeville actor, used to come to the United States and run a circuit, like the Keith-Orpheum circuit, which might-- They might be out six months touring around the country, beginning with New York and going down the coast to Atlanta, for example, and then across to Mobile [Alabama] and Vicksburg [Mississippi] and then to New Orleans and then come up to Saint Louis and then come across-- They could be out on the circuit, and it would be six months of them playing the whole country. He had an act, which was a very popular act, from about-- I don't know whether it started before the First World War. I only know about it as of 1919 through the middle twenties. He did a series of people--and he would wear different hats because, after all, he'd do all the parts, you see--he did a group of working-class girls and their boyfriends. The key person, who I think probably worked as a sewing girl, was Margie. Margie had a little flat, and all the girls came on Saturday afternoons--they apparently worked six and a half days--and on Saturday afternoons, they all came up, and they would get together and share a dish of tea--not a cup, a dish. (This was in the old days when you poured your tea into your dish and blew on it and then drank from the dish--or fanned it with your hat, one of those things. These were all part of the act.) So, Margie and her girlfriends would get together and they would share a dish of tea. Sometimes Margie and her girlfriends would go out into the country on picnics, and they called this going camping. And so, they would all go camping, and so sometimes the routine that he did was Margie going on one of her camping trips with all the girls. They would all go out in the country, [and] they would have the usual problems of getting sand in the sandwiches. They all wore lots of clothes, chemises and corsets and things like that, rats in the hair. These would be the styles, the styles which were prominent in the upper classes from 1906 to 1910, which would be then the kind of styles that would be in the lower classes by 1916 to 1920. [Margie and her friends] would go out, and they would get* [sand in their chemises and ants in their stays and twigs in their rats], you know, and then they would have to shake the things out, and then the men --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. would do lascivious and indecent things, helping them extract the ants--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Sounds like Benny Hill routines.

HARRY HAY: Well, exactly the same kind of thing, but this was all done very much earlier. And here is Bert Savoy going through the entire thing all by himself. You know, he's showing all these various things and playing all these parts. So that they just loved to go camping. When they went camping, all these gestures would come up. Well, the thing that Champ told me was that everybody would know, through the underground railroads in the United States, or the underground series, about Bert Savoy's newest performance. So that by the time he had done it in New York, Rochester, Buffalo, and Chicago, the gay people would be waiting for that performance to show up in vaudeville so they could all go and learn all the things they were doing. Meanwhile, as far as their speech was concerned, whatever words he was using, whatever phrases he used, became part of the routine of the gay speech with everybody. They would pick up new ideas and new ways of talking about things and new ways of reference from the Bert Savoy shows. So that everybody talked Bert Savoy after he'd been in town for a week. Then the people at the next town farther on would be anticipating his coming, and they would also be using some of the new words, the chic new words of the moment.

1.11. Tape Number: VI, Side One December 1, 1981

HARRY HAY: You see, the thing that has to be known is that vaudeville probably was the main line of communication between gay people in New York and gay people in Virginia City and gay people in San Francisco, certainly in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. There would be certain acts that were known, and they all went to all of them, and consequently things would be carried from one place to another, and within six months the whole country would know what camp meant, for example, or a dish of tea or dishing. [tape recorder turned off]

MITCH TUCHMAN: You were just talking about the importance of the vaudeville circuit.

HARRY HAY: Oh, yeah, in tying all the people together. So that words that suddenly become part of our own doubletalk, our own lingo, as it were: many of them came out of the Bert Savoy shows. As you can see, dishing-- After all, when Marge and her girls got together to have a dish of tea, they just tore each other--the people who were not present--to shreds, and always in a very funny, very ludicrous way, in which they would exaggerate, over-exaggerate, and oversatirize or parody. All of this was done over a dish of tea; so it was known as "let's dish." And what dish meant: it meant, of course, we had to have the tea, which got cold and nobody ever drank it [because] they were so busy tearing each other apart or hearing the latest dish. Obviously other people did a dish, too, and the latest dish on so-and-so was all the dirt. OK. So, a lot of these phrases came out of the Savoy show in this regard, and people would then be using [them] all over the country, and pretty soon dish becomes part of the parlance, and you assume it's been there since Noah.* [Many gay men then, as now, moved in many levels of society tightly disguised and wholly competent as chameleons. Then, as now, they were more often than not appreciated strongly for their humor and for their almost universal talent at mimicry. So, secretly "temperamental" men would often recount the latest choice exchange in the newest Bert Savoy to his town, perhaps just to see if another person would, in the famous phrase of Walt Whitman, answer "by making himself known to me by secret signs." This is how the underground "gayspeak" of the Savoy show could be used.] There's an important distinction: there are two forms of impersonation that are going on in vaudeville. One is --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. the type of female impersonation that was being carried on by Julian Eltinge, who is also very important in this time. Now, Julian Eltinge is doing the magnificent job of the impeccability, where he would actually use beautiful clothes. Here he is doing a perfectly beautiful woman. The dig here is that you simply couldn't tell he wasn't a woman. When he sings, he sings in falsetto, or what we now call countertenor. He did performances, and he would sing things like "The Rosary," the famous songs of the time and would even possibly step out the steps of a waltz with a partner. He would probably have a huge Austrian hairdo, and as a matter of fact he probably would be wearing Worth gowns, so that he would do a perfectly, elegantly, beautifully coiffed performance. It was known that it was a female impersonation, and people came to see whether or not he in one iota deviated from the job of a beautiful, suave, elegantly exciting woman. Or maybe even a respectable woman. This was his particular show, and there were lots of people who would go to that. And this was a female impersonation. Bert Savoy is not that. He is the clown. He is the buffoon. He plays the part of Marge, but he also plays the part of Marge's boyfriend. And they're all very campy, I might add. I mean, the boyfriend* [comes across queer as fish, but nevertheless Savoy is tearing off all these different roles with great flair and high hilarity.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Flip Wilson is like that.

HARRY HAY: Exactly. [Savoy is] doing that sort of thing. And to the extent that he's funny and very inventive and very imaginative, that's the extent of whether or not he has succeeded. So that you've got the clown on the one hand, who's mocking-- This is known as camp, in contrast to Eltinge, who is impersonation. Now, in this period, when people got together to tear each other apart, without necessarily having in mind helping them to improve themselves, which is parody or satirization with mocking affection--this is what camp was--to tear each other apart without possibility of their putting themselves back together again [laughter] was known as bitchery. I'm very much afraid that what used to be known as bitchery has now become the usual practice; we've gotten camp and bitchery confused. Most people only know the bitchery part; they don't know what the camp is for. This is why I like to tell this story, because I want them to know that camp played a marvelous healing. It's one of our shaman qualities as gay men. It was one of the ways by --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. which you heal. Because if you can get people to look at their mistakes and laugh at themselves, the laughing in itself is a healing process. I might add that here I didn't know this, until I go to some of the great events put on by the Indian people, as I will do in the fifties and sixties, particularly when I go as an American cousin, which means I will go to dances that normally white people don't go to--and I'm going because I'm a great friend of one of the families who is participating--and see how the clowns perform, the men who are not what they appear to be, the k'ossa, who are sacred people among the Indians and who are therefore the same buffoon that you're going to find in our own culture in earlier times. This is the part that Bert Savoy's playing on the vaudeville circuit in the twenties, so long as vaudeville lasted. In those cultures they understand that any transgression that is performed by anyone, when the buffoon, or the clown, performs it and makes people laugh--at your expense, of course--to the extent that you go along with it, you, the transgressor, play along with the clown who's exposing what you've done, and you do it in such a way that people laugh-- Because their lives are pretty grim, or have been in those years, pretty grim and pretty difficult and pretty desperate, so to laugh is a way of making people feel good and releasing tensions. If you have given them an opportunity to laugh, you have forgiven. So, to laugh is a great gift, and to be able to be helped to laugh is a great gift. So, we recognize that the laughing, the releasing of tensions, and the releasing of resentments, the wiping away of resentments against one another and harboring ill feelings against one another is in itself a healing process. So, this is what camp was supposed to do. It was supposed to be one of those healing processes. This has been a magic that we have been responsible for. This was still going on in the American theater and the English theater up to 1930. This is about all I wanted to say. But this is one of the things I did learn, and it's one of the things I did participate in myself. It always makes me feel good that I was part of that, and that I was, in a way, an inheritor of a long tradition.

MITCH TUCHMAN: When we talk about--and I guess it's coming up-- performances that you did, street performances or political performances, did any of that carry over?

HARRY HAY: Of course. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I was going to say, was it verboten with the Communist Party?

HARRY HAY: It's verboten with the Communist Party if they'd known, but then, after all, you didn't have to tell them that. Right?* [It would have been verboten with the Communist Party had they a knowledge of the camp tradition I occasionally employed. But CP culture of the 1930s in the United States, exactly as it was in Europe and in the Soviet Union, when it concerned art forms already established, was pretty much petit bourgeois in character: not very inventive when it came to form and totally socialist realism in content. Since any emotional or psychological delving into experience was considered bourgeois, decadent indulgence, nothing, including techniques, was explored very deeply. So people are going to be interested that I am capable of playing all kinds of roles, but they don't really care how I am able to fit into all kinds of roles or to make people laugh.] After all, we're dealing with making people laugh, even in times of great tension and hysteria and so on—are-- What you do to make them laugh is forgotten, except for the fact that you did make them laugh. If they went back and analyzed it and discovered that it was campy, they might have been horrified. But they didn't go back that far, because after all the laughter was the important thing. Watch any clown in the circus some day, and you're going to discover that it's almost --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. pure camp. He doesn't know pure camp unless it's in his blood to know pure camp, if you follow what I mean. A hetero doesn't do camp very well, I might add; it's something that we do. I've watched too many heteros try to camp, and they don't quite make it. As I said, the hetero men on stage used to camp, and they didn't quite make it, but the point is everybody knew this, because it was a parlance. So, all I had to do was simply come in and do it in its proper way, and then immediately it all smoothed out, and everything was fine. But they don't do it terribly well, I might add. There's not the ring of conviction in the voice. (And I hope you noticed my inflections when I did that.) Stop it. [tape recorder turned off] Will Geer had been doing a lot of single pieces and single recitations, and there were a number of little plays which would amount to a certain kind of dialogue, that he had always wanted to-- So, he needed somebody at least to feed him lines [in order for him to] come out with certain propaganda points. He'd been needing a fall guy for quite some time. So, he persuaded me, shortly after I was thoroughly caught up in his magic [sighs]--and he was a very charismatic person, and I was really caught up in that--he persuaded me without too much difficulty that I should come down and do it with him. To be an actor or to even be involved in any way, other than just a member of the crowd, in demonstrations in '33, '34, and '35 was a scary business because we were totally illegal at that time and we were totally at the mercy of the police, who in this state, in this city, and that period were still riding horses and who thought nothing of charging a crowd full of women and children, with galloping horses with iron hooves, and swinging with their nightsicks right and left; and they're clobbering people all over the place. You know, the phrase breaking heads is not an exaggeration; this went on not infrequently. The police in L.A. were just as brutal as they were anywhere else; and they were brutal here, I don't mind telling you. To be involved in a mob like that in doing a part, which means you have to be in the center of something, if the cops suddenly charge, you haven't got a chance of a hoot in hell of getting away, and so your own life is in jeopardy at that moment.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What kinds of parts were you doing, and where were you doing them?

HARRY HAY: Well, in those years there were three free speech areas in Los Angeles. One of them was the plaza, the plaza across from Olvera Street. That was one of the centers and one of the great activities in those years, and almost every two months or so there was something going on in the plaza. It would be called by the Trade Union Unity League, which is long prior to the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations]. (It was working in CIO directions, but it was long prior to them. Well, not long. But anyway, TUUL had been going on in the twenties. I'm looking at it in '33 or '34. CIO is to appear at the end of '34, and it will appear out of [other] groups. The Trade Union Unity League, TUUL: it's gotten going.) But to be a member of the TUUL is to be a communist, and to be a communist is to be an outlaw because radicalism is still hanging over from the Palmer raids. It's still totally forbidden.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is to be literally a member of the Communist Party, or to simply have that ideological perspective on current history?

HARRY HAY: Well, it was automatically assumed by the middle class and by the media, which we called the newspapers in those years--we didn't say media then; but I use the word now because it covers a wide umbrella--it was assumed by the media and therefore by politicians and therefore by the government that, if you had that ideology, you were automatically a Red. If you were automatically a Red, you were a member of the party or you were being fed gold from Moscow. I mean, it is all part of a huge propaganda campaign to discredit the thing entirely. So, it didn't matter how you were developed, you were obviously in the toils of those wicked machinations from Moscow. It didn't matter.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What were the other two free speech locations besides the plaza?

HARRY HAY: I'm trying to think of what the third one was. There was one on the east side. (Incidentally, Brooklyn Avenue was an important aspect of the city in the thirties because that's where most of the immigrant Jewish people were, the people who had come and who were consumed-- It was considered that, to a man or to a woman, they were all Reds, or they were all in some way related to something.) So that there was a free speech area, a little, tiny triangle at Evergreen Avenue--Evergreen and State?--[but more probably East First Street] something like that. The third place was somewhere out west, and I don't think I ever did know where it was. I used to think it was Pershing Square, because we used to have a lot of things in Pershing Square, but I don't think that's the free speech place. Maybe it is. Maybe Pershing Square was the third one.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, about these free speech locations? They were hands-off to the police?

HARRY HAY: That's right. They were hands-off to the police.

MITCH TUCHMAN: By formal or just informal agreement?

HARRY HAY: No, no---

MITCH TUCHMAN: By custom, or you could go there and know you were safe?

HARRY HAY: The free speech zones must have been in the city charter. They were areas which apparently the charter required because of something in the state constitution. There would have to be areas where people could speak freely in accordance with the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. It had to be something like that. They couldn't pass municipal ordinances forbidding people to do this. I think they probably stemmed from the troubles around the blowing up of the Times building and the Tom Mooney case. This would have been the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] in the First World War. I don't know if you know this or not, but Los Angeles had been a socialist town.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, I know about that.

HARRY HAY: It came to an end with the blowing up of the Times building and the destruction of [Job] Harriman's campaign for [election] as mayor in [1911]. It's possible that the free speech areas had something to do with compromises made in and around that time. But we're not too far away from it, you see, in 1930; it's only twenty years back, and so it was fresh in the memories of many people. So that there was a strong liberal-left sentiment among middle-class people, particularly people who had lived for a long time, old families. They and some of the children would be involved in many of the activities that were things. Then you had the working-class people. Then you had the lands-menschaften, we called them, all the people from Poland, Silesia, and South Ukraine and so on, who spoke fifty words of English and machine gun rat-a-tat-tat in other languages, which nobody understood, or I didn't. So that there would be these huge outpourings. For instance, one of the first outpourings that I attended was-- Oh, we were talking about Bill Geer; so we don't want--

MITCH TUCHMAN: We were talking basically about what your role was and what you performed at these functions.

HARRY HAY: For instance, there was a play called God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell that Will had always wanted to do because it talked about the need for people to own land. In a way, it was probably a replay of the types of populism which would have been going on strong around the gold issue and the kind of things that William Jennings Bryan had been talking about in the nineties. It probably also had to do with Henry George's single-tax program. These are all issues that appealed to a great many people and which in the thirties looked as though redistribution of land was a possibility, and it would solve a lot of problems.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, did you put on that play?

HARRY HAY: Well, what we did was we probably would do-- No, we never put on a play.* [You see, the free speech zones would hold maybe one thousand to twenty-five hundred people. Well, at demonstrations in those hungry years of the early 1930s, there'd be fifteen to twenty thousand people, so they would overflow the bounds of the free speech zones. If we, the players and speakers, allowed ourselves to get bottled up in the free speech areas, the cops could get at us and beat us in ways we couldn't get away. Then afterwards they could--and did--claim they didn't know how it happened. Instead we worked along the peripheries of crowds so that we could get special people and special speakers or performers away quickly (and hidden quickly) if we had to. Any little play we did do would usually be a section of a longer work which dealt with certain issues; none of our little scenes could be longer than about seven minutes.] [tape recorder turned off; resumes in midsentence]--five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes, because when you would start any kind of a dialogue like this and catch people's attention, maybe begin to put out what we would call educational material, this is when the cops would drive into the crowd, anything to break that up or to stop that or stop that kind of ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. communication from happening. So, sometimes we could find a way of standing on boxes, where we could stand up above people and be heard. Once in a while we tied ourselves to lampposts, so that if crowds did move we wouldn't be dislodged, you see. I'd be tied to one lamppost, and Will would be tied to another one, and then we could sort of do a dialogue across to each other; people could move back and forth, but we'd still be doing a dialogue, you see.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, now, how did these performances happen to be going on? Was it on Will's initiative?

HARRY HAY: It was usually Will's initiative, because he would act as the main person. I would fill in with two or three other parts, you see.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But this wasn't a formal Communist Party function or something, where he had--

HARRY HAY: Well, you see, the Communist Party in this period is totally underground, so that, therefore, no one is to know that such things exist.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did he go to these places on his own initiative, or do you think there was some other motivating force?

HARRY HAY: What you have to understand is that huge mass rallies at this time would be developed by the party, who would then begin to activate its people in mass organizations. The mass organizations, like, well, the International Labor Defense, for instance (ILD)-- The ILD and the TUUL and the TUEL [Trade Union Educational League] and the Morning Freiheit Gesangverein and a whole bunch of these other organizations would decide to hold a rally against war and fascism or against some bill that had just been passed by the Congress which doesn't do anything for the unemployed. Or, as happened, for instance, at one time, the women and the children all came together at the city hall to demand free milk because they heard that milk was being dumped; this was a period when they used to dump things and plow them under in order to keep the price rising. They were saying that milk shouldn't be dumped; it should be distributed to the starving, which was a good idea, but nevertheless the upper class at this moment wasn't doing that. Later on they would, but they weren't doing it [then]. So there would be issues like this called, which were of immediate moment to many people, and a hundred thousand people would show up. Well, with a hundred thousand people, if you can have some singing, or if you can have some entertainment or some kind of an educational [program], other than just dull speeches, it's all to the good. They were always trying to get some kind of an educational, some kind of introducing culture, where people can see different ways of looking at things or hear different ideas, to liven up the meetings. This is what we would do. So therefore this became a responsibility. Will had done this by himself a number of times, so that there were probably upwards of maybe four or five thousand people in and around the area who knew that the moment he appeared that maybe he had something he could do; so they would make it possible in an extemporaneous program for him to do something. He could always do a monologue if nothing else. There were singers, there were people who played the flute or something like that, anything to add as color to a meeting.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did this come rapidly to displace your other acting career?

HARRY HAY: Oh, no, because, after all, meetings like this might be held twice, three times a month. It wouldn't happen every day.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, this isn't something you were out there doing day by day by day.

HARRY HAY: No, nor was anybody else, because you couldn't be up aboveground that much. For instance, after a meeting like that, when the cops would ride through, half the leadership would either have to be underground, or they would have had their heads broken, or they were in jail; so it would be another month before you could get anything together again.

MITCH TUCHMAN: For what period of time did you in essence do two things: pursue an acting career and participate in these sorts-- Am I misconstruing what was going on?

HARRY HAY: No, no, we're not pursuing an acting career. We're all actors at the same time. We've got to eat. We're all performing; so this is something to do in your spare time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In addition to the plays you talked about, did you do film work at this time?

HARRY HAY: I got a few parts in B pictures, a Republic and a Monogram. These are what we used to call the little B studios out in the [San Fernando] Valley.

MITCH TUCHMAN: If I watch for you on TV, will I see you?

HARRY HAY: Well, probably once in a while in either-- For some reason or other, they were doing an awful lot of Civil War pictures and a lot of cowboy-and-Indian stuff, you know. And, of course, the cavalry always gets into that act.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you the front half of General Lee's horse?

HARRY HAY: [laughter] No, I wish I had been. Usually I got parts where the messenger has just escaped the Indians and dashes into the fort, or he is on his way to carry a message from somewhere to somewhere else and they shoot the horse out from under him, because I knew how to roll a horse, which had nothing to do with my acting career, you understand, although I could fall off a horse pretty well. What happens is, the horse "gets shot," and what you do is, you can roll the horse. You reach under the left-hand side and catch the right-hand side bridle and twist the horse's neck in such a way that the camera doesn't see this, you see. The horse at this moment, because he's galloping and his head is pulled up, he no longer sees. Usually the right front hoof stumbles, and he goes down. Then you have loosened yourself from the right-hand stirrup, and you know how to-- So you don't go down with the horse. You rise off of the horse, and you rush off into the bushes, pursued by flaming arrows naturally. There were a whole bunch of people who were doing stuff like that, and I would be one of them.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You were a stunt man, in essence, who might have a line.

HARRY HAY: Well, if I had a line, I'm not a stunt man.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, stunt actor.

HARRY HAY: At this point there's so many people doing this that they're not really called stunt men.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It's not separated.

HARRY HAY: Right. I couldn't do anything else, but I did know how to do this.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you do a considerable amount of pictures or just a few?

HARRY HAY: Oh, I probably had as many as twelve or fourteen parts a year.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Over how long a period?

HARRY HAY: From '34 through '37.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you ever get out of Western duds?

HARRY HAY: Nope. Oh, yes, I did. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Once I did a waiter on a train, [laughter] going down the dining car. I think I had in that--I think that was a big one--I had about three lines in that. What the hell was that one called? It was a stinker.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was it still at Monogram?

HARRY HAY: It was a stinker of a movie. Still at Monogram, and I think in that play-- Well, of course, at Monogram, you know, a lot of good people at various times showed up. Particularly one of the people who used to do things for them occasionally was John Barrymore because, after all, if he was on a particularly bad drunk, the major studios wouldn't touch him, and he had to work; so he'd work for Monogram or Republic and do some crummy, little job. At one time I had great high hopes that I was going to be able to do understudy for-- Oh, dear, I've suddenly forgotten his name too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Understudy? Not in pictures.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, I was a stand-in. There was an actor who worked for Columbia [Charles Bickford], and I looked very much like him, and so I was kind of hoping I could get an understudy job with him.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, were you under contract to any of these studios, or were you always a freelance, a day player?

HARRY HAY: A day player. I never went through casting though. I never went through the casting studios.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you have an agent?

HARRY HAY: You know, you'd have agents, and I'd have agents who had millions of people besides me. I knew a couple of producers. Don't ask me how. [laughter]

MITCH TUCHMAN: You just told me.

HARRY HAY: Well, of course. I knew a couple of producers, and they would call occasionally.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you go to any of the studio schools or any of that stuff?

HARRY HAY: That was a dream fervently to be wished for. No, I never made it to that point. I probably could have gone, but by '35 I would also be rather known to certain elements of the underground police force, [laughter] and so that could have made a difference too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The Red Squad or the Lavender Squad?

HARRY HAY: No, the Red Squad. We didn't have a Lavender Squad then. The Lavender Squad doesn't come till much later--and they were the same people, I might add.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, you've certainly given me the impression with "knowing a few producers" that being gay didn't necessarily harm a Hollywood career.

HARRY HAY: Well, it all depended on what producers, honey. In other words, if the producer himself is undercover gay and he happens to find you particularly attractive, or whatever, we're going to have an underground thing going here. But if he isn't known as gay, the moment that I'm known as gay I'm no good to him.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you think the closet gays were the other gays' worst enemies in Hollywood in essence?

HARRY HAY: In other words, they would tear each other apart?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Basically were there any problems for gays working in the industry, once they were known?

HARRY HAY: Once they were known, they gave all the rest of them a bad name. People who were undercover and somehow in the studios: oh, yes, they were probably the worst vilifiers of all, terrified that in some way or other it would expose them. Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you have any problems in this regard yourself? Did you ever find yourself blackballed?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Yes, I did.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are there stories of historical note in this respect?

HARRY HAY: I think I don't want to. I think in that respect.* [There is still, even now, harmful information peeping out of old woodwork. I think at the moment I don't want to particularize.] I will say one thing. For instance, my -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. relationship with Will, which was very intense but not of great duration as a love affair goes--it probably lasted maybe four months, five months, but we knew each other quite a lot and quite intimately over two or three years--I never suffered from him in any way as far as I know. He was always very nice and very good. However, I must say that he was a little ruthless in the way he pushed me into the party and then kind of took off on other tacks of his own and left me to carry it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, maybe we should carry on with some of that. I was, in fact, going to ask you: Does a point come where you had political activities independent of him? Does that come after joining the party, or will we be getting to that somewhat?

HARRY HAY: In a way that was part of my relationship with him. I'm afraid I carried heavy resentment on that for a long time. It was one of those things where you get pushed into the middle of the lake and then told to swim home. Either you learn or you don't. So, I got pushed into the middle of things like that and then was left to founder on my own. I don't know what Will was doing at this point, nor would I have asked because I had a feeling that he had another mission; he had other things to do, and I don't know what they were at that point. But he introduced me, for instance, into the Hollywood cell, as they were called in that period. Oh, one thing that I have to say to you, and one of the things that I've always found terribly interesting, is the way the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and the way the movies go on about the card-carrying communists, because I never had a card. I don't think we ever had one. We never had a passbook. We never had a card or anything. So, the card-carrying people: I don't know who they were.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You didn't even have a tattoo or anything?

HARRY HAY: Nothing, no. But the card-carrying communist was one thing that always fascinated me because I've always wanted to see a card, because we didn't have them. That would have been a dangerous thing to have had. If you were supposed to be underground and you're carrying a card in your wallet, where are you? No, we didn't have cards. That is one of the most interesting inventions I think I've ever run into. The unions had cards, and the mass organizations, even the mass organizations which were considered Red, had cards. NAACP had a card, and ACLU. To be a member of any of these things is to be a Red automatically. It's assumed that you must be one thing or the other. Those people had cards, and the League Against War and Fascism had a card, and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League had a card, but the party didn't.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was there, in fact, any sort of formal induction whatsoever into the Communist Party?

HARRY HAY: No.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Any ceremony, any swearing in, anything at all that marked your association as anything more than someone who showed up for meetings?

HARRY HAY: No one showed up for meetings who wasn't heavily vouched for. This is totally underground at this moment, and to be known as a member of the Communist Party would automatically have put you in jail.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But you didn't go through any sort of formal initiation of any sort whatsoever?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I went through a close examination by the organizer of the cell, for example, who wanted to know how I felt about certain things, and I answered certain questions, and I had to go to certain classes in order to answer certain questions, which I obviously was weak in.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Sounds like a catechism.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, kind of like a catechism thing. Then you get the sense that either you can accept certain principles, and you accept them by expounding on them and showing how you feel about a certain thing and what your limitations are and how you think in that direction. Other people listen to that, and then they either decided, yes, you're good material or, no, you're not good material.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this an all-gay cell by any means?

HARRY HAY: None of them were gay. None.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Or openly gay?

HARRY HAY: No, no.* [Phrases like "all gay" or "openly gay" have no meaning, actually no relevance, in this period from, say, 1850 to 1960. There would be certain situations where you would be in the theater or certain very well-secured restaurants or bars, like Madame Finocchio's in the speakeasy days, or private parties where you could take your hair down in public. "Taking your hair down" was the euphemism for being openly gay. Sometimes you could do that when you went visiting, although few people I knew, even in pictures, could afford to have an apartment all to themselves. They would be lucky to have a room to themselves. And seldom were you lucky enough to have an apartment mate who was gay. In most cruising situations you seldom, if ever, had both your pants down and your hair down at the same time. Since it hadn't yet occurred to people to be loose enough to be subconsciously giving off secret signs by their body language, even in noncommittal sexual situations you're being a straight who doesn't mind standing still for a minute for what you might have in mind. Or you are doing things which you would just feel -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. violent about, totally opposed to, if you were sober. At most bars, even at dancing bars, like Maxwell's on Third Street, just west of the tunnel, you didn't let your hair down till the lights went dim, and even then not very far down. At a Communist Party meeting, or a union meeting, or anything in the nongay milieu, you always, I repeat, always kept every wave and curl tightly pinned up under your mask and never so much as let a bobby pin into sight.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Or simply were not gay.

HARRY HAY: No, in no way.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you and Will in the same cell?

HARRY HAY: He took me to one he knew, you see, and introduced me as material that he thought would work. He didn't introduce me as his lover. He just introduced me as a friend. Of course, you see, the point is that gayness is not that well known in the time, and it is assumed that actors know each other and that the straight people around them know that actors are very buddy-buddy, and they also know that actors are very temperamental and that actors are always exaggerating their affection towards each other. And this is the way the straight people see them: they're very sentimental, they're always acting, even in public, and they're always showing these extravagant modes of affection, "but it doesn't mean anything."

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you as forthrightly and frankly gay in the cell as you were in other situations that you've described?

HARRY HAY: That isn't the way people lived. Nobody was that—ever--anywhere. You would be openly gay-- You would be openly yourself, which meant that you probably slept with men, probably. No one really knows this. But you probably slept with men more than you slept with women, or maybe you didn't sleep with women at all, in the theater or in certain areas where this was accepted behavior. But in working-class circles or in the Red circles, where it was not accepted behavior, you didn't.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And so you didn't have any reason to pursue in the confines of the cell the dream that you had expressed to Maude Alien?

HARRY HAY: * [I should try to get through to you that this simply couldn't have been thought, let alone voiced, from 1933 to 1953. No one was ever forthrightly gay anyplace, anywhere except maybe in the bathtub by yourself or on those rare occasions when you could be totally alone for a long period with a lover; and such occasions were few and far between. There was no way I could ever have been forthrightly gay in an underground party cell because the grips and mechanics --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. and electricians who were also in that cell would have beaten me up.] The dream I expressed to Maude Alien, and about which I'd also talked to Will Geer, who had said it was silly dreaming on my part and it could never happen, and was something I talked to Lester Horton about on the several occasions when I shared his bed, was something I always was thinking about myself, but I don't suppose that I shared that again with anyone until a guy I remember talking to about it in New York City, a guy I picked up in Central-- whether I picked him up or he picked me up I forget--in Central Park one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1940. I wouldn't have talked to anybody about this from Maude Alien in 1934 to this guy in 1940. So, after all, it wasn't shared with many.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At what point do you join the party? Is that in '34 or '35?

HARRY HAY: The first time I joined was in February, I think, of '34. And I was active-- Active? I went to meetings. I didn't understand what was going on. I couldn't dig the theory that was behind this. I couldn't understand it. I just had a dreadful time; so I was terrified of going to meetings. But I had to go to meetings because Will wanted me to; so, therefore, I was going because I loved Will.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you going to the same meetings he was going to?

HARRY HAY: Sometimes he would be there, and sometimes he wouldn't. I wouldn't know when he was going to be there and when he wasn't. But I would go because I wanted to see him; I wanted to be near him. You know, you can be really wrapped up in these things, and I'm at this point, in March 1934, I'm twenty-one, and he's by far the most compelling lover I've ever had.* [I'd had a black Cuban lover through a large part of 1933. He was pushy in a sassy sort of way, but Will was inspirational and compelling.] The other people I'd known by then were handsome or interesting, but otherwise, take or leave this or that, not much. Will was not only a marvelous person, he was not only a great lay--well, that's part of the story too, of course--he not only was a wonderful lay but he was also a very affectionate person--at times. And other times not; he could be very spare. But he was always to me a very compelling person. More importantly, he was able to explain to me the communist theory, when the people in the group couldn't. So, we had wonderful political discussions, and they were very warming to me, and I loved them, and I was very excited about them. So, to me he was one of --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. the people who opened the world to me. And he's important there. Anytime I could be in his presence, I wanted to be there: to touch him, to do anything. I don't know that he was playing hard to get. It was just that, I think, he was spread thin over a lot of surfaces. He was doing a lot of work in the Central Avenue area, which would be the black area. I don't know what it was. I only knew that he was doing it, and I met a couple of the people who came; and I was wildly jealous of a couple of cute tricks that came out of that area, too. I had lots of competition, I was pretty sure. That didn't help my peace of mind any, but nevertheless. I didn't inquire because you didn't do that. That was one of the things you didn't ask.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You were active from February '34 till when that first time?

HARRY HAY: Till about, I guess, the end of that year. Then I kind of branched off into-- I didn't go back to cell meetings because I didn't like them, and I didn't understand what was happening, and by that time Will wasn't going at all; so I didn't go either. But I did become involved with things on the left that had to do with dance. I was very interested in the dance groups. About this time, I think, I was having a brief affair with Lester Horton, who was the great dance figure here.* [No, I remember now. The New Theater League, a New York group of young, working-class trade unionists, sparked by a young firebrand named Ben Irwin, who were passionately interested in starting a working-class theater movement in the country, published in the February issue, I think, of New Masses in 1934-- It talked about the new Stanislavsky theater in Moscow and how its principles were exactly suited to the highest ideals of socialist realism. The New Theater League call said that the Stanislavsky technique was exactly what the league would strive for. I remember that New Theater League meeting here in Los Angeles It was a Saturday in February '34, and we met in a garden park, presumably all the left-wing cultural groups in the city. One of the dramatic things was that there were twelve to fourteen big, well-rehearsed young people's dance groups, choruses, and theater groups who had never come to the west side of Los Angeles before in their entire lives. It would be the first time I would have ever seen Lester Horton as a political person, and it would be the day that Lester would meet and sign on as a student dancer the woman who eight years later would be featured as his premiere --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. danseuse, Bella Lewitzky. I still remember those handsome and sternly independent, moving young women. Rebel Blue Blouses was their group. They performed for the gathering they had come to attend, doing something very flag-waving, very partisan, very anti-imperialist: Bella and her handsome younger sister and Eleanor Brooke, who also joined Lester's dance group that day. Out of that gathering, the Hollywood Theater Guild would form, to which Bill and I would be responsible and which would become the West Coast's Waiting for Lefty company. Out of that gathering also would come Contemporary Theater, to which my future wife, Anita [Platky], would eventually come. By 1936 the New Theater League would be a league of trade union workers' theaters, one hundred strong the length and breadth of America.] In May of '34 a one-act play came out in New Masses by a man by the name of Clifford Odets. The play was known as Waiting for Lefty. The whole play itself, the script of the play, was printed in New Masses. A whole bunch of us got it, and we decided that we would form a company to do Waiting for Lefty or at least do scenes from it. That was the idea: we were going to do scenes from it because this was fine propaganda material. It had to do with how people got involved with strikes, and how all of a sudden people from ordinary walks of life would find themselves in what amounted to left activities. We got a group of people together whom Bill knew and people we'd already run into from the theater and people who had come to a couple of meetings when we had put a notice in the paper about the possibilities of a "progressive theater," which was what we called it, might begin to consider, and we would meet at a certain place on a Saturday morning, and certain people would show up. Now, half the people who would show up for that would be people who wanted to be seen again in some kind of a theater showcase, and maybe this would be something that would catch people's eye because it was new. Most of them would have some liberal-leftist leanings, left over from the Palmer days or the Sacco and Vanzetti case or one of those others. They wouldn't be what you'd call heavily educated, but they would be enough. Practically all of them would be gay, among the men, I'll add in passing, but they all would be, let's say, homosexual in temperament, put it that way, not necessarily active, openly active, but nevertheless there. We put together a couple of groups who were doing-- I wouldn't call it a company because it wasn't that formal as yet. But we had a few people. Then there was a guy who showed up by the name of William Watts, who turned out to be an excellent director. He was also here getting jobs in pictures and teaching people diction and whatever you did to scramble along to get money. But Bill attached himself to the company and acted as our director, tied things together. By September of '34 we had enough people together so that we rented a house. The house, incidentally, is still standing. I went and looked at it the other day. It was the old Lloyd Pantages house on Harold Way, just west of Western Avenue. We had, let's see, we had about eight people living there in the house. Of those eight, six were in the company; so that we used the living room as a place to rehearse. We called ourselves the Hollywood Theater Guild, and the Hollywood Theater Guild's main claim to fame was the fact that it was going to do Waiting for Lefty by Odets. By this time there were a lot of people who would rent our living room, which was one of those big, old living rooms, about sixteen wide by twenty-four long, or thirty long; it was one of those big, old rooms. We would occasionally use it for left-wing types of movies that were being shown, films that would come from Europe and so on. They'd use it to raise money for particular causes and this and that. At this point there was also a dance group who would once in a while rent that living room to rehearse in. It turned out there was a great big, old, I guess, four- or five-story house right across the street from where we were, a great big, old yard, which had gone to rack and ruin long before and had a whole flank of kind of little cubbyholes. They had maybe been garages or even chicken coops--I don't know what they had been--around the back fence on the thing. Now, these were being lived in by various people: transients and bums and one thing and another. A group of people, including a dance group who used to form in our living room, got the idea of renting the thing across the street. They were going to call it the Hollywood Film and Photo League, which soon became known in our language as the Hollywood Filth and Famine League. Nevertheless the Film and Photo League, I think, went on existing. I think that they probably were still in existence by '38 or '39, long after our particular group had folded. But anyway, they stayed quite a long time, and they came out of our living room.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that Leo Hurwitz or any of those people?

HARRY HAY: No, that's later. The important people who were involved with this thing were Frank and Tanya Tuttle. Frank Tuttle was a movie director and later on producer, and Tanya, who was a Russian woman, was connected with all of the emigre groups who were here in Los Angeles by that time and almost anything that had to do with the left and had to do with anti-Semitism or anti-Nazi and even with the recall of Mayor [Frank] Shaw. Tanya was in the middle of all of them because they had money to spend, and they spent money on progressive causes, and so on. So, they were probably one of the main sponsors of the Hollywood Film and Photo League. The Hollywood Film and Photo League is the beginning of documentaries, and particularly left-wing documentaries, in L.A. [That is] also centered in that area, in that house. A lot of the performances that were given here in L.A., because we didn't have a film house that would show for us, were the Hollywood Film and Photo League and the stuff that went on in that house. So, this was an important cultural thing prior, for instance, to People's Educational Center [in the Otto K. Olsen Building in Hollywood], which would come at the end of the Second World War. So, I mention all that because we were all involved in it. We were always running back and forth across the street. They would come over to our house to eat. We would go over to their house for performances. So we would be going back and forth.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you actually put on Waiting for Lefty?

HARRY HAY: Yes, we did. We put it on in the Hollywood Theater in May of 1935, and we did exactly the same bill that the New York Group Theatre was doing in New York at the same time they were doing it.* [The Group Theatre production opened at New York's Longacre Theatre March 26, 1935.] Odets recognized that Waiting for Lefty was too long to fit as a one-act and too short to be an evening; so, consequently, he wrote a second, companion piece to go with it called Till the Day I Die. Till the Day I Die was a series of six scenes--it was not developed into acts--but it was a series of six scenes which followed the fortunes of a number of people who were in the left underground in Hitler Germany in 1934-35. It simply showed almost stereo-typic scenes of what would happen, of the forces that were involved in the struggle [of] resistance. It would show what they had to resist and what the problems were, and then it would show an underground activity thing, all at the same time. As a play went, it was weak, but it did make a filler for Waiting for Lefty. You'd do Till the Day I Die first, and then you'd end up with Waiting for Lefty, and it would be a rousing evening, and everybody would go out and be all excited and forget all about why they sat there for the first hour and a half.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The people involved in this theater group and the people across the street in the Film and Photo League: that didn't constitute a cell or anything? --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

HARRY HAY: Oh, no.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I mean, these are separate--

HARRY HAY: Well, yes. There was a Communist Party cell, which later becomes a club--in that period it's still a cell or a branch--which was responsible for these cultural activities. The cultural activities would be what we called the Popular Front or United Front activities, which were-- They were mass organizations, and they involved large masses of people, who came in because they were interested in what you were doing. Then you would watch the people who were there, and anyone who showed more than an ordinary interest in political matters or who began to show some kind of creativity or invention, then you began to invite them into what we would call classes. Then if they took to the material and liked it, then you'd invite them to join your cell; this is the boring-from-within process of education, which I think is done-- I think this is typical from here to Algeria. I don't think there's anything unique about this. This is the way you recruited people. Of course, in the Hollywood Film and Photo League and in our group, there were people who were responsible for these activities and for the people who came into it and around it. Of course.

MITCH TUCHMAN: About this point do you return to the Communist Party?

HARRY HAY: Well, by this time I'm in and out, and I'm in and out, and I'm in and out. Maybe I go to five meetings, and then all of a sudden I don't go to any for four months, but I wasn't ever really completely out or completely in. [Lillian Asche, a handsome, blonde woman of perhaps thirty-five is the Hollywood section organizer, and she is educational director as well of my particular cell. One of the great overriding concerns in this time is the education of people away from the presumably anti-Marxist thinking of Jay Lovestone and A. J. Muste. A. J. Muste was purged for, among other disagreements, his passion for what would be called in later days "creative nonviolence" so characteristic of his post-World War II group known as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Lillian leads a number of intense educational discussions presumably to illuminate the theoretical controversies that continue to plague party life and actions up to this point. History and historical research had been the delight of my life in high school and at Stanford. Under the watchful eyes of Lillian Asche, my attempts to make sense of the life-and-death struggle being waged to preserve the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of our souls--between the collective guidance of Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Marxist- --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Leninist children of light and the dastardly forms of the Trotskyite children of darkness--now expanded to encompass the equally malevolent cohorts of Jay Lovestone and A. J. Muste alike. My guess is, at this late date, that Lillian Asche (who with her husband, Harold Asche, who served as CP county organizer up through 1935, maybe 1936, were both long-term FBI operators) was being deliberately obscurantist, the better to discourage young intellectuals like me from getting even so much as a handle on Marxist-Leninist theory in action. Later, in 1937, under a new, and incidentally wonderful, educational director, Helen Gardiner, Marxist-Leninist theory would come alive and magical for me. ]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are you under the wing of Geer, or are you a more autonomous political person by this time?

HARRY HAY: Well, by September of 1934 I'm no longer under the arm of Geer. By this time I think Will--are we still playing? yeah, we're still playing--by this time he's off and doing something in the black district, and I don't see him at all anymore. I really don't know what he's doing, although we're still operating in The Ticket-of-Leave Man at night; we're still doing that performance.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But you're more autonomous as a political person.

HARRY HAY: Well, we are ships that pass in the night, and at this point we've passed. At this moment, he's no longer an issue. Not now, at least. He's there, and he's not there, and when he's there it's wonderful, but I don't expect to see him (except occasionally).* [By December of 1934 The Ticket-of-Leave Man is beginning to wind down. I and the folks living in the Lloyd Pantages house have performed Waiting for Lefty in a variety of places. We've done it for mass organization fund raisers. We've done it on four separate weekends at the Laguna Beach Playhouse. By March of 1935 Odets has written a second playlet Till the Day I Die, which, when coupled with Lefty makes a theatrical evening.] The reason why I say all this is that in May of 1935, when we decided finally that we would-- When Odets has written Till the Day I Die, and we've gotten it, and Bill Watts has taken a look at it, and we feel that maybe we can do something about it, we call a group together between the Film and Photo League and ourselves, the house, and we decide we'll put the play on. Will [Geer] finds an angel who is willing to put up the money to rent the theater. Nobody's going to get paid anything, but he'll put up the money to rent the theater, because the theater at this point is dark, and it hasn't been used for quite some time. The people who own the theater are willing to take a --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. chance, a gamble on this, and there's a guy who will put up money to cover scenery and getting a stage manager and getting the clearances we need with Actors' Equity (the Screen Actors Guild is not yet in existence) and make it possible to do a performance of-- We figure on running it for a month. So, they'll do the bills, and they'll get the advertising, advance advertising, they'll get tickets printed, and all the stuff that you need for all that. And Bill figures very remarkably in this.

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 1, 1981

HARRY HAY: I'm not sure when we begin to cast. I guess, we would cast in about April of '35 and were rehearsing in other places. But we will cast the entire thing, and it was going to be a fairly large cast of people, I would say, all in all. Lefty probably had about fourteen people in it, and, then, Till the Day I Die had about eighteen people in it. [Waiting for Lefty; twenty-three roles, of which several can be played by a single actor; Till the Day I Die; thirty-one roles, of which a half-dozen or more can be double-cast. --Ed.] We're going to be able to have the same people in both companies; the rest of them are going to be separate one from the other. We had hoped to have the same people in both, but it turned out that we couldn't do it. It turned out that the people who were really very good in one part were not willing or not able to do other parts, and so it didn't work out that way. Will Geer himself would do the organizer in Waiting for Lefty, but he wouldn't do any of the parts in Till the Day I Die. I am going to be doing a part in both. I get a part in Till the Day I Die that nobody else in his right mind would have wanted, and nobody else in his right mind did want, and that would be the pansy soldier [Adolph]. There would be a couple of scenes in a Nazi SS situation, and, of course, you get the sense that the SS are the arm of German law which existed in almost any town. The SS were responsible, as you know, for education, and they were also responsible for sort of disciplining the people in a given town, to see that they straightened up and flew right, and so on. They were an additional arm of the police force. There is one very important scene; I think it's scene two or scene three of the garland of [seven] scenes in the play. It is scene two. It happens in the captain's headquarters, and it's primarily played between the captain [Eric Schlegel] and his corporal [Orderly], who is his secretary. The secretary is also a pansy with whom he is having an affair. You assume from what goes on between them, but you don't know this. The captain's part is a fairly good part, and it would be a difficult part to play enough, but no one wanted to play the pansy soldier because the pansy soldier-- Obviously he's about eighteen or nineteen, and he's to be a pretty boy, and the things that have to give him away-- He would be a total queer onstage. The captain could be anybody, and it might not necessarily be the case. But whoever plays the pansy soldier is not going to be able to hide his reputation from the city for very long. This is in the facts of 1935 in L.A. So, that's why nobody will play that part. So, Bill says, "Well, I guess you'll have to play--" [laughter] To me. It fell on me. I'll play it. And I did. Now, the guy with whom I'm playing this, the captain, happens to be gay too, as half the people in the cast were, you know. But, I mean, he's very much a closet gay. Why was that scene in there at all? It's a very strange scene. Well, why was it there? After all, the gay situation is not anything that is necessary on the American stage in 1935. So, why is that scene in there? It soon becomes apparent as you begin to play the play through--we don't have any discussion from New York or talk to Odets about it--but you can see what it's in there for: there are going to be-- In 1935 the people of the United States are not understanding what's happening in Nazi Germany. They really don't understand it. And most importantly, the Jews don't understand what's happening here. (There have been some stories in the paper recently, as I think I mentioned to you, talking about what didn't the Jews do enough during that time. They didn't do anything during this time. They were staying away in droves from anything that had to do with raising money or funds or propaganda to help the Jews or any of the other peoples in Germany against the Nazi regime.) So, Till the Day I Die begins to show you what is really happening in the area. We're dealing with a different time scale than our own. We're dealing with an entirely different culture and a different way of looking. And the only way that you are going to get people to be in a position where they will receive without putting up all their prejudices first, through which the ideas are not going to come, is psychological, if you put them a little off kilter. And one of the ways you put them off kilter is what happens, as you know in your own mind, when you want to laugh about something, and all of a sudden you choke back, and the laughter doesn't quite come. You are about ready to sneeze, but the sneeze won't happen. In that period, you can't think of anything else. If anything happens, you're not going to be critical about what you hear, because you're so busy trying to get that sneeze off, or you're so busy to get that lump out of your throat because of the laughter that didn't come, that you're going to receive without criticism, without judgment, without anything else, anything else you hear. Well, that's what that scene is for. That scene is to make you so uncomfortable that for the next couple of scenes, you're so busy getting rid of that reaction you had from that one scene that you will receive without criticism, without critical inquiry, information that will come in the next two scenes, and then, from there on out, the play can flow. If you've caught that point, you can move beyond it. So, that's what that scene was for. And I must say, knowing that told us how to play it. So that what we had to do was to play a scene with a certain amount of camp and a certain amount of caricature. It's a sentimental scene (almost a lovers' quarrel), and the captain is treating the kid like dirt. He cries several times onstage. But what has to be seen is, you've got to get people up to the point where they want to laugh, not with it, not with feeling, but in ridicule. You have to get them just to the point where they want to laugh in ridicule, and it chokes back; it doesn't quite come. Well, that takes some playing, because one night we would be playing to the hicks from South Gate, who wouldn't know a gay if he walked through in broad daylight, and the next night we were playing it to people from the studios who all know very implicitly what it means. Even gay people who were in the closet understand what it's all about and aren't going to laugh in spite of themselves and not because. So, as we say, there are some who are "jam"--and the word was jam: if you're jam, you don't know from nothing; if you're wise, you know everything--they were so jam, you know, they could have been sold for honey, and there are others who were so wise that anything would have gone over. So, the one night we were playing it with our hands tied to our sides so that we don't wave them, and the next night we're hanging from the chandeliers to get them to that point where they just about--

MITCH TUCHMAN: You had a sense of your audience.

HARRY HAY: Of course.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who was going to be there.

HARRY HAY: And not only that but you can tell from the first two or three lines who is there and what they're going to respond to and what they aren't going to respond to. And you've got to get to a place where you know that they're ready to laugh with ridicule and scorn and then choke it back.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What theater was this done in?

HARRY HAY: Hollywood Theater, the old Repertory Theater on Vine Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is it still there?

HARRY HAY: Yes, it's being used--

MITCH TUCHMAN: That place that they're busily refurbishing but never seem to get anywhere with?

HARRY HAY: Never get anywhere, yeah. That was the old Hollywood Repertory Theater, and that was my main stage. That was where I did A Tale of Two Cities; so I know that theater very well.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And so, you're back in it again.

HARRY HAY: I'm back in it again, doing Waiting for Lefty. So, as I said, this is what you're doing. You're doing this particular job. It's a very difficult part to play, because the two of us never know from one night to the next what we're going to do in order to get that situation. And if we fail, the whole play fails.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What kind of reception did the play get from the press? Was it widely covered? Was it attacked as propaganda?

HARRY HAY: It was attacked as propaganda, but the Times also gave it a fairly lukewarm-- It wasn't a bad review. Our good reviews came in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In other words, the standard press didn't shun the production entirely as--

HARRY HAY: They didn't shun the performance.

MITCH TUCHMAN: They showed up, and they treated it as regular theater, I take it.

HARRY HAY: Well, no. They gave it faint praise because they knew, if they praised it, people would go, and they weren't interested in having the play a success.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Uh-huh. Was the play a success?

HARRY HAY: It ran about four weeks, I think, and then we began to realize we were papering the house. When the receipts fell off, the theater carried us another two weeks and then told us we would have to close.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you travel with the play, or what happened after that?

HARRY HAY: No, no. We had traveled with portions of the play, with Waiting for Lefty. We had traveled with it before that. We had played at Laguna, and we played in San Diego, and we played in Santa Barbara, but that was just Waiting for Lefty. We would sort of fit it into women's clubs, or there might be a progressive organization in Laguna who would do one thing a year, and we'd come down and be the entertainment for them with that show. But that was all. However, the thing that was interesting was that there were people like Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, who were running back and forth at this point between New York and here. They would go to the show in New York, and then they'd come to see our performance. This happened a couple of times. Edward G. Robinson came and saw our show. Then he went back to New York, and he saw the New York Group Theatre's performance. Then he came back and saw our show again.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was the New York Group Theatre performance-- Did it have a longer life than yours?

HARRY HAY: Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was it a hit that went on for a long time?

HARRY HAY: Yes, it went on for quite a long time. I think they played for about six months.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were there any people noteworthy in that day or today in your company as performers?

HARRY HAY: In that particular company? In ours? No. There were some people who later on did a few little parts on stage.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But it wasn't [John] Garfield?

HARRY HAY: Garfield was in the New York company. (Still as Jules Garfield.) Lee Strasberg was in that company. [The playbill does not show Strasberg as a member of that cast, though he was a founder of the Group Theatre. --Ed.] and Lee [J.] Cobb was in that company, in the New York company. We didn't have anybody like that out here. However, what I thought was interesting was that there was a very well-known character actor on the stage who was part of the Group Theatre for a long, long time, a guy by the name of Roman Bohnen. Edward G. Robinson made a point of [coming] back and [telling] me backstage one night that Roman Bohnen was playing the same part [Dr. Barnes] that I was playing in Waiting for Lefty. He had seen our performance here and then gone back to New York and seen their performance, and he said, "I just want you to know that I told Roman Bohnen that the young guy who was playing--" Roman is a man in his forties at that point, and I was twenty. I was playing Dr. Barnes in Waiting for Lefty. He said, "I told Roman that your performance as Dr. Barnes is far better than his." I was so pleased.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That's really impressive.

HARRY HAY: I was very pleased with that. I loved Lefty.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were there subsequent companies here of Waiting for Lefty?

HARRY HAY: No.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It wasn't a standard of revival--

HARRY HAY: We did it. We did it off and on, and we used to be able to get people together doing it. I guess the last time we did it was a couple years later. We did a couple of scenes from it. But insofar as I know, it's never been picked up again. I don't know this, but I don't know of any performance there ever was of that. But we did play it for about five weeks, and, as things go, it was a significant performance. There had been other left-wing plays here, like Sailors of Cattaro. Sailors of Cattaro: that was put on by Contemporary Theater. Hollywood Theater Guild--I called it League; it should have been Guild--the Hollywood Theater Guild and the Contemporary Theater were passionate rivals. We weren't really, but we sort of were competing with one another. They were the Sailors of Cattaro, and we were Waiting for Lefty, and I don't think any of us ever got past our initial performances. Hold on. I seem to have dried up. SECOND PART DECEMBER 18, 1981

HARRY HAY: One of the things that I should have mentioned to you long ago is that, beginning about--when would this be? probably about the summer of 1933--I found myself heavily involved with what might have been known as the foreign colony in Hollywood. I think, if I'm not mistaken, it probably all comes around through a man by the name of Marcel Ventura, who would have picked me up on the corner of Hollywood and Vine; it's probably one night either in late 1932 or January or February of 1933. I should mention that I was one of the street people. I used to cruise frequently. Hollywood and Vine was right down the street from the theater where I was working and where I would usually catch the bus to go home. If I were ever unlucky enough, I had to catch the bus to get home, but most of the time I didn't have to catch the bus to go home; I got a ride one way or another. This is a period quite different from the period of now. There were people who were hustling then, but I had always felt that what I had to offer was beyond price; so, consequently, I had never thought of my learning in this field, shall we say, as something that I would be extracting coin thereof. However, there was one man: I think he was the son of the man who may at one time have been the Argentine consul here. He had gotten himself involved, as homosexual men with a flavor, with European manners, would cut a neat figure in social circles here in the '30s, particularly with older women. So, he had a coterie of friends and connections and so on. Naturally, when he picked me up, he gave me the line about what he was going to do to introduce me to people in the movies, and I was just at this moment young enough and naive enough to believe him. That naivete didn't last long, but nevertheless it served his purposes temporarily. He was kind of a nice guy, and I kind of liked him. There was a whole Spanish delegation at this time here in Southern California. There was a man by the-- (When I wrote that list down, I couldn't think of anything but his first name. For two weeks now I've remembered his last name, and now I've forgotten it again.) His first name was Hugo. He was of a very good Spanish family. He was calling himself by the Spanish royal family's name. Oh, dear.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Gee, I have no idea.

HARRY HAY: I'll think of it sometime. It was like the Bourbons, the Bourbon, but it was something else. [Borbón] Marcel kept saying, "He doesn't have to call himself by that name because his own name is just as good. In fact, it's even better. It's older. Of course, it is true that he is first cousin to Juan Carlos," who was at that time only the heir apparent, and now, since that time, he has abdicated, and his son now is on the throne. (But this is the older Juan who was the son of Alfonso, who had abdicated in 1931.) Anyway, he, I should say among other things, because of his connections with the Spanish throne, he was sort of on call among the California Spanish socialites of that period. We had a lot of them: the Sepúlvedas and the de la Vegas and the del Valles. [They] were still prominently noticed in social circles in the early thirties. This guy was always getting invitations to speak at lunch, and he couldn't speak five words of English without falling flat on his face. So, consequently, I would write his little speeches for him, and then I would teach him to say them so that you could understand what he said. I spoke enough Spanish myself so that I could take down dictation from him in Spanish and translate into English and then teach him back on that. As a result of meeting him, I began meeting Hungarians, Germans, French, one or two Finns, I believe--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, are these kind of middle-class people, or are they poorer, working-class immigrants?

HARRY HAY: No, no, no.

MITCH TUCHMAN: All delegates of--

HARRY HAY: These are all lower nobility, the whole kit and caboodle of them.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And they've come here because of--

HARRY HAY: They come here because of the movies. The colony was here because of the movies. This was just the beginning of the movies, and Hollywood will have a fascination and a sort of fascinating flirtation with the lower nobility of this country and that country and the other country until after the Second World War. All during the star system, this kind of thing is going on. We're always making films about Catherine of Russia or Rudolf of Hapsburg or something or other, and so they're always wanting the genuine flavor by having flunkies around who have a proper accent or who know how to bow in the proper way, and so on, and who might even have uniforms, which are useful to actors, [with] the proper decoration and so on. All these guys, if they have nothing else, they all have their uniforms and their monocles and their sabres, which they clank around at any given moment. They are all wanting to learn things, because, if they're lucky and they have a line, they get twenty-five bucks for it. You see the difference. There were quite a number of people whom I knew. For instance, there was one guy who used to get regularly one line or two lines; his name was Ivan Lebedef. He used to show up in practically all of the European movies as the impeccable Russian grand duke this and grand duke that, and so on. Lebedef I helped a number of times with lines. Of course, I found it was very interesting: Josephine Dillon, who was Clark Gable's first wife, had a school of diction, but she was very expensive. Even though a number of these guys had gone to the school of diction, it didn't much help. You see, the problem of getting Hungarians or French or Spanish or Finns to be able to pronounce j or-- What was the other thing, other sounds that they had to make? I wasn't concerned with what the proper way, let's say, the diction approach to the thing. I wasn't concerned with that. In other words, I didn't help them to pronounce* [the soft g or j or sharpen their pronunciations of our explosive consonants like b and d and t or pronounce sh with a caress rather than as zh with a rasp]. I was only concerned with these particular sounds which have to --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. do with the line that they were speaking or the two lines or three lines that they had to say.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, would you be coaching in terms of dialogue, actually scripts?

HARRY HAY: I would be [coaching] in terms of the actual dialogue. I would find ways and means by which they could pronounce these syllables they were having trouble with.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Sounds like Henry Higgins and Zoltan Kaparthy from--

HARRY HAY: Pretty much that kind of thing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you see yourself more as Henry Higgins or as Zoltan Kaparthy?

HARRY HAY: I could have except Pygmalion didn't come out until-- We didn't get Pygmalion in this country until '35, I think. By that time I was past this whole period, you see. Through that connection, for example, I met a very interesting, rather notorious person, I guess, in his own way. His name was Gabor de Bessenyey. He sometimes called himself Baron. Sometimes he didn't. He was a very powerful figure and cut quite a swath in social circles. He inclined to the [James Wilson] Fifield [Jr.] side of thinking, which would mean, if anything, he'd be moving towards a form of fascism, in that, in this country even then, Fifield and USC [University of Southern California] were always kind of leaning away to the right of thinking. They were always anticommunist this and anticommunist that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Fifield did you say?

HARRY HAY: Fifield of the First Congregational Church. He was always anticommunist something or other, and USC was always leaning in that direction too. Several of the people who were around Gerald L. K. Smith would have summer sessions at USC. Gabor was always flirting around with these people and trying to get me involved with that, but I wouldn't. He is useful, because he is going to lead into things later on. Rene Mistele was a very interesting French designer, who was here for a number of years. He was involved with doing decor for Hollywood Bowl performances of the Japanese dancer Micho Ito.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, are these people that you were teaching English to, all these people that you're mentioning?

HARRY HAY: Micho Ito had a very fine English-speaking wife; so I didn't have to teach anything to him. Mistele I certainly had to teach and all of his friends. He was always getting into trouble in his apartment house, and I had to take him down to small claims court. That would be kind of fun, because what [would] happen was that Mistele would talk to me in French; I understood French, but I couldn't speak it. So, he would talk to me in French, and I'd answer him in Spanish, and then he would answer me in French again. Then I'd say to the judge-- By this time the small claims court would be going, "Oo, oo, oo," because all these languages are all going on here back and forth, and I'm presenting his case in court to the judge in English, but I'm speaking to him in Spanish, and he's answering me in French. The bailiff is always sure there's some conniving; some jiggery-pokery is going on here because, after all, it's obvious that I'm not speaking the same language he's answering in. How do I know that the answer that I'm giving the judge is necessarily correct? I got him out of a number of scrapes by doing this. And then, having done that, I found myself going to small claims court for Germans and for Hungarians. They were all having trouble with their landladies or trying to get their luggage out of hock or whatever their cases were at the various times. So, I'd be doing the same thing. The European colonies understood many languages. They would maybe speak one or two, understand two or three more. So, I found, among other things, that my knowledge of Spanish got me through with the Hungarians, with the Germans, with the French. They all understood the language even if they didn't speak it. They would come back in some language. I understood enough German and enough French so that I could get by with this. So, we could do this German-French, Spanish-Spanish, English-English stuff. And then I'm teaching them* [how to make recognizable American-English sounds by using the characteristic sounds of these rather different, essentially Middle European and Eastern European languages. You wouldn't believe the facial contortions one Netherlander went through trying to learn how to pronounce j for radio]. So, in a way, I'm writing all these worthless speeches. All these guys are doing reminiscences for ladies' lunches, you see, the entertainment at the ladies' lunches, and always it's utter trash. All they did was go through a lot of fantasy projections, recalling royal-family-related childhoods they never had, name dropping like crazy--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are they basically grateful for the lunch they get? Were they on hard times?

HARRY HAY: They're all on hard times, and the lunch they get-- grateful they are not--but nevertheless lunch they need. They would probably get lunch and maybe five dollars or lunch and maybe ten. If they got ten, they'd all go out and get drunk. If they had five, they'd probably pay the rent. If they didn't get anything, they'd curse all the way home. And here I am, as I say, writing all this worthless trivia, this absolute trash, and teaching them how to say --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. it back. It worked for me occasionally because I went along too, and I got the lunch also. I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in cold, hard cash. I was a mercenary little bitch at that point. I wouldn't touch one of these lunch things for under five bucks. And usually, usually I got it, and usually they covered expenses, namely, me; so it all worked out very nicely. I met a number of people who-- I don't know whether it was ever known they were even here, but they were supposed to have been. One person I met was a woman by the name of-- She called herself--and I think she was, by marriage anyway--a baroness, the Baroness Carla Janssen. One night I was saying something to my mother about this woman whom I'd met who was very-- Oh, this woman had said to me, she'd said, "Remember me to your father," and this blew me away, because here is this bunch of expatriate renegades and loose-livers, and so on, who are all running around Hollywood. All of it [is] a little bit on the margin of-- Some of it [is] mostly honest, but not quite; borrowing from people whom they have no intention of paying back or even inadvertently carrying off something or other from somebody else's house and then pawning it. But you know about [it]. It's picayune, and you're not about to report it back. Maybe you should. If you're a young Quaker, you probably would have, but I wasn't. I would hear all of these things, and sometimes I would see them and sometimes I wouldn't. This one woman at one time--and I rather liked her; she had an interesting forwardness about her which in the thirties was not common with women except in the movies-- she said, "Remember me to your father." So, I remembered her to my father, and my father just about fell out of his chair. It was a woman whom he had known in South Africa, in Johannesburg, probably between 1906 and 1910, when she was probably quite a good deal younger. At that point she wasn't a baroness. She was just Carla Janssen. He was interested in knowing where the baron came in. I said, "Well, I don't know about that, and possibly I'll ask her," but I don't think I ever did. She was what would be known as an adventuress. Literature, let's say, middle-class or lower-middle-class literature, of both England and France, and the United States, between about 1880, I guess, and about 1935, is well peppered with stories about adventuresses. Well, Carla Janssen, apparently, was one of the queens of the crop. She had had many adventures, shady ones and strange ones, from here to there. She was variously fingered as having been a spy during the First World War. What she was doing in Hollywood in 1933 or 1934, I don't know, although it occurs to me, now that I'm saying this to you, she was probably selling events out of her life, if she was not indeed selling memoirs, and she might even have been picking up a little blackmail here and there too. I don't know. I don't know that, but I do know that she was here with these bogus counts and real barons and fancy first-class, sort of, royal citizens in their own rights from a whole variety of countries.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Those people-- That society-- You can tell that it's gone because they were so regularly parodied in screwball comedies of the thirties, but they don't appear as comic characters anymore. Mischa Auer just made a career out of playing Russians.

HARRY HAY: Yes, he did.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And Jules Munschin perhaps.

HARRY HAY: Yes, he did. But don't forget that Mischa Auer himself--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was one of them?

HARRY HAY: --was part of that set.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Or the whole business in Dinner at Eight is that they're having dinner for Lord and Lady Ferncliff--

HARRY HAY: That's right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: --whoever that is. It doesn't matter who it is; it's enough to motivate a lot of people to want to be there.

HARRY HAY: Well, you see, for instance, there were quite a number of, let's say, fairly respectably honest people who were genuine in their own right who were hanging around here on-- Well, I was thinking of--oh, dear, what's that man? Peter Lawford. The Lawfords. Lady May Lawford and Sir Sidney Lawford. He was a knight. He wasn't a baron. They were on the edge of respectability here, desperately poor, doing what they could and also looking for lunches and dinners when they could find them too. But, nevertheless, they weren't involved with this crowd. This crowd that I'm talking about were a little bit more--I've forgotten the word for these things--but they were not respectable really. They were a shady lot really, and I think that I wouldn't have chosen them as companions, except that I found it all very interesting, and it told me a lot about a life that I knew nothing about and an era that was already in the process of passing away. I'll have to admit it was sort of glittery, but it was pretty trivial and pretty shallow. I would find myself resenting the fact that I had promised to do this speech and that speech and the other speech, which meant that I had to hang around with these people quite a lot.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Wasn't this in kind of direct opposition to your political sentiments and activities otherwise?

HARRY HAY: Yes. And as a matter of fact, that was one thing that kept me on an even keel. I mean, I suppose that the more I got loaded up with this stuff, perhaps the more determined I was that I would go on the next three demonstrations even though they were dangerous as far as the police were concerned. Yes, I think that had a lot to do with it. I was learning a great deal about why, for example, in various countries the revolutionary movements took the characteristics that they did. These people, of course, were telling me about all the atrocities, but the stories about the atrocities wore awfully thin. I had a good memory, and they didn't; so I would hear them cross themselves up or give the wrong events about the same things twice and in different places. I knew that a lot of this was just being exaggerated beyond all compare and, furthermore, that they didn't really understand what had happened. They didn't really see what it was they had all been doing, and that I found rather interesting.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, even that aspect of those characters comes through in the movie roles that parody them, I think.

HARRY HAY: I think that's very true. What I found so very interesting was that here were people who, from the point of view of their time and their place, presumably very well educated-- Now, this meant, I suppose, that they had a knowledge of a wide variety of things at very small depth. I mean, they had a wide area of knowledge but nothing more than skin deep. They really didn't know their own history. They certainly didn't know anything about their own politics. They had no idea of the disastrous type of loads they had inflicted upon their own countries in those years.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What do you think became of that community? Did part of it return and part of it become assimilated?

HARRY HAY: I would say the best stock--there were some really good people who were here--they went home. They served in various ways, I would imagine, during the Second World War. Either that or they stayed here and became citizens. Or they went to England and became citizens.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But the community just dissipated generally.

HARRY HAY: But otherwise the community simply dissipated, and, like froth on a cake, it was very obvious that they hadn't been of any importance for a long time. They had been nothing but a burden and a threat. So, they got blown away like froth on a beer, and they never went back. They had no reason to. They had no purpose. From what I remember of them, stripped of the so-called glitter of their spangles and their so-called nobility, they weren't much as people.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Sounds like a race of headwaiters.

HARRY HAY: [laughter] If I only could think of them as being that useful, [laughter] but I can't even do that. They really were not worth much as people. I could learn a great deal from that. Anyway, we were peppered with these people in that earlier period. Oh, there is an interesting connection. How does that work out? Oh, yes. Rene Mistele, the designer, was also in his own right a very fine ballroom dancer. Ballroom dancing is what we do in that period. This is the way we dance. We don't dance as people have danced since that time. [We] dance in couples and in ballrooms and so on. It happened also that I was also a very good ballroom dancer--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yes, you talked about that very early.

HARRY HAY: Rene knew of a number of films that were coming up, you know, the Busby Berkeley type of things, musicals and so on, where occasionally they needed fine waltzers, particularly people who could do the Viennese waltz, and I could do that. So, he introduced me one time to a group of about three or four pairs of dancers who did an act. This was still possible. Vaudeville had already sort of begun to go, but occasionally ballroom dancers were useful at evenings where they would have some kind of an entertainment to raise money for hospitals and so on. They would have a big dance, but in the middle of the dance, there would be an entertainment of some sort, and show dancers often were included.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That sort of thing also appears in movies of that period, that sort of couple who would come out onto the dance floor and dance as an exhibition.

HARRY HAY: This was a group of three, and sometimes four, dancers who danced and sort of interwove with each other. It was quite an interesting act. Among the dancers was a very handsome, very handsome young woman by the name of Edie Huntsman, who was a designer and writer in her own right, I guess, but she occasionally needed funds, and she was one of the dancers. I went to try out for this, and I think the reason why I didn't get it was because I was too tall. The women were all around about five-eight. The men were around five-ten or -eleven, and I was six-three, and I would simply stand up above all that. I was far and away the better dancer of almost all of the men, but I was too tall, and I didn't fit. But in the meantime, I stayed around there, and I would play, and I would also fit in when the men didn't come in. [interruption] I stayed with the group and would go to see them occasionally, and I think I was kind of hoping, maybe, they would decide to relent and allow me to dance with them, because I liked what they were doing, and I enjoyed filling in anyway. I liked being around them. Particularly I liked this Edie Huntsman. I liked her very much. Exactly, I would say, [she was] the type of woman that many gay men would like very much: a sort of an open, frank, comrade type of person, and I liked her very much. She herself had some very solid ideas about political actions that were going on in the city at the time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was she involved in any of the things that you were involved with?

HARRY HAY: At that moment she was, but I didn't know it then. She wasn't involved at the levels that I would be involved in. She would be involved with the writing, with what we now call the PR section, much of this, because she belonged to one of the Hollywood sections [Communist Party USA], and I was not myself then privy to the Hollywood sections. I was in the more direct, what was known as the street crowds: open activities and open demonstrations or even open, shall we say, confrontations which were happening. In turn, Edie would introduce me-- She said that there were a number of events that were going on in and around Hollywood that she thought I would enjoy. One time she invited me to an afternoon garden party. The garden party was at the home of a Hungarian woman who was a voice coach and who coached quite a number of people: singers and even speakers and so on. [Her] name was Lillian Hatvanyi.* [She had a pleasant, two-story, white-shingled house on Harper at Fountain, a house with a generous enough lawn to host frequent garden parties at which badminton often was played. Houses like hers, with their quiet, laid-back lawns and berry or grape arbors and small mazes of set-out flowering plants are all gone now from the West Hollywood scene. There's almost nothing left to indicate that "garden-party life," which was one of the joys of the politically progressive Hollywood scene of the Spanish Civil War period or the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League events or the trooping together of all these progressive-cause folks in a joint attempt to dump through recall the corruption-ridden mayor of Los Angeles in 1937-38, Frank Shaw. Lillian Hatvanyi loved to have a garden party or an informal badminton at-home at least twice a month. She collected around herself an exotic mixture] of, I suppose you'd say, attractive, well-appointed young men, who had Hollywood ambitions, who might be singers, who might be dancers, who were a combination of singers and actors, and assorted writers, small-time producers, occasional directors, and so on. She would have sort of soirees, I think you'd call them, only they were daytime affairs rather than evening. They were usually on the weekends, Saturday afternoon or --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Sunday afternoon, into the early evening. There would always be a buffet supper of some sort served.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this something that she was throwing, or was there a purpose to it? Was she earning a living this way?

HARRY HAY: I often wondered about that. Ostensibly she earned her living by being a voice coach. She would have, as I said, she would have these young men who were being coached, who, were they to get a job, would very considerably enhance her prestige, and who then would probably pay her a higher fee than they might have been paying at the moment. Or she might have been coaching them on the possibilities, for instance--

MITCH TUCHMAN: You don't think she was peddling them or anything like that, do you?

HARRY HAY: I think that was exactly what she was doing. I think, as a matter of fact, Hollywood operated along that basis. Everybody was always peddling somebody. And that's what the parties were all for.

MITCH TUCHMAN: No, I meant, sexually was she peddling them?

HARRY HAY: I think so too, but I don't know that, and that wouldn't have been the thing we ever would have discussed. But I'm sure that this was always going on at all times. It only is now going to come out because it's going to be in all these oral histories. As far as Hollywood was concerned, it was pretty well understood that most of the contracts, most of the arrangements had something sexual somewhere along the line. It sort of went with the business, as it were.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What became of your connection with her, then? I interrupted you.

HARRY HAY: What was interesting to me about all this was that I came to know a number of people this way, and I came to know her sister-in-law, I think--I always connect the two together--whose name was Viola Brothers Schorr. Viola Brothers Schorr was one of the great writers in Hollywood. Edie worked with Viola quite often. I came to know Viola, and she was interested in me. We liked each other, and she knew something about me through Edie, who apparently worked with her occasionally. She was interested because of the fact that I was connected with the film group and because I was an actor and because I was also an activist. It was she who one day said to me, "Well, with the various things you do, you might be interested in involving yourself in political satire as an actor and also as a writer [inaudible] you have performed." She knew by this time that I had been doing work with Bill Geer and others at political meetings. And she said, "In this regard, maybe your knowledge would be of some use. So, why don't you come to this meeting at--" This would have been at Frank and Tanya Tuttle's house; they lived up on Outpost [Drive], It was a meeting beginning the discussion of the recall of Frank Shaw, in other words, what was going to be known as the [Fletcher] Bowron campaign. There were a number of little plays, little one-act plays, or skits, that were being developed. I would say, there were at least eight or nine that I know of.

MITCH TUCHMAN: On this theme?

HARRY HAY: On this one theme, the whole idea of trying to show the corruption in the city in a variety of ways, trying to find ways and means to expose these things, because all of the reports that we had on Shaw-- We knew that organized crime was here to some extent. We had no direct knowledge of any of it. It was all inference. It was all what you'd call secondhand or second-rate or second-level reports of corruption or examples of corruption, but no primary material. We were always attempting to take this material and see if we could find ways and means of implying a larger picture and a deeper relationship, and so on. I mention all of this because it's very instructive. Here were some of the so-called better minds in Hollywood together with some of the people who, like myself, had had experience in what we call street-acting, agit-prop, all coming together to see whether or not we could get anything going. The importance of all these meetings was, I suppose, that activists, cultural activists and street activists, were sort of becoming acquainted with each other and possibly making contributions to each other as persons and as activists.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Let me ask you something then: Was the anti-Shaw campaign-- What role would you say the Communist Party played? Gee, maybe I'd better back up. Would you say that your role was directly linked to your membership in the Communist Party--I don't know if membership is the right word--or because you were simply an activist, you would also be active in this thing?

HARRY HAY: Yes, yes, that's how it--

MITCH TUCHMAN: And would you say the communists took a leading role, or were they active in exactly the way I just implied?

HARRY HAY: They didn't take a leading role in that regard. What their responsibilities would be in this case--and they certainly were all along the line--is that they would be very excellent in analysis. They would be analyzing how the things were going.* [If I were to describe in today's terms how the Communist Party, through its members, operated in mass movements, like the Shaw recall campaign, I would say that the CP sought to "facilitate" action programs. Or it sought to "enable" large groups of people to --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. become acquainted with the joyous experience of working with people. Then, after a given push or a given program of action was completed, they would call a conference and analyze the many lessons and new tactics invented and/or learned.]

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 18, 1981

MITCH TUCHMAN: We were talking about the Shaw campaign and the participation of various groups--

HARRY HAY: What I was going to say was that there were these wonderful meetings and the meetings of these committees, the so-called cultural workers, the writers and the actors, coming together to do something about getting Fletcher Bowron into office and Mayor Shaw out of office. I can remember meetings, it seems to me, morning meetings. They would be probably ten o'clock in the morning, and they would last until two or three in the afternoon. They were always on Outpost Drive, somewhere or other, and there would be, as I said, anywhere from 50 to 80, sometimes 120 people at them.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is that where skits would be performed, at that sort of location?

HARRY HAY: No, no, no, that's precisely what I'm getting at. They came together in order to develop these things. There wouldn''t be skits there, because the skits would be done out in the public. The point is, that nothing ever came of it. But a great many of these people came to know each other very well. I think in a way it was kind of a refreshing situation because here were Hollywood people, studio people, who were involved with each other in their lives within the studios themselves, which were actually a world within a world, coming in contact with people from the trade unions and people who were, let''s say, street demonstration people like myself, and so on. There was a sort of an interesting exchange going on here, because the material that they were developing-- If nothing else, a lot of the material that began to appear in films just prior to the Second World War, which had an earthier flavor, a more open sort of street flavor about it, sort of a democratic feeling about it, and less romantic and less hothouse in approach, may very well be because of the fact that all of the writers that I know of were involved with these committees that I''m talking about around the Shaw-Bowron campaign. A lot of this sort of warm, rich, folksy Americana that began to enter films beginning about '37 or '38 might be because of these interesting committees that came together to do presumably political work. Although, as I said, no real political work came out of it, nevertheless it had an effect on the writers and the actors and the directors who were there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did activity in the Bowron campaign ipso facto lead to blacklisting problems later on?

HARRY HAY: No, I don't think those were in any way related. No, I don't think so. The blacklisting problems which showed up in '47, '48, and '49-- Well, yes, wait a minute.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Presumably those people were active in other things too.

HARRY HAY: That's true, they were. But, you see, this is the beginning of a sort of an opening up of the Hollywood people to political problems within the area which might be available. But by the same token, we had in place by then one of the largest sort of what we used to call mass organizations, a very effective one, and that was the Hollywood Anti-Semitic League [Hollywood Anti-Nazi League]. The Hollywood Anti-Semitic League, the Hollywood part--the studios, not the town of Hollywood; the location was Hollywood in terms of film stars and movie companies and so on--and it was a very large organization, and it did a great deal.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It sounds like it was more like the Hollywood Anti-anti-Semitic League.

HARRY HAY: It was the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and what it was involved with-- It was involved with anti-Semitism, the struggle against anti-Semitism. Yeah, how do you put it? This is how we always thought of it. It was a very active organization. It probably had a membership of-- I don't know. Certainly the mailings that we sent out would be anywhere from between ten to twenty-five thousand.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What would motivate non-Jews to be members of such a thing?

HARRY HAY: The recognition of the need to struggle against Hitler, which by this time in left-wing circles is very well known and very widespread.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I see. Were the things that the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the things that they were working on, were they related to European anti-Semitism or to local Los Angeles [anti-Semitism]?

HARRY HAY: They were concerned with European anti-Semitism and local ones, but also we were raising vast amounts of money to get refugees out of Europe. This was important too because it was necessary to keep that going at all times in order to keep as many channels open as possible. So that when the refugees got here, they would be welcomed, and there would be opportunities for them; there would be places for them to stay. Of course, we're in the heights of the Depression, but we still have to find jobs for them or find ways for them to survive.* [By this time in Los Angeles, 1936, '37, '38, we had a large, noisy, vociferous German-American Bund. They had headquarters down on ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Washington Boulevard, between Union Street and where the Harbor Freeway now goes through. They were always attempting to entice anti-Semitic demonstrations and/or confrontations at parades or on high school playgrounds or out in front of churches on specific ethnic-oriented feast days. They would find ways and means of getting exposure for their hate-mongering programs and spokespersons, like Detroit-based Father Coughlin or Texas-Oklahoma-based Gerald L. K. Smith or our local Nazi-favoring crowd, like the Congregational minister James Fifield and a group of Moral Majority-type anti-Semitic ministers Fifield associated with who were teaching at USC.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Tell me if this is the time to bring up something that you discussed with me, and that was that you felt that the Jews locally were not sufficiently involved in this effort.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, this sort of is the time to do it, but before we do that, I must bring up one other person. And, again, this is like dragging a red herring in. It has to do with the man I mentioned earlier, the Argentinian, Marcel Ventura. He had a couple of friends down at Laguna, the area quite north of Laguna known as Emerald Bay, who, I think, rented the house of an actor by the name of Duncan Renaldo. Ostensibly the people who were renting the house were the famous world traveler Richard Halliburton and his secretary, who had one time been his lover, by the name of Paul Mooney. I wanted to mention Paul Mooney, because Marcel had taken me down to spend a weekend at Emerald Bay. Paul liked to have a whole host of strange young men whom he'd never met. He appreciated whole, long lists of them showing up at various times. So, I was brought down as some of the fresh meat, but it turned out that sexually I didn't--that he and I were not compatible. But socially and emotionally and spiritually we were very compatible indeed. We would sit up all night and talk. He would be sexually involved, let's say, between eight and eleven, and then between eleven and seven in the morning, we would be around the fireplace in the big house downstairs talking about various things. And he, I suppose, filled me in with what had been happening in the gay movement since time began down to the present. He had had a wide, personal experience of his own, and he had also done a tremendous amount of reading. As Halliburton's secretary, he had been in all kinds of places in the world and spoke, or at least read, five or six languages, had visited all the interesting people in Europe and also in Asia and in, say, South America and Africa, with vast libraries, illustrations, and things. He had a wide background of all this mateial to tell me all about. He fed all this to me. I'm heavily indebted to Paul Mooney for so many things that I learned. He was a perfectly beautiful young man and very kind and very loving to me. I didn't know until much, much later that he was the son of James Mooney, the anthropologist who wrote on the Ghost Dance religion. It was his father's book through which I discovered that Jack Wilson and Wovoka were the same person. It's a little bit like this is a small world, because Paul Mooney is the person who tells me the most about most of the things I want to know about my own gay world, and then, much later, I find out that his father was the great anthropologist. But I didn't know that at the time; he didn't mention this. He had come to Laguna because Richard Halliburton had wanted to build a house at Laguna. The young architect whom both Mooney and Halliburton brought out from New York, a man by the name of William Alexander, eventually built the house in South Laguna for Halliburton. It still stands there. (I think Halliburton lived in that house a year and never saw it again.) It was one of the first examples of sort of modern architecture in South Laguna, built probably about '34 or '35. [A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles & Southern California gives the date as circa 1937. --Ed.] It won all kinds of prizes, and it is very well known architecturally as an example of modern architecture in this area. (Bill Alexander now lives here in Hollywood and, I think, has left his papers to the University of [California] Santa Barbara and is fairly active in the culture committees of USC--and [falsetto] gay as a fruitcake, I might say. I will meet Bill Alexander in New York. I will not meet him at this time. I know all the people he knows intimately well in Laguna, but I miss the architect. I will not meet him until I get to New York, and then he's important in my life in New York.) I wanted to bring in Paul Mooney. I had to give credit to him. Oh, well, one of the people that I would have met at Paul's was a man by the name of-- His name is either Henry or Charles Hubbell. He was a very strange man. I think he'd been an engineer. He lived in Pasadena. He wanted me very much to be interested in him. He wanted me very much to come out and visit him and stay with him in Pasadena. But he was-- Unfortunately-- Incidentally, I just suddenly realized, I've never discussed things-- Are we supposed to be discussing sexual things on these tapes?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, we have consistently. I mean, I think the thing to keep in mind is that basically this volume is for people doing research. If the things you're telling me you think are the sort of things that are likely to become research topics, yes. If you think that they're reminiscences of such a private nature that no one will make use of them, then they're not particularly appropriate.

HARRY HAY: Don't forget, in the gay world, differently from the heterosexual world, a great many times a sexual reference is important; it's giving you something of the nature of the character of a person. Then I think I'll mention that, because this guy-- The reason I wouldn't go to him and the reason why I didn't go to him is that he's one of these people who in that period would have been known as beautifully, or very heavily, hung. As far as he was concerned, that was who he was. As far as I'm concerned, that's not enough to be a person. That's interesting equipment, but that's about as far as it goes. This is not enough to be involved with a person. I would like very much to have believed that he had some other personality besides that, but this was all that was ever displayed to me whenever I went to see him; it was this that he wanted me to be admiring of. You know, you can admire it for just so long, and then, after a while, you want to go on to something else. I mention all that because he had recently-- Well, let's see. Now I'm talking about 1933, the summer of 1933 or fall of 1933. He had either recently or he was about to become the heir of a trading post in Navajo country. I thought it was in New Mexico, but it probably was Arizona, because this would mean that he was the nephew of Lorenzo Hubbell, the great Indian trader responsible for the development of Navajo rugs, whose trading post would have been at Ganado [Arizona] (it's now a national museum). I could have been Mrs. Hubbell, obviously, and gone and lived as the queen of Ganado. But, as I said, having equipment was just not enough to entice me to these "furrin" parts, and I didn't go. When I went to New Mexico and lived there for nine years, [I] realized that Lorenzo Hubbell lived not very far from where I lived in New Mexico; he had been at a place called Pajarito, which is right at the foot of Black Mesa, near San Ildefonso pueblo, now noticed only because it's a beautiful, little morada; that's the penitente chapels. But anyway, I would think of that, and I would think of Charles Hubbell, and I always wondered what had happened to him. So much for Marcel Ventura and Paul Mooney, at whose house I met all these people in 1933. Now, back to Fletcher Bowron and also the relation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Jewish people who could have been involved. By this time, the Jewish people here in Los Angeles had moved from Brooklyn Avenue on the east side out to what is known as the Fairfax district. They're moving in large numbers, particularly people of middle-class and lower-middle-class status. [They're] buying small houses and businesses along Fairfax or little houses in the streets west and east between La Brea and La Cienega, with the central point being Fairfax from Beverly to Melrose. I won't say there were vast numbers, but there were quite a few thousand people who were involved in this. One would have thought that these were the people who would be active in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League or in possibly even some of the things like the refugee committees or the committees that were formed around the Spanish Civil War. We were raising money for the Spanish Civil War, 1936, '37, '38, in there. They are not active at all. As a matter of fact, there were very few who were active. The temple? Never. People like Edgar Magnin, Rabbi Magnin, who had recently built his temple on Wilshire Boulevard-- (The one that I'm thinking of now is the one around Hobart and Wilshire [Wilshire Boulevard Temple]. It's the old B'nai B'rith, down almost across from the Ambassador [Hotel].) You couldn't get near places like that. You couldn't make a presentation in a temple like that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is that a perception of later years, or at that time were you aware that Magnin et al. weren't cooperating?

HARRY HAY: We were very much aware because we needed people to act as endorsers. We tried to put an ad in the papers. We would want to use names of people who might be endorsers of it or who might even present that or who would help raise money to pay for the ad, and we couldn't get them to even look at it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What do you think caused them to hesitate?

HARRY HAY: It wasn't a question of hesitation.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What caused them to ignore you?

HARRY HAY: What they were concerned with--and so many of them are caught up in this--they were absolutely sure that Hitler was fighting communism. And the fact that so many of the Jewish people who came here to this country were themselves progressives and left people and possibly even interested in the Communist Party themselves made the whole thing suspect as far as the middle-class Jews were concerned, who would have nothing to do with any of that. So, I don't think that they ever truly believed that the Jewish people in Germany as Jews were in danger from Hitler. It was the fact that they were anticommunist that made it all suspect. This was the lower middle class who were on their way, socially upwardly mobile towards the middle class in respectability and money and a house of their own and so on. They wouldn't be caught dead involved with the types of people who were interested in the left-progressive causes in that period. So, consequently, the Jews of Europe were left to their own fate by their own people precisely because they were afraid that being anti-Hitler meant that you were being pro-Stalin.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How about at the moment of the Hitler-Stalin Pact? Did that bring more Jews into antifascism?

HARRY HAY: It didn't. Not that much because by this time it's 1939 and most of the ports of outlet are closed.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Ah, it's too late.

HARRY HAY: At this point, it's probably-- If people can get to Lisbon in Portugal-- Lisbon, I think, is still open. It's still sending refugees to New York late in '39. But outside of that, nothing else is open any longer. The Swiss border is long closed.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That's why people were crossing the Pyrenees then.

HARRY HAY: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How Walter Benjamin died.

HARRY HAY: What they did was, they came out of Switzerland through the Savoy and then the Pyrenees into Portugal. But by '39 [Henri Philippe] Pétain is in control of France, and the Vichy government is in control, so that the possibility of their passing through France is no longer a safe thing. They can pass along the borders between France and Italy, but this is a very dangerous way of going.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I don't want to break anything off, but it is about this time that you get married, is that correct? Could you sort of describe how you met your wife, who she was, and--

HARRY HAY: In this period also-- I have to clarify something. I had been sort of flirting in and out of the Communist Party, for instance in '34 and '35. I covered the period of the Waiting for Lefty play, didn't I?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, yeah.

HARRY HAY: Well, in that period-- I don't know whether I mentioned this thing as far as the party was concerned. When I came into the party--in 1933 I think--I went to a number of so-called beginners' classes, and I had a dreadful time understanding the basics of Marxism. I didn't-- I couldn't-- The woman who was head of the cell, the club, that I belonged to, who was-- It was one of the sort of peripheral clubs around the theater in Hollywood. She was also the teacher of classes, and [she was] sort of the head of three or four different cultural cells of the party. Her name is Lillian Asche. Lillian Asche and her husband, Harold Asche--Harold Asche was county organizer at that time--they later turned out to have been-- I don't know how long they worked for the FBI, but they were certainly working for the FBI at that time. They were a part of the inner spy system, in addition to which I think Lillian Asche was probably a Trotskyite. My remembrance of the classes that they taught were such garbled material that it never made any sense to me. It didn't get out correctly, and I think that she was working on this material deliberately, as it were, so that I never really understood what was happening. Because I couldn't make a logic in here, I felt myself being very bothered, very deeply disturbed, so that by '34 I had sort of drifted away from going to meetings. I might have been ostensibly still "on the books"--if they had had books, but they didn't--so that I hadn't sort of dropped out, but I hadn't dropped in by this time either. Between '35 and '36, I really didn't go to meetings at all. In 1937 one of my father's brothers, whom I was very fond of, my uncle Bob, died. He and a brother [David Hay] had been partners in a cattle business here in California for a long, long time. They owned one of the old Miller and Lux cattle spreads in the San Joaquin Valley, in a place called Firebaugh. It was one of the old home Miller and Lux ranches. They'd had a falling out, and Bob had gone into Arizona and handled cattle one winter, in November I think, and, I don't know, came down with pneumonia somehow or other, and people put him on the train and sent him here to Saint Vincent's, and he languished that winter, but he never entirely got over it, and in February he died. So, I made arrangments to send the body back to Hollister [California], where we thought probably he could be buried, since it was sort of at the foot of the area in which they all had been raised. They had been raised on my grandfather's ranch along the San Benito River at a place called Hernandez. So, I went up there to go to that funeral. That was a fabulous experience for me because, although I knew most of my cousins and most of the uncles and had met them at various times in my life when I was much [younger], I'd never seen them all together in one place. For this funeral, because this was the first of the eight brothers to die--no, it wasn't; it was the second, but the first one had died long ago, twenty years ago, twenty years earlier--so they all came together for this occasion. This would be early March in the San Benito area in Hollister, just below San Juan Bautista. As happens in California, it's almost like early spring. I remember the occasion of that funeral so well because all the girl cousins came and the boy cousins came, different ones from different places, from California, from Nevada, from Idaho, where they all had cattle ranches or were involved in cattle ranching in one way or another. It was a joyous occasion. You know, a funeral is a joyous occasion. All these people came together, and the women all had on sort of bright spring hats and gloves for the occasion and so on. The older folks all got together at the house of one of the-- She was a sister-in-law of one of the brothers. So, the older folks all got together, and they were comparing notes. They hadn't seen each other in many years, and so they were sort of catching up with each other. The young folks all went around the town, and I was part of that. It was an absolutely wonderful occasion, a grand occasion. So, we got our uncle buried, and I went up to the old ranch, to where my grandfather's ranch was, where Bob also had been taking cattle, and found that one of my cousins, as a matter of fact my uncle Bill and a couple of the sons, were taking care of that ranch. This was 1937. They were all poor because of the Depression. Uncle Bill had lost his dairy, and so he's taking care of the old ranch. It occurs to me that maybe this is a time for me to come up there and maybe work there at the ranch and see whether or not I can collect any folk songs in the mountains of California in this period. So, at this moment I'm a little tired of doing ghostwriting for the studios. I had rewritten a novel for a guy, and it had been a stint of a year and a half, and I was tired of that. I didn't have any plays to do at the moment. The ghostwriting was not doing very well; so I thought, well, I'll take the spring off, and I'll come up here to my grandfather's ranch, and I'll find out something about what the tradition was there on the range, and I'll see whether or not I can collect songs in this area. And I wonder, because of the fact that it's inland from Monterey, whether or not there's any Spanish material from this area. So, that was my intention and my plan. When I finally did come up there in May of 1937, I brought with me a very beautiful, little artist. Little: he was-- I'm six feet three; he was about five feet nine maybe, five feet eight, a very slim, beautiful, little man, who turned out unfortunately to be not gay. But I was working awfully hard on him, and I had hopes still at this point. He wanted to do folk drawings. He wanted to know something about folk art, and he also was interested, sort of, in kicking around and doing documentary material. He had thought that possibly he might even learn enough of the techniques so that he could become a migratory worker and sort of travel through Northern California and then across into Nevada and into Colorado for the summer and sketch as he went. This is what he had in mind to do, and he wanted to sketch workers and people who were involved in picking and working in fields and so on. (The plan didn't work out, but that was the idea.) He came up, and I still had hopes that I was going to put the make on him, but it didn't work. I tried and tried. But anyway, I did come up that year. I did quite a bit of writing. And I found that there really wasn't very much in the way of folk material, but inadvertently-- My grandfather's ranch had been a Spanish grant, which he had bought sight unseen from New Zealand in 1877. They came here 1878 from New Zealand, the family, and he had bought it sight unseen. As people would do in that period, you'd put a homestead on the river valley. The hills were kind of in between the valleys, and so consequently nobody put a make on the mountains; they just kind of came along with the property. What you were concerned with was the fertile areas in the valleys and along the creeks and the dry streams and so on. My grandfather's way of training his boys--and he had eight of them, but he would only train seven-- My father went to University of California, graduated as a mining engineer; so he was not interested in this, but all the rest of them would be trained as cattlemen. Grandfather took the oldest boy, outside of--my father was the oldest, but the next oldest would have been John--and he and John worked as partners in this area. Grandfather taught him how to raise wheat, what to do with it; how to raise mountain hay and how to gather it and shed it when it was necessary; and how to feed and fatten his cattle and when to market and when not to market them; all the techniques and trainings that you would need to operate a [ranch]. The two of them worked as partners for three years, and they split their profit at the end of each year, and John's money would be put into the bank. At the end of three years, the next son [who] came along would buy John out. Then Grandfather would advance that fund, would buy him out, and then he would work for wages, and the wages would be paying back Grandfather for the amount you had used to buy out your older brother. So that when John left the ranch at the end of his stint, when he was bought out by his brother Tom, who would be the next in line, he would have a training on how to handle cattle and a cattle spread and how to take care of the hays and the grains, because it would be necessary to keep that spread in existence and pay for his own board at the same time, and he would have ten thousand dollars. This is what it amounted to: five thousand would have been set up for him in the first place, and five thousand would be used to pay him back. He'd have another ten thousand dollars and the knowledge, and he went off into the world to begin his life. The next brother would come up, and he'd go through the same process. Each brother, as they came, part of [his] responsibility would be that [he] would take on a homestead, which [he] would add to the parents' place. So, each one of the sons in turn-- (I might even say that my father set up his homestead. Even though he didn't ever work down on the ranch, he still went there in the summertime, and he set up his own homestead, and he [inaudible] that through; so that land became part of the land too.) [There were] 160 acres from each son. So, this was the way that ranch was built up, and it was still there in existence and very much a tight thing in 1936, '37, '38, when I would know it. I went up there much earlier. I went up there the first time in the summertime. I guess I went up there in the summer of '22, '23, '24, just before I went to Nevada. This is where I learned to ride. This is where I learned to shoot from the hip. I used to be able to shoot a rabbit from the hip from a running horse, which is pretty good shooting in that period. I can't say that I really had to do it since that time, but I could do it then. I also, in the great years, '23 and '24, when we were suffering from cholera and anthrax all through the cattle country here, I spent one entire summer dragging huge logs together to burn the bodies of cattle which had died from anthrax. This was the only way you knew how to handle it was to burn, burn, burn. I was a kid then, ten years old, but I loved that work because I was treated like a man. People asked me my opinion of things, and by this time, by the end of summer, I had an expertise on how to handle all this stuff; so my way of thinking was as good as anyone else's. So, this was my training just before I went to Nevada to begin working in the hay fields. I had actually begun to work as a man much earlier. Well, anyway. So, in '37 I decided to go up to this ranch and see what it was like and to meet some of the people who had known my people, who had known my grandfather in that earlier time. I worked there from, I guess, the first of May through September. During the first haying, which would be in June of that year, I suffered an interesting accident, which was to have interesting repercussions much later in my life. My cousins at one point had decided to go down to the rodeo at a place called Bolado Park [California]. All the tourists and the commercial interests would go to the rodeos at Salinas. We, of the mountain people, who actually had cattle, turned up our noses at Salinas: that was just trash. That was just for commercial interests. It was for show purposes and a lot of Hollywood people; it was all pretend stuff. The real rodeos, where the people were really concerned with the beautiful animals and showing their animals and displaying their animals would be at Bolado Park, where the only prizes that would be given for competitions, for roping or for riding or for any other activity, would be a blue ribbon, a white ribbon, or a red ribbon. No money passed hands. If there was no money, you wouldn't rush your horse so that you broke its wind, which at Salinas, if there was a thousand dollar purse, you might very well do. So that when you got all through, if you break an animal's wind, you may win the prize, but that animal is not worth very much from there on out. So that at Bolado Park people were swapping good stock, good cattle, or making arrangements for studding bulls, you know, the various things that go on that make up for developing herds and building stock and acquiring fine horses and so on. But this would be done in terms of animals which were worth acquiring. So, my two cousins and my aunt and uncle have gone down to Bolado Park, and I'm there alone at the ranch, and my job is to bring the hay in in two of the fields, which I could do by myself at this point. I knew how to do it. I had worked in Nevada previously, and I really knew how to do it. So, I'm working alone. I'm doing one thing I had never done before. I had always stacked hay, and this time I'm putting it in the upper areas of the barn: you know, those great big, open windows, the jigs, and the block and tackle that bring the big load up to the top of the wagon and thrust it in the barn. One of the things you run into--I had run into them in Nevada earlier along river-banks in Nevada, and this would be the same thing along riverbanks in California--one of the things you always have to watch for [is] rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes love the sunlight, and in hayfields it's within reasonable reach of either water or rivers or springs or something. So, they oftentimes will be in the sun, or if they're threatened, they'll be under the haystack, not the haystack, but under the--oh, dear, isn't that funny? I've lost the [word]--the shock that is sitting on the ground. You pick up the shock very gently with the fork and just take the snake right with you and put it up on the wagon. That happened many, many times. In Nevada, it was particularly difficult, because the kind of rattlers we had there were sidewinders, and they're much more deadly and much quicker than the ordinary rattlesnake.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you get bitten then?

HARRY HAY: Well, this particular summer, I'm going to get bitten. So, one afternoon, I have brought a load up from a lower field, which is about three miles away, and I have unloaded it into the barn, and I'm about to-- What happens is that it all comes up in a big pile, and you've got to spread it out all evenly. You're working in hot hay. The hay isn't quite-- It's dry, but it's not that dry, and so it has a certain mustiness and moisture about it, and you're working in this stuff probably hip deep; you're sinking down into the thing, when all of a sudden I hear a rattle, and I think, "My God, where is it?" because, after all, I'm in this hay, and I can hear it, but I don't know where it is. It could be anywhere. All of a sudden, just as I'm saying that, there is a [pauses] on my leg, and I know where it is. He's hanging-- He's got his [fangs]-- His teeth are hanging through my pants, because they've struck through the pants into the leg. So, by the time I get out of the hay, I've lost the snake; he's come off, unhooked himself. I get down into the stackfloor, and there are the telltale marks; the leg is already beginning to swell. Now, at this point, at the time, I am thirty miles from the nearest-- Well, I mean, there are other ranches, but on the lower ranch, going on down towards Hollister, where I must go, I'm thirty miles from the nearest ranch there, and I'm about sixty-five miles from town. And I'm alone. And there are animals to be fed, and dogs and cats to be taken care of, and fences and all the rest of these things, and it's two o'clock in the afternoon. And it's Saturday. All the things you can think of. And at this moment I suddenly think--

MITCH TUCHMAN: And you left your credit cards somewhere.

HARRY HAY: I'm not worried about that, dear. What I'm really worried about at this moment is that I can't remember whether or not it's a few grains of permanganate potash that you put in the thing, or whether or not you put a lot. I can't remember this. It's something-- There's one point where you use a lot, and there's one point where you use a little, and I can't remember which one it is when I get to the snakebite. So, it's right in the middle of the leg, at this point here, and I can't get my mouth down to suck it. If I could only open it up, I could suck it out, but I can't. So, there's only one other thing I could do, and that is, I've got to take my knife, and I've got to go deeply, and I've got to cut this way, which is difficult if you're doing it to yourself. The knife isn't particularly sharp--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Beh!

HARRY HAY: --and you don't feel you can sit there and sharpen the knife while this stuff is running through your veins, you see. I'm doing everything I can to keep from going into a panic. So, I managed somehow or another to make a jagged wound in this thing to get the blood to spurting, but I can't remember about the potash, the permanganated potash. So, I think, "Well, it's safer to use too much." So, I take a small handful of it, and I put that right into the wound and bind the wound together with such bandage as I can--I've got to tear my own underwear apart in order to do this--and I manage to get the horse saddled, and I simply left. I'm sorry to say, I didn't do anything about the animals or anything else. Well, yes, I did. I unharnessed the horses, and I put them in the stableyard, and I put some fodder out for them and for the cattle, and I saddle my horse, and I make my way over the mountains to this ranch, which is thirty miles away. I get there--this is Saturday afternoon; so I left about four-thirty--so I rode all night and got to the ranch the next morning, probably about nine. They took one look at the wound and said, "You've got to go to the doctor," and they put me in their truck, and they drove me to Hollister, which was from their house about forty-five miles. So that I got to Hollister-- I would probably get there about twenty-four hours after the snakebite, after the snake had bitten me. My leg has swollen to about this size, and it's gotten kind of black and blue all up and down, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's it's blood poisoning. I don't know that. It could be. I'm not sure, and the people are not sure. So, I get to the doctor's in Hollister, and the guy takes the bandage off and takes a look and says, "You know, I used to work as a doctor on the Apache reservation in southern Arizona, where the people were oftentimes bit by Gila monsters." He said, "Their only way of knowing how to handle this would be to take a flaming ember from the fire and put it into the wound to cauterize it." He said, "What would happen in that case is that it would cauterize it all right, but all traces of the original wound, the bite of the Gila monster would all be gone, and I would treat the third-degree burn," and he said, "this is what I'm about to do again." He said, "You put on enough permanganate of potash to have taken care of an army of snakes. All you needed was four little grains, not four hundred, which is what you put on it." So he said, "At this moment, my guess is that there isn't a trace of the snake wound left. I will now have to treat you for one of the worst burns I've seen in my life, [laughter] and you'll be here for at least a couple of weeks," which is what I was after that. I had to stay there for a couple of weeks while it healed. It was a mess. It had not quite gone to gangrene but pretty close because I bound it too tight among other things. What was important in this story--I can't really remember how I felt about it--but I really was quite concerned about the bite when it happened, and I don't remember being angry at the snake. But anyway, the thing is, I didn't kill him. I probably couldn't find him anyway, but I don't know that I would have killed him anyway. I've always had the feeling that I wouldn't have. And it's important because much, much later, when I came to visit, to know the Indian people, they recognized me as a member of the snake brotherhood, and I'm automatically a member of the snake clan because I was bitten, I did not kill him, and I survived.* [When I visited the Seneca People's Traditional Reservation at Tonawanda in western New York, during the First Traditional Indian North American Unity Conference in August of 1977, Clifton Sundown, one of the Seneca traditional medicine people and chief of the Seneca snake clan, recognized me (how, I cannot fathom) as a member of the snake brotherhood.] So, this is going to be very important when I am forty, but I had no way of knowing it at that present time. So, this is [the weekend of July 4] 1937. [About July 15, 1937] a couple of my aunt's daughters came up to visit her, and nothing would do but maybe we should have a dance at Hernandez Corners [California]. Hernandez Corners was where the schoolhouse was. The schoolhouse is in an area where all the people who lived along the road to our ranch would send their kids, and other people from the valley would send their kids; so that it might be an area where maybe there might be twenty or thirty families, and the schoolhouse would be serving them. (That schoolhouse has been serving that area since 1885.) -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. So, they decided that what we would do was that we would take the schoolhouse from where it [was] and haul it back to the Corners, where it had been when all my folks lived there long ago, when the boys were growing up in the nineties. We would bring it to the Corners again. We would put it on a sled, and we would bring it back. We'd tune up the piano, and we would have a dance. We announced the dance, I think, about a month in advance. As I remember, the dance was about the [second] weekend in August. What was interesting about the dance was-- I don't know how the word was spread out. Probably by word of mouth and by party telephone, because we all had party lines in that area. Nobody had a private line. There were always at least five or six people on each one of the lines, so that they knew about the dance at Hernandez Corners. I would say that we had enough room--

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 18, 1981

HARRY HAY: I'd say that we probably had enough room. We used an outside platform, outside the schoolhouse. We used the schoolhouse for people's wraps and to put the children, who came down, to sleep and places for food that we'd be serving. We had the piano out of the schoolhouse and onto the platform we had built. I had tuned the piano with a skate key, and we were in pretty good shape. I have a pretty good ear, and the piano was in reasonably good condition. I played the piano too for a lot of the stuff. We probably had room for about fifty or sixty dancers on that platform. About three hundred people came. What was interesting was that people came to tell us that they could remember their mothers and fathers talking about coming to dances at Hernandez Corners fifty years before. So, they came simply out of nostalgia and for old times, because this was something that hadn't happened in the mountains in a long time. There were old folks who had come to the dances at Hernandez Corners fifty years before and who came again and brought their kids and so on. So, it was a very interesting experience and something that just hadn't happened in that area [since before the First World War]. What possessed my cousins to do this, I don't know, except that maybe they'd heard the stories too about the fact that in Grandfather's time there had been dances at Hernandez Corners maybe two, three times a year. So, at any rate, we held one of these dances. At about midnight or thereafter, a rough family showed up. I remember the men because they all had on these big, hobnailed boots, and they just about brought the platform down--clump, clump. They had just recently arrived in this old jalopy they had from Idaho. They'd learned a "brand new song," a real brand new song, and they couldn't wait to sing it to me, because I'm playing the piano, so that I can play it on the piano so that they can dance to it. (Of course, these are country dances that are being done: square dances and schottisches and stuff like that they were doing. None of the dancing that night was-- The only dance that we would have had that would have fitted ballroom dancing would have been the waltz. There were polkas and schottisches and mazurkas and square dances and reels and quadrilles and things like that. This is what we did.) So, this was this brand new song. They couldn't wait for it. In order that I could remember it, I remember I wrote it down on the back of an envelope or something so that I could sketch it out, see what it was, what tune it was. But anyway, it was a song that was called "Idaho Girls, Will You Come Out Tonight and Dance by the Light of the Moon?" So, I wrote this thing out, and I kept thinking, "I've heard this thing before somewhere. Where did I-- I couldn't remember where it was. But nevertheless it was "Idaho Gals, Will You Come Out Tonight and Dance by the Light of the Moon?" as far as these guys were concerned, and they were men maybe in their early fifties, it was the first time they'd ever heard this song, and it was a brand new song. They had been around Boise, Idaho, and everybody up in that part was singing this song, and it was a brand new song, and it had just been invented. OK. So, this is the beginning of my folk collecting, right there, because I've got this down. I've also got down probably a dozen other tunes as other people had started coming forward and volunteered things that they had heard. I began to write all these things down on this same envelope and play them. Then they would start to dance, and then they would sing them, sing the words, that had to do with them. When I get back to [Los Angeles], I will go and look at some books, which I have been looking at by this time, by a man by the name of Sigmund Spaeth, who had written a series of--(Beginning about '33 or '34, he had been putting down American folk songs and ballads and things like that, not only American folk songs but songs, the sentimental songs of the shows, of vaudeville, of the schoolhouse or the church socials through most of the latter part of the nineteenth century. These are the songs that had been sung all over America, and he would put them down in various things. I can't remember. I'm trying to think of some of the names he had. There was something like Read 'em and Weep: [The Songs You Forgot to Remember (1926)]--come out of Sigmund Spaeth. But anyway, he's going to put down the first American folk songs.) [Spaeth's first books on popular music appeared in the 1920s. --Ed.] The moment that I get back to town, late in 1937, I'm going to go to the library, and I will find that nobody knows anything about "Idaho Gals." But I began to recognize that, if I simply go page by page and go by that melody, I'm going to find out something. So, I find out that "Idaho Gals" originally started out-- To all intents and purposes, it's "Buffalo Gals, Will You Come Out Tonight and Dance by the Light of the Moon?" Of course, this is Buffalo, New York, and it's a song that has to do with the Erie Canal. So, this is 125 years earlier than the time that I know about. But in the meantime, it had become "Saint Louis Gals" and "New Orleans Gals." Almost anyplace where gals showed up, this tune showed up too, because it's a very good straight polka or reel. Originally, it [Buffalo] had been known as the Bright Mohawk Valley, and it goes back to the period just around the time of the French and Indian Wars, just before the American Revolution. So, it has quite a long history. It had gone through many changes all the way along the line. I'm going to discover, in the course of finding this song and finding all about it, half a dozen other songs that I came across of an entirely different variety. I came across a version of "The Little Mohee," which has to be recognized as having Spanish elements in it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Little what?

HARRY HAY: "Little Mohee," "The Little Mohee" is important in American folksinging because "The Little Mohee" is a version of the Pocahontas story, and it goes back to about the time of John Rolfe; so this would be Jamestown about 1610 or 1611. It's a song which is sung by various people, but the most famous version of it is probably John Jacob Niles's. My uncle Bill turns out to know "Little Mohee," and he knew the version that I finally came across. He told me that Little Mohee was the daughter of Chief Calaveras and that someday, when we were up in the Trinity River country, that he would take me over there and show me her burial place. Now, Little Mohee actually, as we know of, is the name that the English sailors knew for the woman who was to be known as Pocahontas. So, as you can see, there was a wide discrepancy going on here, but Uncle Bill was absolutely sure that, as I say, that Little Mohee was Calaveras's daughter. So, this would be an Indian maiden all right, but an Indian maiden here in the California area and not in the Virginias, where the Mohee originally started from. So, I have all these little goodies on the back of the envelope when I arrive home at the end of 1937, all from the dances at Hernandez Corners, which, as I said, people had come to because they had heard of dances fifty years before. We will go on hearing about the dances at Hernandez Corners for many years after that particular event. So, that was quite an occasion as far as I was concerned. Later on that year, a guy who-- The truth of the matter was that I had been very madly in love with a guy about a year before. He and I probably would have become a permanent couple except for the fact that his mother stepped in and had other plans for Stanley. So, she drug him away to Europe, to England. She was heavily involved in a thing that was to be known as the Oxford Movement. I can't remember the name of the man who did the thing, but it is now called-- It showed up again in Mormon country back in the sixties, the 1960s, and it was called Moral Rearmament. Well, that was the Oxford Movement back before the Second World War. So, anyway, Jane took Stanley to England with her, and just before I decided to come up to California to my grandfather's ranch in 1937, I had gotten a letter from Stanley, no, from Stanley's mother telling me that he was about to be married. She had sent me an invitation with a little note, saying, "We're so sorry you can't come. We will miss you." I had been at the ranch-- It was just about the time we were planning the dance-- No, it was after I had gotten back from the dance at Hernandez Corners, and we had pulled the schoolhouse back into shape and put it in shape for the kids who would be coming for school in the early fall, and I get a letter from England from Stanley, and in it all it says is, "Help." That's all that was there. I realize from the way it's written that he's had to kind of funnel it out from whoever is watching him and whatever is happening. Then I also get a letter from his mother saying that the marriage is going, no, the marriage has been postponed, but it was now just about to be consummated, and they would be leaving on their honeymoon for America in early October. So, here comes this letter saying, "Help." And so I sat down, and I wrote him a couple of letters. And I hear nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I have a premonition that something strange is happening, and so I can't wait to get home, although I had planned to spend a couple of years there in the mountains at the ranch. I've got to go home. I've got to be somehow or other flexible and fluid in case something happens with Stanley. So, I go home. At this point, my father has-- He had had a stroke the year before, and he was in the process of getting over the stroke when I left to go up to the ranch. During the course of the summer he's had a second stroke, which I didn't know about, and I get back just in time to give my mother a hand with him and make it possible for her and a male nurse to handle him, because he'd now had a stroke-- First, he had a stroke on the left side, and now he's had a stroke on the right, and this time it looks like he might not be able to get out of it quite so easily. He was a very powerfully oriented man, and he had a very powerful will. He had more or less willed himself out of his first stroke, and he was well on his way to trying to do that with his second stroke, but I was not too sure that he could do that. However, it's during this period that I will discover, to my great grief I think, that he loved me, and I had never known that before. I'd always assumed, because of the fact that he did nothing but find fault with me all my life, or fight with me, and I fought with him, it never occurred to me that he loved me, and he did. During these latter six months of his life, from, let's say, the end of '37 through the summer of '38, he will actually allow no one else to touch him but me. I had to shave him. I had to cut his hair and do his nails. He allows the male nurse to feed him, and sometimes he can feed himself, but all these other things I do for him. He will allow no one else to touch him. He's absolutely sure that my mother's trying to poison him. He always tells me that I'm the only one he can trust. When I come up to see him, he will cry, and this is something I can't handle because I've hated him at this point now, and I keep thinking, "It's too late, it's too late. There's nothing-- You can't undo what you've done. I can't love you. I can't open up to you now." I have forgotten something that he had done for me, something that was really very wonderful if I could only have remembered it. But I won't remember that until John helps me find it, I think, about '66 or '67. He helps me unblock a memory in my mind, and I realized that, back in 1933 at one point-- Well, maybe I'll describe that incident with my father where I had been involved with-- Well, my father had owned a piece of property at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Gower. Did I tell you?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, I remember the address, but I'm not sure--

HARRY HAY: There was a house-- There was a brick drugstore on the corner of Hollywood and Gower, and then next to it was this two- or three-story, big, old, rambling California bungalow type of house, the Frank Lloyd Wright type of house, something like this house, with very large living room and dining room and den space downstairs, which could be used for theatrical performances. There was a troupe in that house, one of these talent school places. The woman had been very prominent in vaudeville.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, yeah, you have told me.

HARRY HAY: Did I tell you about that and also about their trying to blackmail my father for the rent?

MITCH TUCHMAN: No, not that.

HARRY HAY: Well, I'm not sure. I'm afraid this story has been told.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You certainly told me about the house and the woman and the people who lived there and everything like that.

HARRY HAY: I used to do master of ceremonies for some of the shows that they would do. The talent school would go out and do little performances here and there, the idea being to give themselves exposure to get more children to come and study fancy-dancing or vaudeville singing or whatever.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, what was it your father did for you?

HARRY HAY: One of the people who was involved with this, one of their young talents who was a tapdancer and sort of a young singer, was a very pretty young man by the name of Brian. I had a heavy crush on Brian, and so I used to go master of ceremonies for some of their events, particularly when we had to do something out at UCLA or maybe out in the [San Fernando] Valley. When we got back, it was too late, and I would always say, "Well, the bus has already left, and I can't go home; so why don't I stay here for the night?" and I got to sleep with Brian. So, we would have sex, and, you know, everything would be very fine. I thought I was heavily in love with Brian. I gave him the signet ring that I had, and I wrote him a bunch of letters. And then, at one time, I began to realize that the Garretts were having trouble paying the rent. I didn't know how much, but I gathered they were having some trouble. One morning, my father said to me, "We're going up to the Garretts. They are three months behind in their rent. They want to see you, and they want to see me. And by the way, they sent me this package of letters." So, he hands me this package of letters that I had sent to Brian, and I think, "Oh, wow, the whole ball of wax is going to come out, and it's going to be a screaming match, and it's all going to come out to my father. Now what do I do?" So, here I am, riding in the car with him, and I'm holding the package of letters in my hand, which he has just handed me. His face is absolutely stone immobile. He's stonefaced, nothing showing, nothing whatsoever. So, we drive in silence, and we go up to the house, and we park, and we go into the living room. No, we go into the vestibule. There's a sort of a little bench in the vestibule, and you go in through a big pair of double doors into the living room. My father says, "You sit here," and he goes to the double [doors], and he knocks on [them]. They say, "Please come in." He opens up these wooden, sliding doors, and he goes through and closes them behind him. There are lots and lots of voices--rumble, rumble, rumble--going on behind this thing. This goes on for about forty-five minutes. Sometimes I can hear high-pitched voices. I can hear Mrs. Garrett screaming at one point, and I hear her weeping at another point. There are all kinds of histrionics going on; and then--thud, thud, thud--things fall; and then people go in and out; and Brian suddenly comes from downstairs and goes through, doesn't even look at me as he goes in--and this breaks my heart--and he goes back out again. Other people go in and out, and the door is opening and closing, and then the thuds and banging. Then, all of a sudden, the doors swing open, and my father is standing there in the doorway. He comes out, and his face is absolutely white. He steps through the [doors] and he closes [them] behind him. Then he says to me, "And now we'll go home." I take him back in the car. At this moment he's trembling, and he asks me to drive; so I drive. And as we're driving home, he said, "They will be moving at the end of the week." And that was all I ever heard. All I ever heard. And I realized much later in that whole thing-- No, not all I ever heard. Meanwhile, he said, "Here's your ring." That is all he's ever said. So, I know that he knew. They probably gave him excruciating details, and they had Brian in the room; so probably he told him in great detail what I did or what I didn't do, what happened and what didn't happen. So, he knew all about everything. He never said a word to me at all on anything. I never heard from him until the end of my life--end of his life. I simply never heard a word. So, he knew everything there was to know, and he never took it up with me. So, in that regard, the mere fact that he had them moving at the end of the week meant, among other things, that he took my side. And I didn't realize this, you see. In fact, if I'd thought about it, I would have realized that, for a man of his experience in 1933, I had a friend, but I didn't realize this at that time. OK. So, I had to put that story in because this I didn't know when he died. And when John finally helped me to recognize that in '65 and what that meant, I really had to unlock something; a lot of things I had locked away in my mind. I grieved about that because I wish I could have told him. I wish I could have held him. I wish I could have told him how much I appreciated that. I wish I could have told him I loved him, which I did, underneath all that hate. But, of course, that didn't happen until much too late. So, at this point, at the end of 1937, I am going to go home. As I say, I'm going to have to take over responsibilities with my father because I'm the only one he will allow to touch him. And I'm waiting for letters from England. One of the things that got me through that period was, there was a bar that I would go to occasionally--it had been at one time a speakeasy, but it was now a bar--here on Western between Melrose and Santa Monica. There used to be a lot of flat buildings, two-upstairs-and-two-downstairs-flat buildings. Right up, oh, I would think about four buildings down from the corner of Santa Monica on the east side of the street, there was a little-- The two downstairs flats had been made into one thing, and there was a little bar, sort of a sitting bar that had a grand piano in it. Occasionally, a couple of people that I knew from vaudeville would come in and sit down at the piano late at night and take the songs that were available, either songs that were not specific as to sex, or gender, or the songs where you could change the name, or it would be a song to a man, so that the singer didn't have to change the thing in any regard. So, they would be songs for us, songs that everybody knew. The song that was getting me through at this moment was "Along Came Bill," which, of course, by this time was long out of date. It belongs to Helen Morgan, and so that belonged actually to the twenties and thirties. "He's My Man" or "Along Came Bill" were songs that were being used at this particular period. I can remember that every time that Jack Dale would come in at midnight, I would ask him to sing "Along Came Bill." This was kind of getting me through at that time, waiting for these letters to come from England. All of a sudden, the dam broke. What actually happened was, I guess, that as Stanley and his wife started their honeymoon and came up on the boat, he attempted to carry through on his wedding night and turned out to be totally impotent and came apart and started to cry. He realized that this was not only terribly wrong but physically wrong for him too; it made him ill. So, he went up on deck and started to write letters to me. By the end of the first week, there were five letters, one each night, and all of them very thick. At this point, I hadn't heard from him in two years, except for the one word, "Help," which had brought me back to L.A. in the first place. I realized that what was happening and what was so very serious about all this was that he had never told the young woman whom he had married that he was gay. He had never discussed what his feelings really were along these lines. As a matter of fact, I think he tried awfully hard to pretend they weren't there. Now it was all coming out. It was all bubbling up. Here was this young woman, who obviously-- I didn't know anything about her at that time, but she was obviously a person who had been rather protected, had never done any work in her life, had lived a rather retired life, had been a part of this Oxford Movement, which would be, among other things, in, almost slightly, what I would call a hothouse environment; lower middle class, probably, as we would have said it delicately then. That was about as far as that would go. Here she is, married to a guy who is not about to consummate the wedding, being brought to a strange country, away from her own family and away from all the people she knows, and she's going to be unceremoniously dumped because he's not about to do anything; he's not going to move in any direction as far as she is concerned. These are all thoughts that I'm going to collect within the next month or two, but in the meantime the letters are appearing every day. First of all, he's going to go to Lawrence, Kansas, because he and his mother were part of the Lawrence family; so this is where they would be spending, presumably, their honeymoon. They were coming by boat, and they will go to Lawrence, Kansas, and then he will come on out here. I mention all of this because later on it's going to turn out that, when he finally gets his divorce, he wants to list me as correspondent; and I decide at that moment I don't want to be correspondent.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Mm-hmm!

HARRY HAY: It was the first time that I'm going to figure as "the other woman" in somebody else's relationship. When I came back to town that year, that fall, I got in touch with my friend-- Oh, I found out that my friend Edie Huntsman had died. It was a shock. She was one of the people who died of cancer at a young age. But in the course of discovering that, I fell into the company of a number of people whom she had known, and they were starting, at that point, a new wave of political classes. I don't know what had happened. I think possibly they had gotten some new translations of Marx and Engels, far more easily read than the ones that they'd had before. So, they were developing sort of beginners' classes and thinking in a variety of directions. I took one of these beginners' classes and suddenly began to understand the material that I had always had such terrible trouble with before, because [I thought perhaps] the translations were poor in the first place and, in the second place, [perhaps] the people who were teaching them didn't understand them anyway. This was really what it amounted to. But through the Hollywood groups, or the Hollywood writers' group, I came into a Hollywood writers' discussion class, and it was a very good one. Quite a number of the people whom I had known around the Fletcher Bowron campaign and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and so on were all in this group. So, it was a friendly place. I knew a lot of the people. And the teachers were excellent. All of a sudden, I'm turning on right and left. It's all making wonderful sense, and I'm feeling so good about all of this. I'm so pleased at me working in this direction and all of a sudden seeing, beginning to recognize the things that I had been doing, the things I had been hearing, things I had read, parts of campaigns that I had been involved with are now, all of a sudden, unveiling themselves. I'm all of a sudden understanding not only levels of them but the deeper roots of all of it. And I'm wildly excited. Everything's falling into place, and I'm feeling very good about it. Then Stanley arrives with his wife in November, and I take him to the last couple of classes, and just like before, he fades away in the punch. This is not where he's at. This isn't anything he can relate to at all. It terrifies him. The political thinking bedevils him. He doesn't want to be involved with it one way or the other. I think, "Here I am, back in the same problem I've always run into: somebody that I [am coming to] love very much and I feel very close to in so many respects and who would make a perfect match for me, when it comes to politics, he just isn't there." I've experienced this frustration so many times before, and all of a sudden, here again, it's in my hands. In a way I feel this is kind of like the last straw because I had put so many eggs in that basket. I was thinking this is the real thing, and this is really going to be a fine relationship. We'll work out--his wife's name was Phyllis--we'll work out a perfectly good relationship for her, and then we'll make for ourselves a good working relationship. Then, all of a sudden I discovered that in politics and in struggle and in attitudes towards revolution and so on, he just isn't there. So, I feel at this moment-- I don't feel that the classes I've gone through are all for nothing. It's just that, at this moment, I think I've got to find a solution for this. I've got to move in some kind of another direction. So that when Saul Glass, who was acting as my doctor during that period and who had been conducting the endocrine tests, which were known as the Glass tests of the thirties--they were the tests where he was trying awfully hard to find-- What would he be looking for? Well, he would be looking for things in the bloodstream that would account for-- I mean, excess amounts of testosterone or endocrine or something which is going to account for the homosexual condition. He had been using as his test groups what we refer to fondly as "the fruit tank" in the L.A. County Jail, then he's using ten homosexuals on the outside, of whom I happened to be one, and then he's going to use a test group of some twenty or thirty heterosexuals whom he has. He's checking urine samples every morning, one against the other. It's a whole process we go through over a period of about three months, and so I'm doing that with him. And I'm talking about my frustrations. By this time, he also knew Stan, and so I'm talking about my problems and my frustrations and how I'm feeling. I guess at a certain point it's showing in my behavior and in my manner, and maybe it's even showing in the bloodstream occasionally: I'm all worked up about something. This is when he suggested I go to see his newly acquired brother-in-law--his sister had recently married--who is Tom Benton and who is going to open up a psychiatrist's office here in L.A. When I go to see him, he is going to say to me, "Maybe you are looking for a boyish girl instead of a girlish boy." Those are his words and not mine. This isn't the way I would have looked at it, but I understood what he was talking about. When he followed it up by asking, didn't I know someone who fitted that classification, I said yes. There was somebody whom I'd known on picket lines and this and that and the other thing, and then I began to discover that she had already gone through classes such as I was involved with and had read all the right literature and knew all the right people. I began to think, this could solve a lot of my problems. A lot of things would all come straight and fly right if she and I could find a working relationship. So, this was when we began the idea of thinking about getting married. Everything was going along very beautifully, and all of a sudden, in April 1938, her mother comes down with a massive heart attack, a massive heart attack from which she will never recover; she lingers about ten days and dies. Anita had had a house-- They had a house out here, a little house that they had rented and-- So, she decides to take her mother's body back to New York, where the family would have been, and she then stays with a sister, a married sister, in New York for four or five months and begins to put together a trousseau, because we are engaged to be married before she goes, and we're to be married in September, when she returns. In the meantime, I've sublet the little house that she and her mother had had, so that we didn't have to-- [There would be] no problem figuring out what to do with household things and her mother's things until she got back, although most of the summer I spent sort of packing things up, separating things out, and burning letters, and all that stuff. Then, on September 9 [1938], which was Admission Day in California, we got married.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was her maiden name?

HARRY HAY: Her maiden name was Platky.

MITCH TUCHMAN: She understood that you were gay?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes, she knew about the fact that I was gay and had been very actively gay. She also knew the things that I had talked about with the psychiatrist, who simply said, "Well, all you do is simply make up your mind to close one book and open another."

MITCH TUCHMAN: And you were convinced of this or acquiesced?

HARRY HAY: Look, it isn't a question of being convinced. What you have to understand is that there is no literature in this field whatsoever at this point one way or the other.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But did you feel that, "Yes, I think that will work for me"?

HARRY HAY: Well, I don't know. I kept thinking, I don't know if it will work or not. I want it to work because it's going to solve a lot of problems for me if it does. Maybe it is only a passing phase, and maybe it is something that I can change. I don't see anything wrong with it. I think it's all very beautiful still, but maybe this is one of the things you have to do in your life. Maybe this is what Freud means when you become civilized: there are certain things you must lay aside. I'm thinking, "Well, all right, this is something that maybe I have to lay aside."

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you go about it with no sense of-- I don't even know how to ask. Were you fully prepared to have a heterosexual relationship sexually?

HARRY HAY: Yes. Well, I mean, the thing was, I didn't know what that would mean. I'd had a couple of heterosexual experiences, and I didn't like them at all. I didn't like them at all. But I thought, well, maybe, maybe this is something you can get used to.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Acquire a taste?

HARRY HAY: Acquire a taste for, yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Maybe like artichokes.

HARRY HAY: Artichokes I never had any problems with. But I thought, well, maybe this is something you can acquire a taste for. Let's see, there is something else I know of you have to acquire a taste for. What is it?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Coffee and grapefruit.

HARRY HAY: Not that. Oysters, I think. Raw oysters. I had learned to acquire a taste for raw oysters, and I thought maybe it's like that. The psychiatrist said it was quite possible and it's something that you can do. So, I thought, "Well, maybe I can. Maybe this is a thing." I liked her so much. I really liked her very much indeed. I would say probably I was certainly in love with her for a long time, but not in the way that we are in love with men. But I was very, very fond of her.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What had her experience been?

HARRY HAY: Well, she was one of these people who, unfortunately, was absolutely convinced of the fact that what any homosexual needed was a good woman. And there are people who are convinced of that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What evidence did she have that she was the one?

HARRY HAY: Oh, she had no doubt of that. She had no doubt of it in her own sense. She was absolutely sure that-- I think she was in love with me, and I think she was absolutely convinced that this would work out, and this was how--

MITCH TUCHMAN: It isn't that she had administered this cure numerous times or something?

HARRY HAY: No, no. The point is that most of the men whom she had liked in her life were gay--this had been her experience before--but she hadn't been able to get them to agree that necessarily what they needed was her. At this moment, she had me persuaded that what I needed was her. I think that she fully, really, truly believed that, because we had a fine-- We really had a wonderful relationship. We had a fine companionship. We had a great deal of pleasure together. There's no denying that we had really a very good relationship. And in the thirteen years, it was a very pleasant thing. Oh, we had our struggles, but the tragic thing about that relationship was--and I realized that at the end of the time--was that all the other couples whom we knew--we knew many other couples quite intimately, we had many close friends who were couples, who had been her friends, you know, before she was married and they were married--[the tragic thing] was that, [whereas] they would have these mighty tussles, these mighty wrestling matches where, as I would say, they would knock the rough edges, the rough angles off each other in the process of doing it and maturing and growing together, we didn't have those kind of knock-out and drag-outs at all because, as a gay man, I was always seeing her point of view. So that we had some struggles, but not very much. We really didn't have them. We were always considered an absolutely ideal couple because nothing went on. Her life seemed to move in very easy ways, and we got a lot of things together, and we were very good friends, and she never had any problems with me; I never looked at another woman. But the men--oh, the men I was looking at all the time of course. But I didn't look at another woman. So, the infidelities that were going on in all the other couples were not going on in ours. As I said, generally speaking, we had a wonderful idea. What was actually happening was that she was growing into a mature woman in her thirties and growing on toward forty with the same naive expectations and the same experience in struggling with a man that she'd had at twenty-five, because that didn't change, because I wasn't working on her in that. So, therefore, that was never being exercised. When we finally were divorced, and here she is at forty beginning to deal with other men who are forty, who are veteran, scarred warriors, and here she still has the naive expectations of a young woman of twenty-five, it just doesn't work out. She never marries again. And I think, among other things, the reason why was because she never could find a relationship that would suit her purposes, because she hadn't grown-- She wasn't a forty-year-old woman emotionally; so that it just never worked out. She was actually slaughtered by these people who were able to be very hard and very rough on her, and she never understood what was happening.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You had several children, didn't you?

HARRY HAY: Well, the children were adopted.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I didn't know that.

HARRY HAY: The children were adopted. I turned out to be sterile. Now, whether or not I was sterile from birth or whether or not I was sterile as a result of the mumps I had when I was seventeen at the CMTC one summer, I don't know. I have no way of knowing that. Anyway, the point is, I was sterile and therefore incapable of giving her a child. We had thought of artificial insemination, but in that period it was still too rough and too difficult a thing. Also the doctor wasn't entirely sure that it would be easy for her. She was a big woman, but he wasn't entirely sure that it would be easy for her to bear. So, we decided that we would adopt.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How many children did you have?

HARRY HAY: Two.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Does adoption in some ways follow the same sort of pattern time-wise that a planned family would by natural birth?

HARRY HAY: Well, we always did it through the California Children's Home Society, and the Home Society were very careful in the way they screened the parents. Or at least we got Hannah, the oldest daughter, that way. We first applied for her-- It was a child who was being matched to our--a woman who was being matched to our qualifications; so that we probably were being screened the last six months of Hannah's gestation. In other words, we picked her up at three weeks. She was three weeks old when we got her.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I think what I meant by the question was, do couples tend to adopt the first child at approximately the time they might have a first child and then wait the same period between that and adopting the second child that couples might wait in having their second child? I mean, does it follow that kind of natural life cycle in a way.

HARRY HAY: Yes, I would think so, because, you see, we adopted Hannah in '43, and by that time we would have been married five years. Then we waited until '45 to adopt Kate.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was she also a newborn at the time?

HARRY HAY: Yes, she was a newborn also. We had had a very difficult experience with-- We had decided not to go to the Home Society for the second child. We had known-- There were a number of nurses, for instance, who, in order to get jobs even during the war years, would make a place in their home for a woman who was pregnant, who might be pregnant out of wedlock, as we used to say, and make it possible for the baby to be born in ordinary circumstances, a home circumstance as it were, with a trained nurse around, the trained nurse who lived in that house. Then they would have already made arrangements to part from the child. Well, we did that. We knew of a young woman who was coming to term, as it were, and the baby was born. The baby was born, and I think about thirty-six hours or forty-eight hours after the child was born, we had her at home. We had the child about ten days, I guess, two weeks, and then the young woman's parents came out from Indianapolis, and they were insisting that she take the child back. Now, what they were actually saying was that she had to live with this sin, and that meant that the child was going to have to live in a perfectly dreadful, hating atmosphere that she did not--

MITCH TUCHMAN: The child had to be the punishment.

HARRY HAY: Yes, that's right. But nevertheless they were insisting on that, and because we hadn't gone through the proper channels, we didn't have a legal hold on that. After about three days, they came and took the child back. That was the same thing as if the child had died because we had by this time become very fond of her, and it was a real wrench. A double wrench: plus the fact that we recognized what kind of a home that child was going to go into and what kind of a life it was going to lead. But there was nothing we could do about it. So, the second child, by the time we tried for that, we knew again of someone who was coming to term, though we had them do it through the regular adoption agency. She had to agree to-- She agreed with the state to give up the child, and the child was then turned over to the state, and then she was turned over to us within about forty-eight hours.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, this child was a boy or a girl?

HARRY HAY: Both of them were girls.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, altogether there were three--

HARRY HAY: There were three, of which you might say that two lived as far as we were concerned.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the third child's name?

HARRY HAY: Well, the second child and the third child had both been named Kate. Katie was born in 1945.

MITCH TUCHMAN: When in 1945?

HARRY HAY: December 7, 1945.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Pearl Harbor Day.

HARRY HAY: Pearl Harbor Day, but Pearl Harbor Day four years later.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, four years later, right.

HARRY HAY: Hannah was just old enough-- She was just short of two when VE Day came. I'll never forget that. We went up on Hollywood Boulevard when the news came. She was a perfectly darling, little, strawberry-blond girl with beautiful blue eyes and a charming smile, leaning out the window and waving at all the sailors and soldiers who were all whooping it up on Hollywood Boulevard. They saw her, and it happened, one after another, they would just grab her up out of the car and kiss her and hug her and put her back, so that she probably got hugged and kissed by more soldiers and sailors that night than I'm sure at any time of her life since. Whether or not that had an effect on her I really don't know. But nevertheless I can remember me driving up the street with this beaming child and everybody wanting to kiss her.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But she is now a brigadier general in the Women's Air Force; so you suspect there was--

HARRY HAY: [laughter] At this point I don't know what she's doing. She has rejected me entirely at this point; so I have no way of knowing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This is which? Hannah?

HARRY HAY: Both of them have. This rejection came about six years ago. And I can't tell you why. Why anybody would reject at thirty, I'm not at all sure, but we had been very good friends before that. But anyway, this is what we have. I've run out now. [tape recorder turned off] During the war years, I had a brief spell, right at the beginning, of working in a foundry, and then after working in a foundry, learning a little bit about casting and things like that. I got a job as what amounted to a production assistant in material at a plant. I loved this work. It was just the beginnings of what we would call systems engineering, but [systems] engineering doesn't exist yet. We were just beginning to do this kind of work, the kind of analysis that you can do on paper, which is one of the ways by which material can be saved. This was something that was worked out during the Second World War, and I happened to be part of that. But my first job I was involved with-- I became interested in organizing a trade union because of the fact that in all of these jobs, right at the beginning, we all of us worked about eighteen hours a day, and we would work six and seven days a week. They were tough times, and it was really rather necessary, we felt, to get a trade union going because the excesses that were going on in planning, even in companies like this, were very obvious and very glaring and very appalling. We felt ourselves that a good, responsible trade union, particularly among the engineers and technicians, could do a much better job in processing and planning than was being done by management. But this is the early years of the war, and the-- I can't remember the name of the organization that should handle things like this--

MITCH TUCHMAN: National Labor Relations Board?

HARRY HAY: Yes, the National Labor Relations Board should have stepped in because, as an organizing team, we were all known; and so they really shouldn't have fired us for union activity, but they did. Because of the fact that we were in the war effort and because I was already a part of a team that had been working in material planning and so on-- there were too many jobs needed in this field--I wasn't allowed the liberty of acting on the picket line and getting the company to take us back; I was immediately whisked into another job, so that I went to work. At this moment, I can't remember the names of any of the places-- The place I got fired from was called Avion [Enterprises]. The place where I got hired had been Gaffers and Sattler, the stove manufacturers down in Maywood, but I can't for the moment think of what their name was.

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 29, 1981

HARRY HAY: I think I've already told you about the fact that I had this bad breakdown at Stanford, and I had to go away to the desert for a year, or eight or nine months, and in September or October of 1932 I returned to Los Angeles. One of the things that I had done in previous times, I had been one of the winning medalists as an oratorical speaker in high school; I had won several oratorical contests and things, and I won a state contest at one time. It was the state contest--they had these constitutional oratorical contests; well, they used to have these sort of general ones too--and the general one was the one I won in my senior year. One of the people who had coached me on writing it and also presenting it was a guy who had graduated from Los Angeles High School, I think the year before, and he had been the winner. So, he was at this time going to Pomona College, and the faculty advisors had him come back from Pomona a couple of weekends and coach me. His name was John Cage. [Cage] had been born in Eagle Rock, and he had lived most of his life in Eagle Rock. His father [John Milton Cage] was an inventor of sorts for Richfield Oil. What happened to inventors in areas like that in those years: they were very badly paid. They would be paid a small royalty if the various inventions they had came through, but apparently they needed an FAETC [Federation of Architects, Engineers, and Technicians] union to protect them. I remember that John Cage's father, who was a very sweet, gentle man, not at all pushy, was being actually pushed behind all the time. They were really very poor, not very well off at all. Then, at one point, they got a tremendous income, a tremendous royalty on something, and they bought a very fancy house in Pacific Palisades . Crete [Lucretia] Cage, John's mother, who was a very active, aggressive clubwoman and very conscious of the fact that she was married to an inventor, and so on, was going to take over this family and run all the men--her husband and her son and everything else with it--which is another story. But anyway, John Cage came in from Pomona, and he coached me. So, we came to know each other, and he was kind of a nice guy and very gentle also and diffident. Had I known then what I know now, I would have been able to spot him as a gay man even then, but I didn't know that at that time. Or, I knew some things, but I didn't know how to spot us yet, except that I knew that I felt that I could trust him, and we seemed to kind of like each other. Then I go ahead and I win the oratorical contest. The following year, I had heard recently that John Cage had quit Pomona College, or at least had taken a leave at Pomona College--I think this was probably in relationship to his father's big royalty--and he had decided to broaden his vistas, and he was traveling in Europe. This is all I knew. This is 1929, early 1930. So, I come back to Los Angeles in the fall of 1932, and my mother says, "Oh, I saw in the paper where John Cage has returned from Europe. Why don't you give him a call, and maybe you can get together? You might find this interesting." I thought, well, I didn't really know him that well, but he'd been in Europe. By this time, of course, I'm a very active gay--I'm an active-in-my-mind gay man. I'm not as active as I would like to be. I'm full of vinegar, and the tap is not being turned as often as it should be. But I think, "Well, I wonder." I think maybe he and I would understand each other, and maybe that'd be kind of nice. I was looking at it for a very different reason than my mother is, but I'm looking at it. So, I find the telephone number for him in Pacific Palisades, which is where they were all living then, and I give him a call. And, yes, he does remember me, and would I like to come on a Sunday afternoon for tea? That was terribly formal. I thought, "Formal. No? All right. Maybe it's all right." So, I had to take a long bus ride to Castellamare [Drive], which is way, way the hell and gone down on the beach practically above Sunset. [The bus] passes the area where I'm supposed to meet him, and I get off, and then I have to walk about a mile to get to where he is. Lo and behold, he and another man are living in this house alone while Crete and her husband are somewhere; I don't know where they are, but they're not there. We have tea, and we talk. I find out that this is a man whom he met while he was in Europe. And I get a lot of stories and a lot of this and a lot of that: how they lived together in Majorca for, oh, six months or so, where they could get a house and two servants and a cook and all the food they needed to supply the house for twenty-five dollars a week; and so that was something they could afford. This was something they could do. Then they go to Paris, and they meet up with the Gertrude Stein crowd, and various things happen on the Left Bank; this is where they spend all their money, and they get broke, and they finally have to go back to Majorca to live out their time, and then, all of a sudden, the allowance that his father has been sending him suddenly stops; so they have to come home because John and his friend didn't have that much money, and they couldn't carry on indefinitely. So, they had to come home. But it's all very formal. It's all very stiff, and I have to sort of pry all this out with a crowbar, and it doesn't flow very well. I keep thinking this is a stiff and awkward conversation, and as soon as I possibly can, I leave, and I make up my mind on the bus on the way home that I'm not going to repeat that again because it was just too uncomfortable, and I didn't like them that much. I felt like I was just a small insect on a very hot stone being carefully scrutinized by these people, and I just didn't like that, and I wasn't going to have anything to do with that anymore. So, I'm making up my mind on the bus going back. I get off the bus, and I walk to my-- I make the transfers I needed to get back to my house, and it takes about two hours, two and a half hours, and I get home. I've made up my mind: I'm never going to go there again, and I'm greeted by my mother with "John's been trying to reach you on the telephone." I keep thinking, "Why?" She says, "You have to call him back. I said you'd call him back." I said, "Mother, you shouldn't take messages for me like that. You should take the message but not commit me. I'm never going back there again, never, never, never." So, I call up, and I'm very cold and diffident, and John is saying, "I just wanted to let you know that you passed the test." I said, "What test?" He said, "Well, we just have to sort of screen people. I knew a lot of people here, and I find that I really don't like them very much anymore. But you passed the test. We want you to come right back and stay with us."

MITCH TUCHMAN: Weird.

HARRY HAY: I think, I've just made up my mind that I'm never coming there again, and I go through the whole business of what I thought on the bus. John says, "I know about all that. I figured this is what you probably did. That's why I wanted to get you right away. We want you to pack your things and come down for a week." Well, I'm doing exactly the same thing that you are in your face. I think, "What is this? What is this? Why is he saying this?" But I'm also for some reason or another-- There's something in his voice, an entirely different tone than I heard before. I'm a little intrigued by it also. I really don't have anything to do, and I am broke, and I can just about afford the trip back, and that's about it, you see--which I tell him. He says, "That's all right. That's all right. We'll figure out something." So, I do pack my clothes, and I do go back the same day, the bus trip. I get down there, and they are both entirely different: they're utterly charming, they're very warm, very nice. They are apparently at this point quite satisfied, happy lovers, as it were. I find myself-- I've never known lovers before, and this is great. They're not up the freeway, or anything like that, but nevertheless we suddenly find ourselves very close, because actually it turned out that we like each other very much. John and I are very similiar to each other; so that Don likes us both, as it were. Well, I haven't been in the house two days, I guess, when I begin to discover that John has decided that his vocation in life is composing, which is something he didn't know before he left for Europe. It's something, as a matter of fact, that this man, Don St. ["saint"] Paul--or Don Sample, as he called himself-- It was St. ["san"] Paul actually, and it had been St. ["saint"] Paul. By the time he got through Paris and Europe for a couple of years, where he'd been before John met him, it was St. ["san"] Paul. Finally, he got to the place where he sometimes used to spell it S-A-M-P-L-E. He had gone to-- Oh, dear, I used to know which college he went to-- (Dorr Legg went to the same one.) Well, it doesn't matter.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, when you see this [transcribed], you'll be able to fill it in.

HARRY HAY: It doesn't matter that much. This is only an incident we're dealing with anyway. Don was a fairly interesting, critical person. He had gone to Europe originally because he wanted to visit the Bauhaus. He was interested in architecture and architectural design and so on, and so the Bauhaus was why he had gone in the first place. He simply inadvertently met John, I guess in a bar, on the Left Bank in Paris in-- I suppose, John had maybe been in Europe about six months by the time this happened. They immediately fell for each other and all the rest of it, and it turned into a fine romance very quickly. Don was an excellent critic, and this is something he went on being. So, when John began to compose, Don was very careful that he moved him-- He was solicitous to move him in the direction that he should be moving in, that he seemed to be interested in, but at the same time insisted on a certain amount of discipline, which, I think, as far as John was concerned, was probably very fine. Anyway, by the time he got back here, he had quite an oeuvre of materials that he had done. He had made some settings of Pindaric odes, for example, and he was in the process of doing settings of Ecclesiastes. So, I found this very interesting: what he was doing. He played himself, and I listened, and this and that. I was interested at this point in modern dance. So, I was going around dancing to the various things he had, and Don kept saying, "You know, we ought to do something between you two guys"--at this moment we were thinking in dance. Then, one morning we went down to visit some friends of theirs who were-- I don't know whether they were necessarily gay women, but they were women who felt safer with gay men than they did with straight men. They lived in the Santa Monica Canyon at this point. One of the women had a piano. Oh, one woman--I don't know how they met her--her name was Cornelia Mall, and she was the daughter of--I've forgotten Mr. Mall's first name now, but he was Mall Steel Company here; so that they were sort of small-time capitalists, and therefore she was one who had pretensions and attitudes towards women's clubs, particularly cultural women's clubs in Santa Monica; this would have been in the thirties. Cornelia and her mother were fairly active in these Santa Monica women's clubs and things of that nature. And possibly Cornelia-- Maybe they had met her through Crete Cage, John's mother, who would have probably known her mother and maybe young Cornelia. Cornelia was a very fine, intellectual, interesting young woman, a plain person; so consequently, therefore, not successful with the men, as it were. She was already looking forward toward a cultural career; she wasn't looking forward towards marriage, which in '32 was unusual, in Santa Monica at least. She had sort of taken John under her wing. One of these fine days, she was going to give him a concert of his materials at Santa Monica Woman's Club. This was already all sort of in the works by the time I entered the picture. So, through Cornelia, we had gone down, and we were meeting with a very sunny young woman, who, I think, was a dancer too but who had sort of sentimental tastes. In her little, tiny front parlor, little, tiny front room she had behind the sort of gift shop, which was faced onto one of the beach streets in Santa Monica Canyon, not a beach street, but a street leading towards the beach--and I forget what she sold; I think she sold clothes of some sort, maybe things that she stitched up herself--she had an upright piano. On the upright piano, she said, "I just got a brand new song, and I'm just dying to learn it, and now I've got to find someone to sing it, because of course I can't sing it myself." It was a piece by Charles Wakefield Cadman called "At Dawning." It was one of those typical, sentimental chamber songs that people would use for encores; Paul Robeson or Marian Anderson, somebody like that, might use it as an encore in that period. Because of the fact that it was Cadman, and Cadman had a tendency to be pretty much on the sentimental side, it had a certain fling. It was popular on the radio in that period. It was one of the things that you heard; "Ole Speaks" and "Who Is Sylvia?" and "At Dawning" used to show up regularly as encores in somebody's repertoire. Anyway, this girl [Mattie], whose name I now forget, had it. I said, "Well, I know the song." "Oh, you do?" Can you sing it?" And I said, "Yeah, I can sing it." So, she sat down, and she started to play, and I sang it. All of a sudden, John and Don looked at each other and looked at me, and they said, "You didn't tell us you could sing." Don said, "And you certainly didn't tell us you could sing really very well. You've got a beautiful voice. Why didn't you tell us?" I said, "Well, would it have made a difference?" He said, "Well, yes, of course, because now you can sing all of John's songs." I said, "Well, he played them, and I think they're in the wrong key for me." "You know, I can transpose that. I'll just put them down." Then he said, "We're going right home and get to work on the Santa Monica Woman's [Club] concert, because John can play this, and he can play this and this, and you can sing this group, and you can sing that group. We brought a whole bunch of music from Europe, and you can sing those things. So, we'll do a group of John Cage, we'll do a group of Hindemith, and we'll do a group of Honegger, and we'll do a couple of Poulenc, and we'll have a concert." And so, I get whisked out of this lovely room and these kind of nice people on a sunny day on Chautauqua--and I had just been thinking about going to the beach, even though it was November, because it was such a pretty day--and I got whisked right back out. "Right now, we're going to start to work on singing." The upshot of the whole thing was that in late November or early December of that year--and I can't remember just when--we did do a concert at the Santa Monica Woman's Club. The concert consisted of a small group by Poulenc, a small group by Honegger, two songs by Hindemith, and a group by John Cage, and then he did some instrumental things without voice; and it made up quite a concert. The reason why I want you--you're not looking properly shocked--is that Honegger and Poulenc, most of which had maybe been written two or three years by that time, in 1932 at Santa Monica Woman's Club!

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is that--

HARRY HAY: That probably was the first time any of that stuff had been sung in the United States by this time. It was just too new. It was just too modern, and it just shocked the hell out of the women. They didn't know what the hell they were listening to. This is material such as the Woman's Club has never heard before, but they're much too well-bred and too polite to say that they haven't the foggiest notion of what they were listening to. For instance, the thing of Poulenc that I sang was actually "Six Songs in French for Those Who Do Not Speak French." Remember how sort of irreverent the Six [The "Groupe des Six"--Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre--were young French composers who, in the 1920s, were known to be dedicated to modern music. --Ed.] were in the twenties, in French anyway. It turns out, of course, that I'm singing songs about the jonquil and the narcissus and the iris and the daisy and so on, and what it is, is a seed catalog set to music. That's very irreverent, indeed, but it's loads of fun if you sing it with a straight face; you know, you carry on. These things of Hindemith's were out of his theater, the type of theater that he had been doing with-- oh, dear, I've forgotten the name of the man that we all know from the theater in Berlin in the twenties.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Brecht?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, Bertolt Brecht, right. Hindemith had done music for a number of Brecht plays. Now, this isn't necessarily Brecht, but it's of that caliber. It's the theater music of about 1926-27. There was a song about the smithy, and there was a song about something else, but they were sort of more or less modern, twentieth-century, technological, working-class songs, nothing more. So, it's just the kind of material, again, that Santa Monica is not about to hear, I guess, again, outside of Cage, in quite some time. It was not what you call a great success, and we weren't really asked to-- As a matter of fact, we were asked to repeat it, but the reason why we were asked to repeat it was nobody understood what they heard the first time and thought they could make sense the second time. I don't know whether they did either; we did another concert in December. But he was invited to do just his piano music in March for another type of thing. In the meantime, I had met a woman, a young woman--I don't know how I met her; at this moment I don't Remember--whose name is Verna Arvey. (Verna Arvey is later to become Mrs. William Grant Still, but at this moment she's Verna Arvey.) She's a piano teacher, and she's a concert pianist in her own right, and in 1932-33 concert-pianists-in-their-own-right are starving to death along with everybody else because they're not getting any work or any places to play because nobody can afford the expense of trying to get people to come to listen to something. So, Verna Arvey knows a great many young black people (who were also a little bit part of my story), in the course of which she knows a group of women in Los Angeles who have-- As a matter of fact, she knows-- They're either the League of Women Composers or the International League of Women Composers. I'm not quite sure just what that was, but there was a group by that name, which had been organized and was being actually administered by a woman called Mary Carr Moore. (And, you know, I just only recently realized I never thought in that period to ask whether or not she belonged to the old Moore family, for which Fort Moore is named here in Los Angeles. I really don't know that: whether or not that's who her husband was. But anyway, the Carrs apparently were people of some prominence here in L.A. Her brother, Harry Carr, had a column in the Los Angeles Times since Hell was a pup; at least, I suppose he'd maybe had it for twenty years by the time I knew about it. It was the column that was on the left-hand side of the front page of the paper, and I think it was called "Around L.A." He was sort of the Jack Smith of his time in a way. We didn't have any other columnist like that in the Times. He talked about everything that had to do with L.A.: what was happening, when the Chinese New Year was, and what visiting firemen were, and so on. It was a very important column. He was considered one of the important editors on the Times. But who the Carrs were, I'm not sure I can tell you. You can find that out. Somebody's got to know this. I wanted to get Mary Carr Moore in, because whether or not the International League of Women Composers, whatever, has been mentioned before, I don't know. And it should be because it was an interesting group of people. They were very dedicated people. I don't know whether any important women ever came out of that group. I can't say that. I don't know. I mean, names that we know of. But nevertheless it did meet once a month at Mary Carr Moore's home up on Lafayette Park Place, just off of-- I think it was between Fifth and Sixth on Lafayette Park, which was an old, comfortable sort of cultural area of L.A. in the period probably between, say, the First World War and the Second World War.) So, at one point, Verna Arvey got a gig, as it were, for John and me at the International League of Women Composers. What they did was, they would hold kind of a soiree once a month, and they would invite young composers to perform, men and women, particularly if they were California based or if they were young people just starting and so on; they were very interested in that. Although Verna at first had suggested that maybe she would play-- What she was really going to do-- She was interested in me. Now, what she was interested in me for I don't know. I think at one time maybe she thought that I had possibilities as a husband. I liked her. She liked me. I liked her. We got along very well indeed. I had a great feeling for-- I still have a fine feeling for Verna. (I haven't seen her for many, many years, but nevertheless--) I think at first she wanted to be my accompanist, and I would sing John's songs. I think that was the original idea. But it ended up with John coming and [accompanying me while I sang his songs and then playing a small group of his piano studies]. Verna arranged for this. So, let's say that John had two exposures in Southern California: one in late 1932 and one, no, two or three at the Santa Monica Woman's Club and this one here in Los Angeles. As far as I know, those were the only exposures that he had in that period. He had left with Don for sort of a trip across the country in '34, and then, so far as I know, he never came back again. But I just wanted to mention that, because I have to be known, if nothing else in my life, as John Cage's first performer.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I have records of fairly early Cage works and, unless I'm mistaken, on the records I have all the vocal work is a woman. Now, I don't know if they are any of the same pieces you're speaking of. Some of the pieces go [back] to the thirties. It was a twenty-five-year retrospective concert given in about 1957; so that means the works could go back to 1932, the ones that I have on record.

HARRY HAY: Most of the work of John Cage I have. I have the manuscripts of them. So, I don't think-- Because he left them with me when he took off for his trip to go visit Ed [Edward] and Flora Weston in Carmel, and he didn't come back.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, you have manuscripts?

HARRY HAY: I have manuscripts of John Cage, yes. I have the manuscripts of the songs I sang, and I also have manuscripts of his beginning material on Ecclesiastes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I should think that's quite valuable archival material.

HARRY HAY: Well, I think it would be.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I don't know what the John Cage archive is, but they'll probably be calling you.

HARRY HAY: It's just shocking if they don't know it. They'll only know it through this thing, because, as far as I know, it's the only place it's going to be taken care of. I mean, I keep forgetting these things, and that's something I just forgot.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I like Cage.

HARRY HAY: It's going to be a terrible shock to everybody that it's written on standard staves; most Cage music isn't, you know. But this is original stuff with little clefs on it; the bass clef and all the things written out.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I'm going to turn this off for just a second, [tape recorder turned off]

HARRY HAY: As you say, with Dorothy Healey and Albert Maltz you've got the [Jacques] Duclos letter covered. However, it does affect me in one regard, because when the convention--I guess you'd call it the L.A. convention--of the party was called in, I think, November of 1945, whenever it was--they'll have gotten the dates exactly, because that was important to them; it wasn't to me--but I think it's November of '45--this is when the Los Angeles, Southern California leadership actually sort of abdicates in the middle of the crisis--I find myself all of a sudden heavily illuminated and sort of catapulted into a certain prominence I hadn't expected, because I had been teaching a course all through the war years in [Wassily] Leontief's political economy. Now, Leontief is the classical text in political economy, and up until 1951 at least, he still was the classical text in political economy. I didn't know, as a matter of fact, I don't think Southern California necessarily knew too well, that during the war years that [Earl] Browder was actually sort of advocating open collaboration with Roosevelt in order to win the war. So that in this period, the teaching of Leontief's [classical text] would have been treason, as far as the party was concerned, and I could have gotten thrown out on my little fat ear. But I didn't know this; so I was happily taking-- I had a course that went two, three years, I guess, and I must have had, oh, upwards of forty or fifty people passing in and out of that class. But all of a sudden, we're talking about all these things during the crisis of that 1945 convention, and all of a sudden a number of people whom I'd taught came up and said, "Hey, do you realize what you were doing? Do you realize what we were doing? Do you realize what you were opening us up to during all that period?" I said, "No, I didn't know that." But anyway, it put us into a holier-than-thou situation, that everybody else had been sort of collaborationist and so on. The result was that I found myself, for instance, working on resolutions committees and things like that, because at that point that, as a teacher, would put me into a position of a certain knowledge other people wouldn't have had, and I had a clear record, and others didn't. So, I found myself on the resolutions committee. I'm mentioning all of that because that particular aspect, being on that committee, features in my HUAC trial some ten years later. One of the people who is to finger-- One of the stool pigeons who is to testify against me apparently was a member of that convention also and remembered my particular prominence, as it were, in that convention. OK. So, that's that. I'll leave that for-- But as a result of having worked on the resolutions committee, and* [together with its coming out that I had been teaching not only Marxism but Leontief's political economy between 1945 and 1948] I suddenly found myself being called upon to do teaching all over the place. Now, in those years, we had a number of Marxist courses that went on down at the party headquarters downtown, which is a small, crabbed sort of a building. I can't remember where it was at the moment. I've got the picture in mind. It might have been on East Third Street or perhaps East Fourth Street.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That's probably covered in Healey also, I think.

HARRY HAY: That will probably be covered by Dorothy anyway. --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. But I come into close association with the man who's the education director, a man by the name of Jim Forrest. Jim had come out from Saint Louis, I think. He comes out from Saint Louis as a result of the blowup that we have around the Duclos letter, and he's here for a couple of, three years I think. Then he went back perhaps. Anyway, he gets me interested in doing what we call beginners' classes, which is a thing that you go through. The beginners' classes are probably eight to ten weeks long, and we go through Marx's Value, Price, and Profit and Wage, Labor, and Capital, and we do the first chapter, always the first chapter, of Lenin's State and Revolution; we never get to chapter two or three, where the interesting stuff is. Obviously, you're going to have to take an extended course if you're going to go into State and Revolution. You get the first chapter, and you get the sort of highlights of that, and then you go into-- We do one time on imperialism and one time on something else. You're just kind of waffling off the top of the wheat, and you're not really getting down into the deep seeds of anything. It's just sort of to familiarize people with words and phrases and ways of seeing, and I think that's about all it amounts to. However, I persuaded Jim Forrest that one session on imperialism just wouldn't do. I managed to persuade him that, in my course at least, I would be allowed to do three sessions on imperialism, at least that, which, with reluc-tancy, he decided to extend the curriculum so that could happen. I taught beginners' classes in East Los Angeles and in West Los Angeles, but mostly in South Bay. Nobody was working South Bay, and I happened to work-- I was working at that time in Inglewood. So, therefore, what I'd do would be simply stay over for supper and work in the South Bay--Inglewood, Hawthorne, El Segundo, Redondo--so that I was doing-- In 1945 and 1946, there was a period in there when I had five nights a week I was teaching classes, and then the sixth night, I'd have to go to my own group in Echo Park; so I was very busy. This would go on in stints for two or three months, and then I'd kind of burn out, and for two or three months, maybe six months, I wouldn't do anything, and then I'd get into another one of those again. In the course of this also, in November 1945, one night, one Saturday night, I went to a meeting which had been called in the Otto K. Olsen Building, which used to be on Vine Street, across the street from the old Hollywood Theatre. (It isn't there now, but it was there then). It was a room that probably could comfortably hold maybe twenty people, and eighty had showed up; so it was uncomfortably holding eighty. Pete Seeger, who had just returned from the Pacific theater of the war, and a guy by the name of "Boots" Casetta, who was also known as Mario Casetta, and I guess there were some other people there: Ray Glazer may have been there, and Billy Wolff may have been there, and Earl Robinson may be there, although I don't remember him. William Oliver certainly was; he was the music critic for the evening Herald. They had brought guitars and banjos and things, and they sang a whole bunch of songs that they had learned out of their childhoods or they had collected from their own experiences. Pete and Boots in particular were singing a whole bunch of songs that they had learned from different people because of the fact that they had been in the cultural wing of the war-- They had been in the army, but they were in the cultural section of the army, the entertainment section of the army. They used to go around to different places and sing to different guys and so on. Well, they had collected a whole vast array of songs from the different people in different parts of the country. So, they all came together, and they were singing this stuff. After it was all over, people said, "Well, what is this that we've just done?" because what they had done was, they would sing the songs they had, and then they would pass the guitars around, and anybody else who wanted to sing-- They were sort of in the process of collecting stuff. I remembered, and Pete remembered too, that Woody Guthrie had said that, when people got together and did things like this, what you called it was a hootenanny. So we decided, this is what we'd had, was a hootenanny. We'd had it, but we hadn't called it-- But this is what we decided it was: a hootenanny. Then we thought maybe it would be kind of fun if we had another one sometime pretty soon. So, we scheduled some other place--I've forgotten where, somebody's house I think--for the second one, which would be another hootenanny. One of the people came in the next time, and he'd taken one of the songs we'd sung the week before, or the month before--I think it was a week; I think the second was two weeks later--and he had changed the words to fit one of the-- We had a whole bunch of new kinds of protest demonstrations in '45 and '46. We'd had a thing called the Office of Price Administration, the OPA, and it had been very important in rent control here in L.A. It had also been very important in holding down profiteering in grocery prices and automobiles and iceboxes, and one thing and another, which people were beginning to buy. Already they were talking about raising the Office of Price Administration restrictions on these various things, and prices were already beginning to soar. People were beginning to be concerned about this, because they would not be able to pay for these things; so there were picket lines already being thrown in front of federal buildings or in front of Maytag (Maytag themselves had slipped a price increase on a couple of things, and they were being protested against). Somebody said, "Why don't we take this song and change these words and change these words and change these words; then we've got something we can sing, that people can sing on the demonstration lines, and it'll be fun, and more people will come." So, we thought that's a good idea. "Why don't we do that?" So, for the third session we had we were already going to begin to write words for them. There were a couple of very clever kind of song writers, because they were dialogue writers for radio, I guess, at that time: one was William Wolff, and the other was Ray Glazer, and they were already acting as a team on something that was called Duffy's Tavern, I think. So, they had a sort of facility for writing things, and they came up with a couple of real easy songs. I can remember one of them was one that people would know, and that was "Put it on the ground/Spread it all around/Dig it with a hoe/It will make your flowers grow." Of course, in those years you couldn't say shit anyway, but nevertheless you described what the material was that Mr. Ford had come out with or Harry Truman had just said. But if you would take—ah!—that material and just spread it on your garden, it would grow. It was very popu- lar. That song became nationally known, I'd say, within a matter of weeks, because, you know, somebody was here from Saint Louis, and he took it to Saint Louis, and Saint Louis took it to Chicago, and then it went to New York, and it just spread through the underground. But, all of a sudden, there were singing picket lines all over the country because it was a popular thing to do, and it just hit like an explosion. So, very quickly we thought we ought to do this on a regular basis, get together, and organize this thing, and see to it that it gets carried through, and maybe even begin to publish some of these songs, at least put them on broadsides and make them available so that you could distribute them. So, a bunch of us started getting together, and all of a sudden I find myself being responsible with Earl Robinson and Billy Wolff and Ray Glazer and a guy by the name of McCabe (but I can't remember what McCabe's first name was). We're the people who are responsible for calling the meetings and getting places to meet and keeping up with some of the things. Earl Robinson's sister, who is working in a music publishing house and has what amounts to Ditto, I guess at that time, rather than Xerox (because Xerox doesn't exist at that point)-- But she has a Ditto machine available to her, which has musical forms; so that I write out the melodies, you know, put them on the staves and arrange it and put the words underneath it and get it to her, and she puts it into a regular form, runs it through the machine, brings me back a hundred copies for the next meeting. We've already started what is going to be known as "People's Songs"; this is what we decide to call it. Earl and Billy Wolff are in touch with Peter, who is on the East Coast at this point, in New York, because this is where he had been-- He had come to New York City in May of 1941, which was partly my idea from a meeting that we'd all been at in Chicago.* [There had been an America First conference in Chicago in May of 1941, to which had come all the left liberals in cultural fields of entertainment, which included both professionals and amateurs, like trade union theater groups. Paul Robeson came and sang Earl Robinson's "Ballad for Americans" with Chicago's left-wing Goodman Theater. Carl Sandburg came and sang some of his American folk songs. Elsie Huston came and sang some of her Brazilian Indian songs, and Pete Seeger sang. A number of us encouraged him to come and live in New York. I was particularly enthusiastic about the notion that we might be able to help him survive if he could think of coming to New York.] He set up a square dance group in the Village as a way of sort of making a little money, and out of that had -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. been formed the Almanac Singers. But anyway, that's their story in the East, and I don't-- It's part of my activity when I was in the East the two years, three years that I lived in New York between '39 and '42.* [I was a functionary of a major left-wing theater group in New York City known as the Theater Arts Committee. I was the spokesperson for the audience on TAC's executive steering committee, responsible for the types of activities people might be interested in attending.] I was the audience person responsible for the Theater Arts Committee. We had an audience section; that was one of my responsibilities. For a year, I was also executive director of the New Theater League [in 1941]. The New Theater League was involved with trade union theaters. Twice a year to raise money for them and to raise money for us and to help the singers themselves, we used to put on a kind of a folk music concert at the Auto Workers' Hall in Lower Manhattan. We used to get people like Leadbelly and Aunt Molly Jackson. There was this drunk who-- Well, I won't say he was drunk, but he drank a great deal, and he didn't do any work. [I am reacting to realizing that you would expect that he would have been involved with the variety arts -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. division of WPA, but he wasn't.] He lived on a houseboat on the East River. His wife was a schoolteacher, and she's the one who paid for the family. He had gone down to the Library of Congress and had collected quite a lot of stuff, and he had quite a repertory of songs. So, he'd work twice a year on that program, and it gave him a little money, and it kept everything else going. His name was Burl Ives. It was during this recent period that he dug up the song that he became famous for, and later on we discovered that he had actually changed the words. That was, he had come across a very important struggle song of the slaves right towards the last years of slavery, just before the war itself-- You know, for instance, today when you have corn meal or corn, you break off the little tibs, which is the kernel. This is where the value of the corn is; the corn oil and the corn protein is in the kernel. When you broke it off, it was known as cracked corn. So, in a certain song, where the singer is using black magic, he's setting up a situation which brings his master to grief, and if you sing it and believe it, maybe it will actually happen. In the song he says, "Gimme cracked corn, and I don't care. My master's gone away." That means* ["I don't mind eating junk"--stuff that has absolutely no food -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Value--"at least with my master gone, the burden is off our backs. For a while at least we won't be continually whipped to death. While we are not free, at least the burden is off our backs; we'll not be whipped to death."] That song actually says, "Gimme cracked corn," but when Burl read this thing, it didn't make any sense to him; so he changed it from "Gimme cracked corn" to "Jimmy Crack Corn." This is the way all the kids knew it: "Jimmy Crack Corn." It that respect, he's completely destroyed the fact that this was a struggle song. Well, when we discovered this much later--we find this out in '51 or '52 when Pete Seeger happens to go down to the Library of Congress for something or other and comes across "Gimme cracked corn"--I think he wrote an editorial on this in People's Songs' magazine, called Sing Out!. But by this time, it was much too late; every kid in America knew "Jimmy Crack Corn," and they were not about to give it up for anybody; so it never changed. But I always felt badly about that bastardization of a rather important song of the century before. So, I'm being very active in People's Songs and helping set it up. As a matter of fact, I still have the remains of the voice that John Cage had thought was very good twenty years earlier; so I do quite a bit of singing with everybody else. I don't ever act as a soloist, but I do like to act as a-- I introduce a lot of songs into our People's Songs movement. What we did was, each week we would put on some kind of a concert for ourselves. We'd all bring in different folk songs that we'd learned and run across, or tunes that we wanted people to use. What we were doing is, we would throw these original songs into the hopper, and people would notice them or write them down, and then, if they felt like it, they would take it and add new lyrics to it. By this time, we had about ten or twelve different groups with protests going on all over the place on all kinds of things, and they were always looking for new songs. So, we were putting songs together in all kinds of ways.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you always using, though, music that was standard?

HARRY HAY: In the public domain.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, but it was only the lyrics that were changed. You weren't composing new music.

HARRY HAY: No, our idea was to use the folk music out of the public domain so that there would never be any question of ASCAP or royalties, because this didn't have that. If you composed something new, you'd have to pay royalties.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who owned the copyright to the lyrics, or was it not copyrighted?

HARRY HAY: What we did was, you wrote out things, and you copyrighted it, and presumably the copyright was owned by People's Songs itself; you gave it to the group as it were. Anybody in the group, you didn't charge for that. At this point, we were not doing royalties, not then. It was all part of the struggle. You're all to the left, and therefore you all share in the thing, and it was a whole different point of view from the proprietary attitudes of the middle class. I can remember, for instance, one of the first people-- We used to meet in a very nice home in what is now the Arlington District, a home that had belonged to [Venita Craig]. I can see her so plainly. She used to be volunteer librarian at the L.A. city library, in the print room downstairs in the old library. She for years managed the print library down there, and that was her thing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did she live there on Arlington or just in that area?

HARRY HAY: Her husband and she -- Her husband was a mining engineer, and their family lived in this big house on Arlington.* [They had two albino children named Van and Marian. Albino people in those days had terrible trouble -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. with their eyesight.] I remember it because it had a beautiful, marvelous, baronial, two-story living room.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is it the white house that's up on the hill there on Arlington?

HARRY HAY: No, it was on Arlington just-- It's where the freeway is now.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, down that far on Arlington? Oh, I see.

HARRY HAY: I think the freeway went right through that area.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I'm thinking of the house that's halfway between Olympic and Pico, the big, white house with the glass porch.

HARRY HAY: No, no.* [That was the Milbank house, where I used to go to dinner parties before the Fortnightly, the dancing balls that the Four Hundred held every two weeks in the school months for their teenagers, thirteen to seventeen years old.] This was a--

MITCH TUCHMAN: She's farther along.

HARRY HAY: It was a Spanish stucco, but a very handsome house. It was a fine house, and we could seat easily eighty people in this living room. It was a wonderful room to sing in, and it had a high ceiling, and so, therefore, the sound carried in it very well. We had many, many meetings in this house. By this time it didn't belong to her any -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. longer. The woman who had it was her niece [Jan Callendar], I guess, who had inherited it.* [Jan obviously had money and kept, from our working-class point of view, a fairly elaborate house for herself, her children, and a live-in lover.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, was People's Songs synonymous with Communist Party, or is that not true?

HARRY HAY: No, no, no. People's Songs was what we used to call in those years a mass organization. All kinds of people came to People's Songs. The party people were responsible for keeping it going and for seeing that it did exist, but there were thousands of people who came to that and thousands more who came and participated and who would go to two or three meetings and then would go away. There were hundreds who stayed with it, and we had groups of people for whom we performed all over the place who were simply on the left, and that was all.

MITCH TUCHMAN: To accommodate all these people, did it, in fact, have a cell-like structure? With eighty people in this living room, if there are, in fact, hundreds of people involved, would there be another group in West L.A. and a group somewhere else, in the Valley or something? -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

HARRY HAY: We tried doing that and found that it did not work terribly well. What we really had was, we had eighty people, but they weren't the same eighty. We had a lot of people who probably came--we met every week--we had probably people who came maybe once, maybe twice a month. Well, for instance, I can remember the first time that Malvina Reynolds came, the first couple of times that she came. She came up from Long Beach, or from San Pedro, I guess. I remember, she was such a lovely, shy, plump, matronly kind of a woman and absolutely sure that the stuff that she wrote was doggerel and nobody would really be interested. She had a little, tiny voice, and she was so terrified. She couldn't play the guitar worth beans at that point, but she learned it later on. But she didn't know it then. I remember she came and sang a couple of songs for us, and we thought they were wonderful. She couldn't believe that we thought they were good. She just thought-- She wanted to do them because she wanted to see if there was anybody else in San Pedro who could sing, and maybe they would take one or two or her songs. She had a lot of stuff that was trash, and then she would have a few things, like the "Ticky Tacky" song, that came out a bit later. But there was this quality there, and she was so afraid that we wouldn't like her. She was so afraid that we wouldn't like what she was doing, and she felt so strongly about them. She became a faithful volunteer. She was one of the few people out of that eighty who came every week for months in there. What we would do, about every two months we would do a bigger concert, as it were, or a bigger hootenanny, and we would raise funds. We needed funds to pay for our own publications and stuff.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You'd raise funds through admissions?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, fifty cents. And one time I think we even charged a whole dollar.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And then Sing Out!: was that distributed free, or was that sold at newsstands?

HARRY HAY: * [Here in L.A. in the first years, 1946-47, we gave Sing Out! free to people in order to get the new songs, or new words, disseminated so that they go to as many picket lines and demonstrations as possible. But by 1948, when Sing Out! was being published in New York, I think copies sold for ten cents each, and later for two bits. It never sold on newsstands. It would have been disseminated in left-wing bookstores. Of course in 1946-47, we didn't have a name for it.] I probably have the first ten or twelve things that we published. I have the manuscripts of these here too, also, because that was what I was doing then, my ------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. responsibility to the group. We didn't call it anything, just People's Songs. But we wanted to make it available to Kansas City and Saint Louis and San Diego and Oshkosh or whoever was having strike lines. We wanted to get this stuff out so that people could use it for demonstrations. This is what we were for. So, the eighty people who would come-- People began coming simply because they liked to hear what would come up each time, but there were probably upwards of thirty or forty performers, you know. We had different groups of people who would do different things, and we had people who wanted to learn only the traditional material, and so we would have traditional songs like "Last of the Low Country" or Scottish songs. I knew a whole bunch of them. Then we were also taking the John Jacob Niles stuff and making it available to everybody so they'd become familiar with it.

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 29, 1981

HARRY HAY: The hootenanny meetings went off at quite a pace, and then we were having monthly hootenannies.* [The hootenanny meetings where we came together to discuss new stuff and report on other activities where we were using our materials in the community were held every second week, and our bigger performing hootenannies, to which lots of listeners came, were held once a month.] By, I'd say, the fall of 1947, a group of people in the Hollywood party--these would be the Hollywood cultural organizations and the people who were responsible in the Hollywood party--began to put something together called the People's Educational Center (PEC). We were called on to do maybe as much as an eight weeks' group on folk music; People's Songs were invited to do it. There was a guy named Fred who was a teacher in the group. He liked to sing sort of Hebrew songs and songs from Israel and stuff, which he knew from his own background. He was a fairly good performer. He and Billy Wolff and Earl Robinson and I took on the responsibility of the PEC group. -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Pete Seeger used to come out here regularly, and Earl would go to New York regularly. When Pete, for instance, came out here, he usually would stay at my house, because I had a--I was married in those years--we had a big house on the east side of Silver Lake. (It's in that house that the gay movement begins.) It's still there. It's an interesting old house there on the hill, just on the east side of the lake* [at 2328 Cove Avenue. It also had a big living room, a two-story room with a balcony at one end. It was not as big as the Arlington Place house, but we could seat about fifty people in that room without too much trouble. Jan Callender's house was Spanish hacienda baroque, but our house at the top of Cove Avenue was Dutch farmhouse. It was built when Silver Lake was only a swamp where people dumped trash and old jalopies, where there were only neglected eucalyptus trees around it, and in it, and it was rimmed with straggly reeds and bulrushes. The picture window in the house was built to face east. The windows on the west side, the lake side, were designed to look over the top of the native holly bushes and live oaks that edged the hill, so that you looked across the lake, not down into it, to the hills on the other side, across to Griffith Park, and around the hill to Burbank and the San -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Fernando Valley beyond.] So, Pete would stay with me when he came out here. Then Earl would stay with Pete when he went back. So, we had a nice rapport back and forth between the two groups. Since Pete would come out here maybe every two or three months, whenever he was here we would figure on having a hootenanny and include him because he's a good performer. He wasn't a well-known performer at that time, but we were beginning to help-- We all felt that he was so good and that he was just all music whenever that gangling frame was moving around that we wanted to begin building him up as much as we possibly could because we thought he was so good. We would get more people for Earl Robinson or Billy Wolff among the people we knew than we could for Pete in those years, but this, of course, all changed later. So, we were doing a certain amount of performing. By this time, we were doing standard folk material that people wanted to begin to hear because we began to think we'd teach people as much as we could about regional folk music. Bill Oliver, the music critic for the Herald, who was a singer and played the banjo or the guitar--no, I think he played the guitar--had a nice voice in his own right, and he knew a lot of stuff out of Kentucky. As a matter of fact, "Dark As a Dungeon" and "Sixteen-Pound Hammer" and stuff like that, which Merle Haggard is going to make popular on records later on, I first heard Bill do. These are things that he did from his grandmother, from his own background. So, a lot of the stuff that came out of Kentucky that was sung here, most people thought that it was learned off Haggard records. It wasn't. It came out of Bill Oliver's own experience. So, he would sing stuff like that, and Earl would sing stuff out of the American-Scottish tradition from around Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, and Billy Wolff brought material from the East Coast, from New York, from New York state, particularly Revolutionary War songs, our first revolution. I was responsible pretty much for cowboy ballads and material from the West, material where the Scotch-Irish and the Spanish traditions had somewhat connected, because I had collected a bunch of songs like that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, you talked about that.

HARRY HAY: So, then, this is where our general expertise was. All of us were going through every book we could get ahold of or any record collection. Earl and Bill and I: we could all take dictation off the record anyway; so we would write down all the songs we'd hear off the records and then make it available to the people in our group.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, are you teaching your other classes at this time too, or has that tailed off?

HARRY HAY: What I would do is, I would do a stint when I would do nothing but People's Songs for three nights a week; then, all of a sudden, I'd go off and do another teaching stint, and I'd have that for a while. What I tried to do with a lot of my teaching classes, when I did have a teaching class, I would be teaching from seven to nine, and then I'd rush and get into a meeting and go on there from nine or eleven kind of thing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, you had a variety of activities.

HARRY HAY: I had a variety of things, and I was never home.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you also working for a living at that time?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I was.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What were you doing right around that time?

HARRY HAY: From '45 to '47 I was working in an engineering firm in Hawthorne, building hydraulic jacks. I was doing production engineering and purchasing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What would be the name of that?

HARRY HAY: That was called B. G. Engineering. I don't think they're there anymore. But anyway, that was during that period. Then from B. G. Engineering, I did a brief stint with Pope. This happened through People's Songs and the beginnings of the People's Educational Center. I used to go to a music group that was at People's Educational Center, sort of the progressives around the Music Guild and other organizations that were here in town. (The Music Guild later on, for instance, were the first people to bring Rudolf Firkusny, the pianist, to Los Angeles. He was just beginning to perform, and the Music Guild was an organization of people who were interested in good music, chamber music and stuff like this, in Los Angeles. It was largely run by Alfred Leonard of the Gateway to Music. He had this record shop, called Gateway to Music, on Wilshire Boulevard just across the street from the Ambassador. Alfred Leonard and his brother, whose name was Joseph Leonard, I think--he was blind: they were big wheels in chamber music in L.A. In other words, differently from Buffy [Dorothy Buffum] Chandler, they really knew about music. )

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, from B. G. Engineering, you went to a job that had something to do with music.

HARRY HAY: Yes, I did.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was that?

HARRY HAY: Well, Alfred Leonard liked what I was doing in folk music and thought that I could very well sort of sell records and sell equipment; and I had a great knowledge of music anyway. So, he felt that he would sort of tie me into his machine in his record store. But we didn't work out well together. We got on each others' nerves. We moved in different directions. I turned out not to be a good salesman. I probably could have done something about his little magazine that he put out once a month. He used to, for instance, supply all the records to KFAC. The KFAC record library was built out of the Gateway to Music collection. Half of the commentaries that were usually used by the KFAC disc jockeys were written by Alfred Leonard. So, a lot of the stuff that had to do with folk music I wrote, for 1945, '46, and the early part of '47. But Alfred and I didn't get along, and that was not a good connection. I left there after about a year. The only person that I met there whom I really enjoyed was a young woman who was acting as Alfred's secretary, whose name was Alice. Alice married Jerry Pacht, the judge. I remember Jerry would come around to see Alice, because she was one of the most beautiful people I've ever seen. Well, anyway, whatever. So, PEC: we begin to get that going. Let's see, who was I working for when I went to the PEC? I went through a brief period of working for a television-- Television was just beginning, and there was a television repair service, and I kind of worked out a process of how we could handle television repair so that things coming in didn't get lost. More people had stuff that was badly handled, or sets would come back again and again and again, and we were offering service where you paid: "You folks pay so much in a month, and we'll handle the service on your equipment." That could be a losing proposition unless it was worked out in certain procedural ways. I had learned a great deal about what now would be known as systems engineering.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, I was going to ask. That sounds like systems engineering or something.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, like I was going to say, I had learned a great deal about systems engineering during the war, where we had been developing systems engineering, just beginning it as a process. I'm one of the people who helped develop the processes for that. So, I was beginning to make an application of that to television service. It probably would have worked if the guys who were doing it, the two men who owned the little company, had had procedural minds, but they didn't; so that we were never able to really work this out. I had simply said that we would analyze the work that they did and set it down in increments: every increment would have a certain value, a certain price on it. But they could never agree on what the increments were worth; so the company folded, and I folded with it. A guy that I knew said, "Well, we need a typist and an assistant purchasing agent down where I work, and why don't you come down and try it out?" It was a miserable, little hole of old-fashioned people. They made gas and oil burners for steam boilers. They had been making these things for fifty years by that time, I guess, in a little, old place that was on the-- It was the garage and an upstairs room, which had been attached to a stable of an old ranch that was on Alameda Street, one of the old places that's dated back in the nineties of the last century. [It was] called Leahy Manufacturing Company, and it's still there. If you go down to Eighth and Alameda, it's still there. If you look inside, you'll see that it obviously is part of the old stable that was built in the 1890s because of the brickwork and the building that's there. It's a crummy, little, old building, and it's still there. I don't know who's in it now, because H. V. Leahy, Herbert V. Leahy, who was the inventor of most of the equipment that they were making, was in his eighties, late eighties, still active in his late eighties, when I left there in 1964.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, you were there quite some time.

HARRY HAY: I worked there from '48 to '64. Well, I might say, the gay movement is actually very beholden to H. V. Leahy because it was his Ditto machine that put out most of the literature that we put out in the first four years of our movement. So, I went to work for Leahy's in, I guess, about April of 1948.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Over the period you were there, did your duties change, or did you essentially--

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes. The man whom I'm supposedly to be assisting left about three or four months after I got there. So, I took on the job of purchasing agent. I took on the job of purchasing agent-office manager, and eventually I worked it into sort of production engineering. I simply reorganized their entire system and set them up on a systems basis, which they had never done before, and worked it out in such a way that I actually revolutionized their price structure too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How long was Leahy still around when you were working there? He was eighty-eight when you left there in 1964?

HARRY HAY: When I left there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I see, not when you arrived there. I see, I see.

HARRY HAY: When I got there, he was probably in his late sixties or early seventies, you see, and he just went on through.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this job in any way through friendly connections, through political or folk-singing activities?

HARRY HAY: Sort of.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I mean, was Leahy himself progressive or anything like that?

HARRY HAY: No. The guy whom I was working for was a sort of a hanger-on around the progressive movement. His wife was far more active, or his then wife, was far more active than he was.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But Leahy Manufacturing Company was not a hotbed of political discussion?

HARRY HAY: Oh, it was a hotbed of reactionary conservatism. They had a miserable, little branch of the steelworkers' union. Was it the steelworkers' union, or was it the catchall union? No, I think it was probably the steelworkers' union, which was controlled by management, the management being Mrs. Leahy, who was a biddy out of Tennessee. She was something unbelievable. She belonged in Krazy Kat, I think. She was a real character. I used to say that every time she breezed through there, we got a smell of swamp water. She ran the old man ragged. Their idea of a labor union was the business manager, the business agent for the union, would go out and talk to the boys for a half hour. Then he would come, and he and Mrs. Leahy and Mr. Leahy would meet for three hours, and they'd scream, holler, and yell at each other, and they would come out of this, the workers would only lose a little or nothing, [laughter] and the business agent would get a great big, fat cut out of it. You know, it was one of these things where it was that collusion situation. There was no progressivism in that union at all. The people that they would get, who were all working there by the time I got there in 1948, let's see: there were men who had been working for Mr. Leahy for forty years, who had originally ended up-- Most of the tools in the place, they had brought into it. Leahy himself was not right, but he was one of these people who-- He believed in what he was doing. He loved everything he did. His life was getting there at seven o'clock in the morning and leaving at six o'clock at night. I think he went home, had dinner, and went to sleep. So that he spent his whole time-- He would come down on Saturdays and Sundays and dream up stuff. There were pieces of equipment in that place that should have been in museums long ago, and they were still operating. So, they were hardly what you would call a cost-conscious place until I got there, and then they became a little more cost-conscious after that. But I did the first time studies in that plant that had ever been done.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How long did your activities at PEC and People's Songs continue? Did they go up through--

HARRY HAY: PEC lasted itself until-- We did a group for eight weeks there, and it was a miserable group. It was very unsatisfactory. I thought it was very poor. We really got nowhere. What they really amounted to was thirteen little hootenannies.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I see. PEC didn't become sort of a career for you, in other words. You weren't associated with it for years and years.

HARRY HAY: PEC didn't become a career for anybody. It ended. You see, it started in '47, and it came to an end in '49 with the beginning of the hearings of the Hollywood Ten because half the people in the Hollywood Ten were part of the PEC, either in its background or as teachers or both.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And how about People's Songs or any singing activities: how did they continue?

HARRY HAY: People's Songs: by this time, the great interest in hootenannies has begun to sort of-- You know, it goes for about two or three years; then it begins to drop off. Then, pretty soon we had a number of performers. When we started the classes at PEC, a lot of people came around too for that. But, as I said, we would do one on the Revolutionary War, and we'd do another one on the Civil War, and then the expansion of the West; you know, the various areas of the country. All it amounted to was, we were just sort of doing performances of songs that came out of the period, and we felt this is not any good. This is not telling anybody anything. We're just going through songs. We might just as well put this out in the literature.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Have a structured entertainment.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, that's all it amounts to. Nobody can tell where it came from or how it happened. "We've got to do a better job on this." None of the people who were involved, who were the sort of people who'd show up for the performances, were interested in doing that. Fred said, "Well, I can't handle it right now because I've got some teaching I'm doing outside." (He was also teaching political economy, and he was a teacher by profession.) He said, "I just can't handle taking on a curriculum and setting this up; so I can't do it either." It looked as though we were not going to be able to do it at all until Earl said, "Well, why don't you do it?" I said, "Me?" "Yeah, you. Why not?" He said, "You've been interested in quite some-- " I had been by this time-- Oh, I know. My brother-in-law, my wife's younger brother, or older brother--older to her but the youngest man in the family--was working for Crown Book Company. He was the West Coast representative for Crown Publishing. He was enjoying doing it very much, and he persuaded me that maybe I should do the book that eventually comes out called Our American Music. (This hadn't come out at that time.) He said, "Why don't you consider doing something on American music? Do a survey on American music."* [He persuaded me that I should produce a study of the development of American music with particular emphasis on its grassroots folk origins. John Tasker Howard's voluminous work, Our American Music, first published in 1929, was out of print in 1945, when Crown approached me. Even when Howard issued a third and revised edition, as of 1946, his coverage of the new folk riches in American music sensibilities was grudging rather than glowing. Before I got very far into the explorations, Eric Siegmeister's Music Lover's Handbook appeared. Liberally comprehensive, Siegmeister's book appeared to incorporate many of the propositions of People's Songs and the treasure trove of new sources of folk materials it was unlocking and uncovering. To me, however, the book was infuriating precisely because, in true petit bourgeois thinking, Siegmeister would say, "the danced chorus in the gambling scene of Traviata is a curious jumble of Spanish, Italian, and Hungarian (he should have said Austro-Hungarian) entrees." There was not so much as a whisper of why these tunes were used or what they were for. It was precisely -------------- * Mr. Hay added the bracketed section during his review of the transcript. the whats, whys, and wherefores of the interplay of folk and art music from one historical tide-rise to the next historical tide-fall wherein our (or my) real news, and newer contributions, lay.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was his name, or what is his name?

HARRY HAY: Who?

MITCH TUCHMAN: The person who is making this suggestion.

HARRY HAY: To me? His name is John Storm, and he was, as I say, the representative for the whole West Coast for Crown Publishing--from 1945 to 1948, I guess. So, I thought that's not a bad idea. (Oh, John Tasker Howard is the guy who put out the book called Our American Music; [Three Hundred Years of It] eventually.) But he [Storm] wanted me to do a thing, and I worked out a survey for American music and broke it down into about twelve or fourteen chapters: how I could see it and how the stuff could be brought in, and everything. They were very interested in this, and they said, "Develop it into a full-scale thing, and we'll work out a royalty situation with you." Well, things developed in a crisis situation shortly thereafter, and that never happened. But nevertheless, because I had developed the earlier part of it and I was very interested in it, Earl said to me, "Well, why don't you take that outline that you did and at least have one [course] on American music, if nothing else?" What we were all aware of was the fact that a lot of this material comes out of historical incidents, and that art music has something to do with it too--but what, we weren't quite sure. How it all relates we weren't quite sure. But we were aware of the fact that you couldn't do it in eight weeks. It was probably going to have to be a three-month course, and it was going to take a lot of work and trouble. So he said, "Why don't you just take your outline and make a course out of it?" So, I thought, "Well, maybe I'll do that." So, in '48, I guess, the PEC people got in touch with me, and we set up the course for me to do. It was to be a set of, I think, thirteen weeks. I set the thing up, and I did the first thirteen weeks, and I realized again this was not satisfactory: I'd have to do a bigger job than this. So, the next time, the thirteen weeks, I expanded it into a sort of a history of music itself, which would be from the European theater on. I set up an outline for that. In doing the work for that, I suddenly discovered that it was far too compact, and I wasn't getting anywhere with this either. I mean, I did my thirteen weeks through the fall of 1948. As we got into 1949, I made it a two- session course. In other words, it was going to be thirteen weeks and then thirteen more weeks, which made twenty-six weeks, you see; there would be an A and a B section. We would go up to the end of the Renaissance, and from there on out we would go on up to the present time. And that's where it more or less stayed. But it began to be-- I became aware of the fact, after I'd taught this about four years that I was going to have to expand it again; it was much too compact even so. I have the outlines for that still.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, did this extend beyond the life of PEC? This was always a PEC course?

HARRY HAY: Well, most of the PEC-- PEC began to be in serious trouble as we began to recognize that the Hollywood Ten-- When they were first called, we thought it wasn't going to amount to anything. Then we realized that it was going to be a real full-scale thing, and PEC just simply folded because it became desperate and dangerous. People who were being fingered before the House Un-American Activities Committee were prominent in PEC, and we were losing people in droves. So, by this time, I think that the [California] Labor School in San Francisco under Holland had probably been going since '45. So, a move came on-- I can't say who the people were here because I don't think I really know. If I did know, I've forgotten now. Dorothy Healey's story probably covers a lot of this. The Labor School is set up here in Southern California. We call it the Southern California Labor School in, I think, the fall of 1949. At that time most of the meetings for the school were at the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] headquarters at Avalon and Figueroa. (Is that where it was?) Anyway, it was way down in the southwest part of town. In fact, it was Avalon and Fifty-first Street, I think, where the building was. Then they opened up a downtown section of the Labor School in a building which, I think, was 232 South Hill Street and 237 South Broadway. It was one of those buildings that went between Hill and Broadway. It was about a twelve-story building, and it was mostly given over to little warrens of cloaks and suits manufacturers and little companies like cap makers and things. There were some union headquarters in that building, and then there were little papers that advertised new lines and things.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Then did Southern California Labor School assume the curricula of PEC? Did it work that way?

HARRY HAY: It contained it and lots more, because there was a lot of labor education, there was a lot of labor history, there was labor law. There were a lot of different kinds of courses that were given that would be of interest to a labor school and not necessarily to the people of a cultural center in Hollywood.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did your activities simply segue from one to the other?

HARRY HAY: Yes, they did. As a matter of fact, some of the same personnel moved from one to the other, and it was automatically assumed that that thing would go on down there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And then, how long did you remain associated with it?

HARRY HAY: Well, Mitch, at that point, People's Songs then had two activities down there: we had a People's Chorus, which Earl Robinson conducted, and then there was the education on the development of music, which I took care of. The People's Chorus, Earl Robinson's People's Chorus, was really a fairly active group. There were probably sixty or seventy singers among other things, and they did several concerts. They were going to be doing some of the material we'd be talking about in the sessions, and so on, and Earl would occasionally come up and give me a hand on the other. Because of the fact that it was a two-tiered course, in other words, you had the beginning course and the advanced course; so I taught there in the fall of '49 and the spring of '50, the fall of 1950 and the spring of-- By the spring of 1951, I had A and B going at the same time; so I had advanced people and beginning people-- I had about four classes: I had two classes of beginners and two classes of advanced; so I had about four evenings involved down there. Then, late in '50 or early in '51, we had some courses out in Westwood. These we were doing in people's homes. I taught in a very nice house in Westwood, as I remember. It held probably, by this time that place would have about fifty people in it, I guess. Then the classes that I had out there were quite large. They were much larger than the ones I had downtown because the fame of the class had grown. There were a lot of things we were doing. I was covering an awful lot of things that nobody else had covered before. Although there were extensive schools of music at USC and UCLA, we were saying things in our group that academia was simply not touching. As a matter of fact, they were violently denouncing it. Since that time, most of the stuff that I had in my course has been incorporated in everybody's school, but in those years it was not. There were some very radical departures that were being used. One of the things that I was showing: I was showing how folk music became a tool, a vehicle for education, particularly for struggle, and how it had been used as a language beyond the words-- In other words, languages which couldn't be tied down. I was showing how sympathetic magic, for instance, could be used as a form of struggle, a negative form of struggle, but nevertheless a form of struggle of the peasantry against the feudal overlords and how it worked. I showed, for instance, that what we used to refer to as the "woman question ballad," which was the right of women to their own lives, to make their own choices, to think on their own feet, and the right of young men and young women to love each other regardless of what the law said or what the overlords had felt about it and so on, was actually a form of political struggle; so that "Barbara Alien" is a political struggle ballad and not just simply a sentimental story. So, we were dealing with things of that nature, which is now more or less accepted, but in 1950 and '51, was food for the HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, because this was considered tampering with historical materials.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did HUAC bring these courses to an end ultimately?

HARRY HAY: Yes, yes--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did they end basically in the early fifties?

HARRY HAY: --but not as far as I personally am concerned, but as far as the Labor School was concerned.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did HUAC kill the Labor School, or did the merger [of the CIO] with the AFL [American Federation of Labor] kill the Labor School?

HARRY HAY: Well, don't forget the merger with the AF of L-- With the pressure going on through [Joseph] McCarthy and HUAC and the witch hunt that goes on in the CIO as a result of the Whittaker [Chambers-Alger Hiss hearings] is actually what tears that whole thing apart and makes the Labor School impossible.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Then did you continue teaching without an organizational structure?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I did. Yes, I did.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Just on a private basis?

HARRY HAY: Yes. Well, for instance, the Labor School in certain sections in certain ways continued. It moved entirely from the AFL-CIO building after the merger. The school was invited to leave that place by the reactionary elements in the AF of L by about six months after the merger. So, I would say, by late in 1950, the Labor School had left that building there and had concentrated entirely on the building downtown. In '51 and the early part of 1952, there was a library. They had an extensive library incidentally, and I had contributed a lot of stuff to the library, including a lot of my pamphlets from the party, which would have dated out of the late twenties and early thirties; I had given a lot of stuff to the library. There was a fire. We suspect arson, but nobody ever knew. But the fire just wiped out that library completely. That sort of put a pall on the whole Labor School itself. They were afraid that they really couldn't continue very much more past that fire because the fire burnt a tremendous amount of stuff that they were using for their facilities in all the courses, not just mine. By this time, I have been teaching courses--this is '51--I had had not only courses in Westwood but I'd also had courses in private homes throughout L.A., particularly the west and the south, as far south maybe as Jefferson and as far west maybe [as] Culver City. Then I had a couple of courses in Santa Monica, and I had some in Westwood, and I had some in the Valley. And these classes would move around. So, we wouldn't do it in the same house each time but in a house that could easily handle maybe twenty people. We would have it in that particular place. So, I had by this time, I guess by '51, I had probably more classes outside the building than I had in the building. I had my one regular class downtown in the building: I had one advanced and one beginner's, but most of the other classes were out and around.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Till what year did your teaching continue?

HARRY HAY: I went on teaching through '53. The Labor School was officially closed in '51, but there were individual classes such as mine going on in the name of the Labor School into late '53. One thing I should mention that was-- It was one of the things that I would do as an adjunct to my work with the thing: In 1948, when Henry Wallace was running as the third-party candidate in the American Party, they were always doing fund raisers. Every party had them. Almost every week there was a fund raiser for the American Party or something that had to do with the Wallace campaign. One of the ways by which they raised money: they would have professional entertainment, as it were. Professional: I mean, whatever we could do. One of their popular entertainers was me. I would go around, and I did one of two things--and sometimes did them both together. I worked out a forty-five-minute to an hour demonstration of what my class was all about by picking out some of the highlights of the things we heard, things that people wouldn't have heard of, things that they didn't know, which I would play. It was a very popular thing because of the types of music that were heard and the things that I had to say about them, which would be very provocative. Everybody would say, "Ah! I've got to take that class. I've got to find out what else he has to say." That kind of thing. Then, the second part of the entertainment was, I would teach them rounds.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, when you said, in the first part, music you would play, meaning--

HARRY HAY: Records that I would have, that I would take along.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Records, OK. I didn't know if you were playing piano or guitar or singing.

HARRY HAY: I'd perform certain things, usually I would have a phonograph. One of the things that I used in 1948 which--and every time I played it, I couldn't play it just once; I never could get away without playing it at least a half a dozen times--was the [Johann] Pachelbel Kanon. I had it as the flip side of the second of a two-record set of ten-inch disks. So, this means the whole canon was played in under three minutes by the-- I think it was the Arthur Fiedler Symphonietta. I would play this, and people would just gasp: "It [is] so exciting and so wonderful." Of course, I would tell them how it was--that it was a canon on a ground, and I would explain what that was and what it meant and, politically, what it consisted of. I would play it, and people would say, "You have to play that over again," and I would play it about eight or nine times. Well, as you know, from 1975 until the present time, the Pachelbel Kanon is probably one of the most popular things out of the early eighteenth century that's ever been played. I mean, every record company has at least four different editions of the damn thing. It really burst when everybody heard it; so I'm not surprised, because when I was playing it back in the fifties, people were just going out of their minds. I'm sure that the Victor Record Company had more people who'd write in and say, "You know, I broke the last record of my [Esajas] Reusner suite. Do you think you could replace it?" Of course, it was the Pachelbel Kanon they were ordering because it was on the flip side of that record. I'm sure that the Reusner suite itself, which is what it was contained in, I'm sure nobody ever played the first record at any time; they only played the flip side of record four, which was this little canon. I know of at least a hundred people who have ordered it based on my class. So, they must have gone out of their minds trying to figure out why they had to keep replacing that one record in this obscure, little ten-inch album of two records that they had put out in 1946, or something like that. But, anyway, as I said, wherever I went, whenever I played the Pachelbel Kanon, I couldn't play it once. I'd have to play it at least eight or nine times; people were just mad about it. They would call me up and say, "Will you come and bring that record?" So, I'd come and bring that record. For instance, one of the things that I would like to do and people liked to hear, they enjoyed doing: they would ask me to figure out--it was like a sixty-four-dollar question kind of thing-- I had a record that I would play, and I would talk about-- I had two series of records. I would play a record by Guillaume Dufay of a Gloria, a little, ten-inch record of a Gloria, that he probably wrote around, say, 1475. Then I would play right after it another thing which was called "Ave Verum." Then I would say, "Knowing what you know about music"--and I'm talking to an audience who's heard me do this for the first time--knowing what you know about music, can you tell me the length of time you think, the number of years or centuries that might [have elapsed] between the [composition of the music] I just played and the [music] I'm playing now." Most people would say, "Yeah, about 250 years. It sounds like about the time of Bach," which it did sound like. And I'd say, "Well, you'll be really interested to know that the actual time lapse between the piece I just played you and the piece I'm playing now is five years. This was written around 1480; this was written around 1475." They'd all go, "Ah!" and they'd have to take the course to find out how that all happened, you see. Well, Josquin Des Prez does write material that sounds very much like Bach, [while] the stuff of Guillaume Dufay, which is very complicated, very mensurated, very cerebral, written in 1475, is in what we call the Ars Antiqua, and it's an entirely different position. What you've got [in Des Prez] is a revolution that is beginning to happen, where material is coming up from the groundswell, from the peasantry. [The Dufay] is aristocratic material, which has just dissipated into practically nothing at one point, as dry as dust and thoroughly cerebral, has no contact with human beings any longer. It had had in the period of the Crusades, but the Crusades are now dead some three hundred years. Now, all of a sudden you've got this revolution of whole new peasant material that is coming up from the ground being fed into this new music. And the difference is the difference of five years in time, but what you're getting is the beginning of the Renaissance throughout the whole country as versus the Medieval period, which came into existence in the Dark Ages, in the ninth century, and is now dying away. So, you've got that very interesting, dramatic juxtaposition, and you could hear it in two pieces of music written five years apart. So, anybody who's interested in historical materialism is going, "Whoo! We've got to hear about this." This was exciting. And this is what I was using as fund-raising performance to help raise money for the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948. I used to love doing this, and I would probably work maybe three or four nights a week doing this kind of thing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Basically, I want to ask if there's any kind of concluding statement about the music that you want to make or if there are other things.

HARRY HAY: Well, I want to bring in something else: that type of study, this way of looking at music from a historical point of view, from the point of view of revolution, from the point of view of using it as a secret language, and so on, is an interest I think that went on, could go on indefinitely. Nobody is really handling it in that way any longer. I did it, for instance, as I say, up to the end of 1953, and then that kind of died away for a while. When I was called for the HUAC thing, the man who eventually acted as my lawyer, was interested in-- When I'd been called for HUAC, I didn't know why I was going to be called, what was going to be looked into: as a Marxist teacher in the South Bay in the late forties or whether or not I was going to be picked up because of my work at the Labor School. It could have been either one. So, I had discussed this with him, and in the course of discussing this with him, he said, "You know, I have an idea that when we're through with the HUAC hearing, if everything turns out favorably, I'd like to have another one of those music classes." So, I set up a music class in my lawyer's house on Mulholland Drive, and it ran from 1955-- I didn't get it organized until late that winter, I guess. It ran '55, '56, and early '57.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who was the lawyer? What was his name?

HARRY HAY: Frank Pestana.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, sure. We've got plenty on Pestana too.

HARRY HAY: I'm sure you do.

MITCH TUCHMAN: He's still around, isn't he?

HARRY HAY: Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I think he is, yeah. I think he is, because we're always being told, "Well, why don't you call Frank Pestana and check that?"

HARRY HAY: Well, maybe so. I know that Jean Kidwell, his wife, is still quite active.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I'm sure he's around.

HARRY HAY: He was active in the Maoist movement, the Maoist sympathizers, or friends of Maoism, in this country for a long time. I haven't heard his name for a long time, and I thought maybe he wasn't still around. He was one of the first organizers of the National Lawyers Guild. So, it was Frank Pestana who acted as my attorney for HUAC. As I said, I taught it again till 1956-57. That was very interesting. Again, this was the type of thing that all kinds of people are interested in. Oh, and I got a wonderful, interesting call as a result of this class, the result of teaching people how folk music had been developed and how it worked and what it did and what it meant, what the structure of it meant. I got a call one morning--let's see, this would have been when? about '57, '58--it might have been late in '58 or early '59--I can't remember now exactly what it was--but all of a sudden I get a call five o'clock in the morning, and I'm awakened out of a sound sleep, and it's long distance, and it's a call-- It's coming from Peking, China, and I think, "Who do I know-- How-- What is Peking, China, calling me for?" The equipment-- We couldn't get the connection, but it was Peking that was calling. Then I could get it, and then I could hear voices, and then I could hear Chinese, and then I could hear a lot of things, and "Click, click, click," and funny noises and explosions and things. So, finally they said, "We're awfully sorry. We'll have to clear the line." They didn't have satellites in those years; so it was coming by radio-telephone, I guess. "We'll have to call you back," and they never called me back, and I never found out what that was. I wondered for years who was calling me from Peking, China. "How exciting." Then, let's see, in the sixties, John and I are together by this time, and I'm interested in the peace movement in the sixties. I have a wonderful idea about how we can bring the draft to a grinding halt, and I go to talk to the progressive end of the National Lawyers Guild, who are doing things with draft resisters at this point, and I try to interest them in this movement. I meet with Frank Pestana and Harriet Pilpel and somebody else in early spring, I guess, of 1966. I'm talking about trying to get them interested in this program, which they're not interested in and they don't care anything about. But Frank says, "You know, I'm glad I've made contact with you again. Why don't you and John come up to the house for dinner?" So, I came up to the house there on Mulholland, where I had taught--I had been teaching in his house up on Mulholland, my class in 1956; this is now 1966--and Harriet Pilpel is there and a few other people, and we're talking about things, and Frank says, "You know, back in '58 or '59 I was traveling in China-- " And I said, "Did you call me one morning?" He said, "Yes, and I couldn't get through." But he tells me why he had called--he was so excited, he just couldn't wait to tell me: he had been traveling, I guess, along the banks of the Yangtze, and he said that what they did-- There were a number of other people who were there. (It was very difficult to get to China in those years; you had to come through other countries and so on in order to get in that area.) He said that there were a number of different people who were traveling with him. What they would do, they would travel at night, and the guards would come through, and they would pull the shades down so that you couldn't look out at night. Then, in the morning, at eight o'clock in the morning, the guards would come through and put the shades up. But you didn't put the shades up until the guards came through and did it; you couldn't look out on your own for whatever reasons. He said, "So, I was lying in my bed that morning, just about six o'clock in the morning, and I awaken, and all of a sudden I was hearing singing." He said, "I heard types of singing. I would hear a single voice, and then I'd hear somebody that would accompany it, and then I'd hear an answer." He said, "Suddenly I got a picture of what was going on outside that train: I could hear leader and chorus, and I could hear the buildup of things, and I could hear responses." He said, "I remembered how you used to teach us how this was being done in the Gothic periods, in the early Medieval periods, what are called leader and chorus songs, and how songs are done." He said, "It was a virelay--" (Virelay is a twelfth-century form, but it's a peasant form that was developed in this time. It's done for certain reasons in certain ways. It's a leader who is telling one group of people to do such and such, and then the chorus has already told another group of people to do a response thing. So that the leader shows the new people how to do something new, and they do in turn, and then the other group comes along and carries out something that's been carried on all along. Then he does something new, and this group then includes that in their thing, and they bring it along. So, it's like an "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" type of thing, where I do two steps forward, and then the other group who's already done five steps backwards and one to the right now takes two steps forward, and all of a sudden I teach you to do something else, and this group comes along and adds it, so that it becomes a-- But it's a way of working, it's a way of operation, it's a way of doing work.) So, this is going on outside the window, and he hears it in China. It's in an idiom of music he's never heard. But after he listens to it for about an hour, he said, "I had a perfect picture of what was going on outside that window. And when the guard came through and lifted the [shade] and I could look out the window, they were doing exactly what you had told me in [your] class ten years before would be happening." He said, "I couldn't wait to get to the phone to corroborate." Well, of course, that's exciting stuff, you know, to realize so much later that what I had been teaching him had made such an impression that all of a sudden he became part of that world. He said, "I never realized until then how much I had learned from that class in music." So, that was what I could have heard on the telephone. That was what he was going to tell me about. I had one or two other things. I had made some guesses in that period, some educated guesses on who Joan of Arc was and what she was like, and I got a call in '54, '55, from a woman who was saying, "You've got to see a book that's just come out. I took your class in 1949 or 1950, when it was at the Labor School, and what you had to say about Joan of Arc just blew my mind away. But there's a book coming out now, and it's corroborating everything you said." And she said, "It's none of the sources that you gave for it. How did you know about these various things?" I said, "Well, I just kind of put a lot of stuff together and read between the lines. And, after all, I'm a gay man, and I read between the lines in a lot of things. That's where our history is." She said, "Well, you did a marvelous job, because it's all coming out now, and it's exactly what you had said at that point." I mean, I would have these little verifications here and there of the fact that what I had been doing in that early class had sparked a lot of minds in a lot of different directions. So, my last class was in 1956-57, and I never taught again after that. That was my period with that. Now, when I'm starting the course, when I'm working at PEC and also at the Labor School in the earlier period, I'm still married. But in 1948--and this story, of course, has been well told; you know, you'll find this in everybody's book--it is while I am working--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, the Wallace--

HARRY HAY: --at the Wallace campaign that the gay movement begins.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Let me turn this off for just a moment.

1.17. TAPE NUMBER IX: SIDE ONE DECEMBER 29, 1981

MITCH TUCHMAN: We began this series of tapes, if you remember, by your talking about your experience with oral history to date. [We have] covered in subsequent sessions experiences that you had from childhood up through the period of the Second World War and, following the period of the Second World War, emphasizing your upbringing around the world and in Los Angeles: your education, early sexual experiences, your interest in music, your interest in politics and in acting. Then, after we finished the last tape, we decided that the thing to do would be to discuss, at this point, just how adequate has been the coverage of the early years of the gay movement, and having covered that, launch in a kind of thematic way into your experiences, as opposed to maintaining a kind of chronological organization from this point onward. The thing to do then, I guess, is for me simply to ask you what has been the character of the historical coverage of the gay movement, and why is it that you feel it has been inadequate to date, and how would you redress that inadequacy?

HARRY HAY: Well, most of the writing--most of the writing versus most of the taping--most of the writing on the gay move- ment, curiously enough--or maybe from some people's point of view not curiously enough--has been from the East Coast. I can remember in the early seventies, it was a young man by the name of Don Teal, I think, who was in the Gay Activist Alliance, who did a thing on the history of the gay movement. You got the sense from that that nothing had happened until Stonewall in '69, and then all of a sudden everything had happened, and it all happened in New York. So, this guy really didn't know a damned thing about what had happened in the earlier period. You got the sense also from that particular history that he couldn't have cared less. Then, later on-- During the seventies there were other people who were writing on the history, and occasionally they would mention that obviously the "dinosaurs" had done something in California in an earlier time, but that was back in the mists of history; nobody had any idea what that was. That's a slight exaggeration, you understand, but it's close. Then, for instance, D'Emilio, John D'Emilio, came to us in New Mexico and was there for four or five days taping; he wrote the history which I believe now is going to be called In the Shadow. [D'Emilio eventually called his history Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983). --Ed.] The book itself is due to come out. He did his doctoral dissertation on the history of the gay movement. The first three chapters, which were called a work-in-progress, when they were published in the Body Politic in November of '78 through February-March of '79, covered the early Mattachine, the one I was involved with. I thought it was a magnificent coverage because you not only had my own testimony but he got corroborations from a half dozen other people; so that all stands together very well, showing me, among other things, that my memory is a lot better than I thought it was.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Have any of the published histories caught up with the past and recognized that something happened before Stonewall, or is D'Emilio the first?

HARRY HAY: Yes, yes. Jonathan Katz's book [Gay American History] does too, but John D'Emilio has done it in great detail to show what the various crossroads that ran through it were and the fact that our group split for political reasons. And people who were involved in that political split: he has their testimony in it as well. So, it's a very complete story.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What do you think accounts for historians in the late sixties having failed to notice events that really occurred no more than fifteen years before that?

HARRY HAY: Well, I think it's an interesting reason, something that I think we out West would notice rather frequently: when New Yorkers or people in Boston, anybody on the East Coast-- Let's say, the East Coast establishment, that Nixon and other people are always upset about, is something that's very real, very tangible, and it's true in all classes. It's not just simply true of one particular group, the establishment, let's say. The East Coast has a tendency to believe that everything begins there simply because at one time everything did begin there since they were all there was. In New York, probably beginning with Stonewall in late '69, or in June of '69, and then the following year the development of the Gay Activist Alliance, which was indeed a very big group (and there were a lot of [left-wing] political offshoots from that, including, of course, Iron Butterflies, among other things, [and the group that produced the journal] Come Out) they were extremely active politically; this is perfectly true. And, of course, they were very large because the city's very large. So, there's a very large concentration of gays there, probably as many gays there in relationship to the rest of the city as there are now in San Francisco. (In other words, that San Francisco group in 1970 was not anywhere near what it is now.) Because of the fact that they were very active and very noisy and very rowdy and so on, people have the tendency to assume that that's where all the activity was. And because of the fact that, as I said, this was the political group-- Other groups in the country were active in a number of very interesting gay ways, but they weren't necessarily politically oriented in the way the group in New York was. So that the activism that surrounded all that tumultuous activity around the Gay Activist Alliance [GAA] and the [GAA] Firehouse, and so on: a lot of people got caught up in that ferment and assumed that weaving that web was the core of the story. This has happened a number of times before. I know that, for instance, long ago, when William Z. Foster was writing the history of the working-class movement, he had a tendency to talk about the ferment of the activity to be in and around New York, the web from Lowell, Massachusetts, for instance, down through the Pennsylvania coal mines. But the truth of the matter was that in San Francisco, amazingly interesting, active things had gone on in the sixties of the last century. In California, in contrast, for instance, to New York or Massachusetts or Pennsylvania or anywhere else, we had a good many socialist legislators in the state house in Sacramento. Los Angeles was a socialist town in the last century. I mean, all these things show, among other things, that there was a huge independent left movement going out here in California, which the East Coast people never paid any attention to.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I don't think I've ever asked you: How do you feel about this perception of history that's coming out of Don Teal and those people? Did you feel resentful? Did you want to write a letter and say, "Hey, somebody forgot to put me in the footnotes"?

HARRY HAY: No. I don't care about me. I really didn't care about me. I mean, I'm not caught up that way, but I did feel that the whole movement of activity, things that had happened out here, were quite important, and they were far more important than Don Teal recognized, because the main characteristics of the whole gay movement of the seventies operated on the idea of consensus, the idea of no membership lists, the idea of no hierarchy, the idea of no rules and no dues; so that it was a flowing group. And that whole idea had actually developed here in Los Angeles, again, in the seventies. It did not happen in New York.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But that idea sounds very, very different from the way you structured your organization.

HARRY HAY: No, it isn't.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Or is that not what you're talking about?

HARRY HAY: No, as a matter of fact, it's only exactly the opposite [the mirror image]. In other words, when we had structured our organization, we had structured it-- We required ourselves to be unanimous. We had to operate on unanimity, and we were doing that only because of the fact that as far as we knew nothing like this had ever happened before, and we had to be sure we were not making a mistake.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are we talking about the same thing? Are we talking about the cell structure that D'Emilio described?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, right. The cell structure, which was an Algerian form, as we found out much later. But this is all being done because we're developing in a period of McCarthy-ism, and that makes a very big difference. I mean, after all, the movement in New York through Stonewall, which spread to the rest of the country, is done in a time when everybody is very open and not afraid to be outside. We are involved, were totally underground in the fifties.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is it true that your point basically though is that what you did in the fifties-- Let me back up: it sounds like what they're saying is that what you did in the fifties didn't last; it didn't have a lasting effect, and it has disappeared.

HARRY HAY: What I'm saying is that Don Teal didn't even mention that it happened.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That I recognize. Is that your point though? Is that true that it didn't take and had to be started up all over again, or did it, in fact--

HARRY HAY: Well, my point really is-- You asked much earlier--We talked about the powder train. The powder train is very important here, and the various things that we did here-- Our movement didn't last; that's true. I mean, the large groups of very active, interested people caught up by a vision didn't last, but there was a skeleton that went on here. It went on and became very active* [in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, New York. From New York it spread to Boston and Providence, down to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and west to Rochester, Syracuse, and the Niagara frontier, and farther west to Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis]. But it spread from here. It didn't spread from New York out.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And it remained active continuously?

HARRY HAY: Yes. Uh-huh.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Maybe you could say what form that took.

HARRY HAY: Well, I can do that. I want to go into that in some detail, but we're just making the [distinction] between the East Coast and the West Coast. I think, in a way, one of the things [that is] interesting about the difference between the East and the West is this: that in the East, you do have a very large, so-called establishment of many classes, and I think that you find people who* [perceive new ideas, new dreams in terms of organizational structures that might support or sustain them, people who would take the germ of such supports and organize into very interesting forms]. But I think the passion for invention, the idea of developing a visionary approach to things is --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. far more characteristic of west of the Mississippi than it is of east of the Mississippi. Because the people who came West were to a large--I think this was true right from the beginning, let's say, the beginning of the nineteenth century--most of the people who came West in the first place came in search of a dream, came in search of a vision, and found areas out in the West where they could actually begin to live it in one way or another. I think this definitely is the difference in character between the West and the East. So that people have a tendency to catch the idea of a vision and then flesh it out on the West Coast. Then it spreads east, and then the East takes it up and structures it and organizes it and marches militantly in one direction or another. I think this is probably the way the two parts of the country relate. And I think it's still true. It was just as true in the gay movement as it was in the working-class movement or the socialist movement earlier, and so on.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are there other failings of the recording of gay history, other reasons--

HARRY HAY: Well, for instance, as far as I'm concerned, when John D'Emilio wrote his article, you got the sense that nothing happened after 1954 as far as I was concerned. I had an awful lot of people who wrote and said, "Yes, but that was way back in 1954." He wrote it in such a way as to say, "He's dead, and we've never heard from him since." And that was the thing that kind of bothered me because in a way I had not thought of it in those terms. We had not gone right on. I think the point is that all of us who were involved in that early group sort of felt that we had burned out. Burned out: we were not only burned out but, I think, we were traumatized by the way the movement split. It was kind of a stunner. I don't think we knew what had happened to us: you got hit on the head, and you just kind of stagger around for a couple of years not knowing what's going on; so that I really didn't do much in the fifties after that.* [At first, I don't think we actually understood what had happened to us. I turned to what was to become for me a disastrous, eleven-year-long relationship with a beautiful young Danish immigrant full-fashion hat designer who was half my age. Chuck Rowland, Bob Hall, and Jim Kepner fled to Mexico in the spring-summer of 1954, hoping to obtain work permits and establish residency there with the help of Paul Bernard, a former Mattachine steering committee member, who had emigrated to Mexico City two years earlier.] But by the early sixties, we were very much recovered, and we were moving in a number of rather interesting directions in the sixties. -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. There were one or two important things that happened in the fifties that have never been given adequate coverage too, and I think this is something I would like to discuss.* [The second Mattachine Society, which grew out of the split in my original group as of April-May 1953, retained about 60 percent of the May 1953 membership, primarily those brothers who would not be concerned by membership exposure through more-or-less open, Lions Club-type meetings governed by majority rule and Roberts Rules of Order procedures. This membership began falling off by 1954. In 1955 Mattachine headquarters, by vote at their now-yearly conventions, was assumed by Hal Call of Donan Press and Charles Lucas, both residents of San Francisco. But the switch from being motivated by dreams of self-affirmations to "we're the same as everybody else except in bed"-motivated meetings governed by majority vote took its toll. From the second half of 1954 through 1955 the Los Angeles membership gradually fell away, until by the fall of 1956 the Los Angeles Mattachine organization to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. Another item] is the Supreme Court case in 1957. I think it's known as Roth versus The People, or something of the sort. It was an enormously important case, and although I wasn't directly -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. involved with it, I was indirectly involved in a number of ways.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you want to talk about that?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I could talk about that. Sure.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I have no idea what that is.

HARRY HAY: First of all, I would say that-- Just to backtrack--I think we already covered this--in the final period of the early Mattachine, the first Mattachine Society-- (As a matter of fact, I don't know how much I've covered on that, but I think I will mention one or two things about that. This is referred to, of course, in great detail by John D'Emilio; so I'm not going to give you any details.) But in the spring of '52, we undertook to defend an entrapment case. The one thing I do want to mention--and I want to mention it in some detail because it's something that I think one of these fine days we have to have retribution for out here--and that is that the Los Angeles Times gave us a total blackout. It was what I would call a conspiracy of silence because every medium, every radio station, every TV station--and we had several of them by that time--and the Los Angeles Times and any other paper that we had around then (whether or not that other daily paper was still in existence then I've forgotten by now) but anyway, no one covered that trial; and they had plenty of notice of it because it was one of these things held and then dragged on for a couple of weeks and then it was put off for a couple of weeks and then something else happened. Then we were in court for about five days on the thing. Anyway, no one ever covered the thing. There was absolutely no mention of it at any time. It was the first time in the history that I know of that anybody fought a case of entrapment. And in this particular case we fought it to a standstill, and the city of Los Angeles had to back off. So, as far as we were concerned, it was a victory. During the course of that, we put out about twenty-five thousand pieces of literature. (You know, for a group that has no money, that's not bad in that period.) We had the stuff covered all over the city. No mention of it in the press. Nothing. No mention until the following--this is in the spring of '52--no mention until the following October, when the syndicated columnist Paul Coates picked up the story; and then that was, of course, what caused the actual split. So that the Times, which rather prides itself on being the great paper that mentions everything and is a friend of the gay community, has to know in its [the gay movement's] original beginnings, it [the Times] did all it could to stamp it out by that silence. This is something that has to be looked at one of these days. I think that they owe us not only an apology but they also owe us our retribution in a way. But that's neither here nor there at the present time. I kind of got the sense in a way--and I don't really know; I'll have to see the book and see how [D'Emilio] handles it--but I got the sense-- When Body Politic came out, publishing the thing, I sort of wrote and suggested: "It didn't end in '54. We went on after that." And I got the sense from them that, "As far as we're concerned, it ended." And so I kind of felt like I was buried alive because I hadn't thought of it as being a closed episode. It was just that, as I said, it was a holding pattern for a while. We kind of went back and regrouped.* [In actuality, One, Inc., which, as a direct production of the Matta-chine Foundation had become the first Mattachine blooming in another form, now began to grow and flourish by embracing some of the cross-currents and counter-currents within the original group in dialogue and even confrontational forms. One, Inc., under Chuck Rowland, developed a social services division, which began to explore early forms of peer counseling, which began to undertake housing and job referrals on a small scale. Meanwhile the powder-train-laying activities, reaching out to new contacts across the country, tying together presumably disparate items of gay -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. persecution and gay oppression into plausible patterns of interrelationships began to emerge in One magazine's monthly issues, in the news columns by Lyn Pederson and Dal McIntire, both house names for Jim Kepner, now widely loved and revered as the international gay and lesbian archivist. All of this actually took a number of years to do. But it all begins to take off in the spring of 1954, although its origins go back to] October of '52, when we had first thought we'd set up a house organ, or a newsletter--newsletters were simply not a thing you did in the fifties; that wasn't thought of until probably '68, '69--but we thought, first of all, to establish a house organ or some kind of a way of keeping in contact. Then the idea came of setting up a separate organization, a separate group so that we would have two gay groups for the citizens of California, which could then interact between themselves and maybe get something else going. So that One, Inc., was set up as a separate thing. Although it was set up out of Mattachine-- All the people in it were Matta-chine people. The monies were Mattachine monies, and the mailing list was the Mattachine mailing list.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, was this after Mattachine had changed from--

HARRY HAY: No.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This was during--

HARRY HAY: This was during the latter period of the first Matta-chine. It was before the big split, which came in March of the following year.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, what was the purpose of having two organizations?

HARRY HAY: Well, because if we had two organizations, the [second one] could very shortly take on a life of its own, for one thing, if it was connected with Mattachine; it could simply move in another direction. And then, possibly, we could involve ourselves in a very extensive dialogue between the two, if you had two groups that were thinking in a little bit different directions from each other. This is what we were hoping would happen: that we would sort of have two guns out there, one facing east and one facing southwest.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This was a very specific kind of strategic decision?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, yeah.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But with the same people involved at the heads of both organizations, how could--

HARRY HAY: They wouldn't be the same people at the head necessarily. In the first place, although we operated by unanimity, we didn't think of ourselves as having a hierarchy; so that you didn't have heads of anything. But one of the organizers of One, Inc., was, in fact, one of the original organizers of Mattachine.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did the two organizations have similar goals and purposes and activities, or were they distinct?

HARRY HAY: Well, One set itself up to be a journal. It was going to be a journal. It didn't want to think in terms of education, both in print and possibly even a little-- I think the idea of holding classes was not part of their original-- I think that was something that developed as a result of their work as a journal, but I don't think they thought of themselves as an educational institution in 1953. I think that came later. But the incorporation was big enough to allow that to happen if it did. But they thought of themselves as being a journal, and an educational journal only, which would make it possible for them later on to become nonprofit because of the fact that they were educational and not political. So, when the split took place, as it did beginning January, February, March of 1953, they were simply on the side being able to observe all this and were not themselves caught in the toil and moil of it, although, again, the personnel that was involved there were the same personnel who had been in the old Mattachine. OK. When the group split, and the name Mattachine-- We gave them-- We ourselves on the original steering com- mittee-- My own particular feeling about this [was] that by this time the name Mattachine meant many things, because we had by this time gotten mail from all over the world. I think I've already told you this, but the thing that moved me very much was that we had gotten a letter from, I think, either New South Wales or even Tasmania, the little island off the south coast of Australia, simply saying, "You guys don't know this, because you have no way of seeing it from where we are, so far away from you, but the name Mattachine already means 'freedom' to us. And maybe sometime in my lifetime, this will happen."* [Actually the first line of his letter said, "The magic name Mattachine sends hope along the wind."] This is back in 1952, August 1952* [and I cannot, even now, tell this incident or even write about it without tearing in the eyes and getting all choked up]; so that I remembered that letter, and I thought, well, even if the group splits and we go down for now, we're simply wiped out, as it were, and the new group goes on, the name has to go on because it does mean hope to so many people in different parts of the world. So, therefore, maybe if the new group takes the name, they at least will stick to some of our original goals and some of our original desires because pressures from around the -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. world may persuade them to move in our direction. So, I persuaded the rest of our steering committee not to insist on our keeping the name and their thinking up a new one, but actually dissolve and give them the name. And this is what we did.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did you feel about it? I mean, that sounds very rational and--

HARRY HAY: It broke my heart. What do you think?

MITCH TUCHMAN: That's what I wondered.

HARRY HAY: To give the name to people whom I'm afraid might even trample the thing unless we put in some safeguards--and the idea of keeping the name might even be a safeguard. Sure, it broke my heart. This, I think, was the thing that probably put us all in sort of limbo, sort of a holding pattern, although sort of self-freezing, for about four or five years.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And you didn't all emerge from limbo to be as active as you've remained or become?

HARRY HAY: Well, a couple of the people did. A couple of people actually moved to a position of taking active-- They became, let's say, political activists in the ranks of One. I at this time was living with a young Danish man who was a hatmaker. This was a very difficult period for me. This was something that had happened right at the crisis of Mattachine. I was suffering from culture shock, because the thinking of the European, particularly the Scandinavian, middle-class gays and our thinking were poles apart, which was something I couldn't have known--nobody knew this--till you experience it. He was a lower-middle-class young man who-- And I found out that Denmark, probably Sweden and Norway, were all, let's say, of a similar pattern. But the experience in his country was that-- I don't even know if you could refer to people as gay. I think you'd have to refer to them as homosexual. So long as you set up housekeeping, so long as you were the exact imitation of the hetero majority in whose midst you lived, and you kept your house and you conformed to exactly the sort of, let's say, Reform Protestant attitudes of the lower middle class--you dressed demurely and you didn't raise your eyebrows--and you didn't gawk and stare at people--your head was not on a swivel as all of ours are when we're out in public places--you were nice and respectable and restrained, just as your hetero counterparts were, and didn't rock the boat in any way whatsoever, you were permitted to exist. In other words, you were tolerated. You were patronized. This is the way that living was in Copenhagen and in Oslo and in Stockholm. And this is the way my friend, Jorn [Kamgren], wanted our household to be. Well, I'm not one of those. I was already beginning to be very much aware of what, in the late sixties-- As a matter of fact, in 1972 I myself, in a letter to Don Kilhefner, am going to call [it] "gay consciousness." As far as I know, that was the first time that phrase was ever used. Already in the fifties I'm beginning to be aware that this is very true. I am running into major trouble from my friend, Jorn, who doesn't see this at all or who, if he does see it, wants to be recognized as Mrs. Founder-of-the-Movement. He had a very strong sense of class. I don't know if you are familiar with what prewar and probably immediately after, postwar, Denmark or Scandinavia is. The assistant to the assistant to the assistant postmaster's wife is Mrs. Assistant to the Assistant to the Assistant Postmaster, all done in Danish or in German and hung onto your name; therefore people bow and scrape to you because of your position, as it were, on the steps of the City of God. Well, they've got that attitude going on, and this is his attitude too. When we would go to meetings, for example, he'd be furious because he's not being deferred to as Mrs. Founder-of-the-Movement.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I don't know what this question will bring but: What did you learn about our culture from what you began to recognize about his culture? I mean, did it give you any new perspective on how we do things?

HARRY HAY: Yes, of course, it did. I mean, simply because I was chafing at being caught in this lower-middle-class situa- tion, I thought to myself, "Oh, I know perfectly well why people broke away from the Old World." I mean, "How do you breathe in this? You're simply carrying the mercantilism," let's say, "of the Renaissance on your shoulders at all times. There's no way of breaking out of this." But I also recognized something else of myself. Here was a young man who is half my age, who is really a very attractive, very pretty young man, proportioned, shall we say, in all kinds of interesting ways, and I am at this point going through the doldrums of the forties. I'm going through my own confrontation, as Jung calls it. I'm thinking in many respects I'm probably very lucky to have as a partner a sexually and personally attractive young man, who has the possibilities of becoming a great designer (which he did), and I should make of this what I can and be satisfied. So, not only that but he was an immigrant here. He was surviving simply because I had suddenly stepped in at a certain point when he was starving and needed help from a friend. I said, "I have undertaken now a certain responsibility, and I have to see it through whatever it requires." And it required a large chunk out of the middle of my life. But, nevertheless, I saw it through for eleven years.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Might some people not have perceived this as paradise: to be able to be gay and ignored?

HARRY HAY: I'm not sure that I understand.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, I just mean, it sounds like the situation in these Scandinavian countries is that these people can do whatever they want and [yet] be ignored as long as they're like everybody else.

HARRY HAY: Well, the real truth of the matter is that they can't do whatever they like. They can do what the heteros can do, and that in a way is pretty restricted. It's the type of restriction that you would run into in what we would call, let's say, the rather restricted nineteenth-century Protestant society, which is a little bit like the-- You are restrained in the same way that the Mennonites were restrained or the women of the Scotch Presbyterians were restrained. I had seen something of that because my grandmother, my father's mother, was of the Christian Society, as the very strict Knoxian Presbyterians were called. I can remember my aunt Alice, her oldest daughter, who had told me long ago that she had been strictly brought up so that the only time that she ever left the house at all was to go to church on Sundays and that she had been taught never to lift her eyes to a man. I'm talking about people who were raised in Covina in 1909, 1910, 1911.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So that the life you were describing is more sort of--

HARRY HAY: Circumspect. Circumscribed. Oh, yes, very.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But with or without a lot of chafing at the bit? I mean, dissatisfaction.

HARRY HAY: * [Jorn never evidenced any signs of chafing sufficient to even achieve a rumble of discontent, nor did I get any similar such sense from the materials I eventually read in the Scandinavian gay press for the period.] Although in the [fifties], when we first began hearing about the Forbunden av 1948 and the magazines that are being published in Denmark-- I think it translates into "friends," although I can't remember now what-- Vennen. Vennen it was called, which means "friends." It was published in Copenhagen, and then later it was published in Bergen, in Norway, and then it would be published back in Copenhagen again. It sounded like they had the breath of freedom and they were beginning to move in various directions. It turned out, in a way, that it was sort of a cruising service done by mail. It never seemed to have a vision greater than having a dance maybe, which might end in a discreet orgy twice a year or three times a year. That's about as far as it went. And then it acted as sort of a dating circle by mail, which reached out to other European cities. It was probably an internationally read magazine, and I suppose it might have ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. been published in as many as four or five thousand, and that included, of course, the American subscription as well. They had Per Kreis, which, I think, in German means "circle." It was called Le Cercle in French. It was called Per Kreis in German. It was published out of Switzerland. It existed before the Second World War, it was suspended during the Second World War, and it went on being printed, now and again, after the Second World War up to 1951 and '52. There was a group called the COC in Holland. I don't know when they were formed. Jack Argo was their main organizer, and they were very much in action between 1948 and 1952, '53. Per Kreis, for instance, and, I think, the Dutch group were active during the Second World War in the Resistance. As a matter of fact, I know a little bit (although I don't know how much we know even yet) about the fact that they spirited people out of Switzerland and out of Germany and out of France into the Scandinavian countries and even across the Channel to England: gay people as well as heteros. It was a very important part of the resistance. These remnants-- We do know that Vennen in Denmark and Per Kreis in Switzerland and Le Cercle in France and the COC in Holland had all been a part of that network. But I don't think that story's been told yet at all; and I think before everybody dies, it ought to be done.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you think that there are people from a generation before yours who are saying, "Oh, that Harry Hay thinks he started the movement, but why doesn't he recognize what we did in the twenties or the teens or the thirties?" Are there people before you, or to put it rudely, what claim do you have, really, to have been the first? Can you substantiate it?

HARRY HAY: Well, you see, the point is, we weren't concerned with whether or not we were the first. That's not the point. This is looking at history by hindsight, as it were.* [Mitch, there's been a lot of scurrilous mishandling of me around the following in 1983, '84, '85. I would like to insert this not only for the record in general but for this story in particular. The only way we knew anything at all in 1950 was through what each of the others knew. I know about the group in Chicago in 1924, and through Bans von Trardorste, a well-known German refugee actor with whom I had an affair in the summer and fall of 1935, I knew about Magnus Herschfeld's Charlottenburg Institute and its magnificent library, which had been burned by the Nazis earlier that year. Hans must have known about Herschfeld's and Ulrich's groups but he never told me about any of this. Most of -------------- * Mr. Hay inserted the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. what he shared with me was the theater life of Berlin in the 1920s and about Brecht and about Reinhardt and Stanislavsky, which I was passionate to know about in those years. It was Rudi Gernreich who knew a little about Herschfeld's groups and knew vaguely about their distinction. He would have been still a schoolboy in 1935. Undoubtedly in 1950-53 there were a number of gay brothers in and around Hollywood and Los Angeles who, wealthy enough to travel and buy books and periodicals abroad, knew quite a lot about not only the groups in Holland, like COC, or in Basel, Switzerland, like the one around Per Kreis, the German-Swiss publication. Such books and periodicals as they might have had would have been successfully spirited through customs, hidden in clothes or whatever. Had they tried to send them through the mails, postal inspection would have interrupted, as they did to us in the fall of 1952 when the British summer visitors who had been enthusiastic attendees at our consciousness-raising raps, then simply called discussion groups, tried to send us Per Kreis, something from Holland, and three pieces from Scandinavia. It was simply that those brothers and sisters who knew of European activities and publications were not the folks who braved the possibilities of exposure by joining their knowledge to ours in the formative years.] The only way we knew anything at all in 1950--because, after all, so little has been published in English at that point; you look and see it just wasn't there--

MITCH TUCHMAN: And, of course, I mean the first in America.

HARRY HAY: You see, the point that we were concerned with was that we didn't know of anything else. The only thing we knew about--and it was kind of vague in my mind--I had known about some type of a holding pattern, a group of men who had existed in Chicago [the Chicago Society for Human Rights] in 1924--1924 to maybe a year or so afterwards. One of the people had been-- Maybe he was a mail clerk, but anyway he worked with the U.S. Post Office. They had gotten busted because they had been using the mails; it was done through the post office department and was "using the mails for sexual purposes" or something of the sort. Actually, all it had been was a way by which gay men got together. I think they probably had a drag ball once or twice a year. I think this is about the extent of it. In other words, it was not ever done for political purposes or for educational purposes. It was only done as a way of getting together. This is all we knew about, and I knew about this inadvertently through the man who brought me out, who had been himself the lover of another guy who had been involved with the group in Chicago. Let's see, Champ brings me out in the spring of 1930, and the man he had known in Kansas City in '27, who had been involved with a man who had been a lover in Chicago in 1924* [who was one of the men involved with the Chicago Society for Human Rights]. So, it was not even a direct line. It was sort of indirect relationships of relationships of relationships.* [But maybe it is important that almost in the same breath with my being brought out into an ongoing channel of the clandestine gay underground of the time, I also knew that an attempt had been made to form a gay group, which had been viciously stamped out by the U.S. government.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: What made it possible for Mattachine to have had the success that it did while you were involved with it? Was it the radicalism of the thirties and forties, or was it some-- What do you think accounted for the fact that you succeeded where Chicago of the twenties failed?

HARRY HAY: We had the vision of ourselves as-- How to put it? We had a dream of a sort of society, of a whole society of people like ourselves being able to be who we were, express what we were, have our poetry understood and accepted. We had a sort of a feeling that there was far more to being gay than just our sexual inclinations, and we were about to find out what they were and explore them. We were at home with each other and excited about the idea that we were -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. going to finally begin to discover who we really were.* [After all, you must remember we five knew each other as having shared a common background of experience as having been political outlaws, fellow members of the left-wing underground during World War II and after. So changing over from being political outlaws in common to being political-sexual outlaws in common just wasn't all that different. As a matter of fact, it probably brought us into ever greater commitment.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, this name Jorn doesn't come up, to my knowledge, in D'Emilio.

HARRY HAY: No.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That was that same period, wasn't it?

HARRY HAY: I met Jorn in the late spring of '52.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh. So, in fact, he wasn't around as early as '48.

HARRY HAY: No. No, he wasn't. No, he comes in much later. He's in my personal life, and he takes the place of RG [Rudi Gernreich]; by this time, he and I have separated.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh. Had you and he been lovers?

HARRY HAY: Yes, yes, yes. I didn't mention this [in earlier interviews]. I mentioned RG and Mr. X. These are all names that appear in Jonathan Katz and John D'Emilio's -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. thing, because I'd never been given, and I haven't been given yet, permission to use his name. [Rudi Gernreich died April 21, 1985, at the age of sixty-two. I now may use his name in full.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: By the time you met Jorn, had you already developed the notion of what you now call gays being an alien culture?

HARRY HAY: No.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, you didn't already have in your mind just how very "wrong" Jorn was.

HARRY HAY: At this moment I could look at him in terms of radical politics, and I was looking at it in terms of Marxist historical materialism, and I realized that here was a group of people who--and I was thinking of his whole class: his family and all the people who were here from Denmark--recognizing that this is what was really known as the petit bourgeoisie. I could see that Marx's limitation --the way he thought and the way he saw the petit bourgeoisie--he was seeing the petit bourgeoisie of Germany of the nineteenth century, and I was realizing that the petit bourgeoisie of Denmark in the twentieth century wasn't that different. It had moved to twentieth-century values. In other words, it could see the automobile rather than the ------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. horse and buggy, but otherwise there wasn't that much difference.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But you had yet, then, to develop a gay analysis that was as developed as a Marxist analysis.

HARRY HAY: Right. Yes. But I was already aware of the fact that he was caught up in an exact imitation of the hetero culture out of which he came. I already was beginning to ask myself, "Is this a gay culture, or is it indeed only a homosexual variation of the heterosexual majority pattern which is there?" And I had decided that it was the latter. I thought, at first, it was worth exploring, and then I later on realized it was nothing that we could use at all and that in effect I was really suffering from a culture gap that could never be crossed.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did the other kind of consciousness and analysis arise? Is that important to discuss at this point? The consciousness of gays as-- You know, you've said--I shouldn't interrupt so much—you've said at some point that--and let me make sure I get this straight--that whereas other people would like to say gays are exactly the same as heteros except in bed, you came to realize it's the other way around.

HARRY HAY: My relationship with Jorn is one of the things that helped spark that. I'm going to begin to think a lot of things as a result of this. Let me put this in to start with: because of the fact that it became apparent to him that he was not going to be recognized as Mrs. Founder-of-the Movement, he then tried very hard to see to it that I simply divorced myself from the group: Charles Rowland, for example, and I guess Bob-- (And you know, all of a sudden, at this moment, I can't remember his last name.)

MITCH TUCHMAN: I can pick it up from D'Emilio.

HARRY HAY: Yes, you can. Chuck and Bob [Hull] and Dale [Jennings]: those three, moved into One, Inc. Dale went in as editor. Chuck Rowland by May of '53 had established what was known as the social services division, which is an important thing because the social services division is what the Gay Community Services Center is now here in L.A.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It developed out of that?

HARRY HAY: It didn't develop out of that as a direct thing, but, I mean, it begins the activity which is now incorporated into the Gay Community Services Center here. The social services division is involved. And that is, for instance, what we were concerned with: when people came here from various places who knew about One, for example, who came to look up One or Mattachine, that they had places to crash, they had places where they could go. If they wanted employment, we attempted to find temporary employment, and so on.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, in other words, people came very early to depend on you for things that you-- If you weren't prepared to provide them, you assumed those responsibilities, and that's how you grew.

HARRY HAY: Yes, that's right. Yeah. So, the social services division was already in operation by May or June of 1953.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you already have these kids on the street who just drift into town and become hustlers?

HARRY HAY: The gay movement has always had its component of street people. Let's say, I would not directly know this, but I would know it from people who had told me about the-- We've always had street cruising. We've always been the people of twilight. We've always been the people who went to the Bois de Boulogne, for example, in Paris or along the Seine in the twilight, where the demimonde went. This is where we met other people who came looking for us, as it were, looking for people like ourselves. This is how our cruising patterns begin. This is why we go to parks and why we go to art galleries and why we would hang around the lobbies of theaters and at the opera. These are the things we had learned; and how far back we know these, I don't know, except we know in the eighteenth century they were doing this. We know that in the Vauxhall Gardens in London, for example, that certain areas of that were appar- ently holding patterns and cruising patterns where the gentry met the stableboys, for example.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Let me not, though, get you--

HARRY HAY: Now, I'm spread out. I mean, the point is that--

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, the social services division--

HARRY HAY: The social services division was a natural concomitant. In a way, facetiously we had always said, "Maybe we should set up a booth in the lobby of the Greyhound Bus [terminal] downtown." Then somebody suggested, "Well, maybe we should do it right next to the toilet." [laughter]

MITCH TUCHMAN: So that your activities, rather than disappearing, became channeled into more pragmatic needs of gay people than more politically activist--

HARRY HAY: Well, you see, in the Mattachine itself—Remember-- You'd have to look into D'Emilio's book, and you'd see what was happening--and I don't want to get involved with that-- but the discussion groups out of which the whole Mattachine idea comes in the first place were still fairly exciting things. We're still exploring ourselves. We're still telling each other our stories, which incidentally still goes on, as you probably know, because even at the Faerie gatherings of the last couple or three years, this has been going on. The same thing happens which happened in the early Mattachine: you're caught in the same fire and the same fervor and the same zeal, which I find extremely interesting. I might also say that I went to a movie last night called My Dinner with Andre. I was taken by a couple of men who had been to our gatherings, and I was absolutely caught by the fact that in My Dinner with Andre, here is a hetero male attempting to tell another hetero male what goes on at a spiritual gathering for Radical Faeries. This is what the movie's all about. It's so exciting to hear the heteros trying to do it. They're trying to deal with subject-subject consciousness, and he hasn't come to that phrase yet--but he will if I can help it. This is what the movie's all about. It's so interesting to listen to the hetero audience around respond to this film, and here we gay men who have been to gatherings find this very exciting because he's trying to cover what we try to cover when we try to tell somebody who hasn't been to a gathering what a gathering is like. Well, the result is My Dinner with Andre and the fact that, all of a sudden at the climax of the film, he says, "I'm beginning to realize that what we need is a new language," which is something that we've already come to. I mean, it's just that kind of thing. So, that kind of excitement, that kind of being Columbus discovering a New World is what the early Mattachine was all about: rediscovering ourselves and discovering the world in which we really belonged and discovering ourselves as part of the world that we always sort of dreamed that we might be a part of but never thought we'd ever find. This is that type of excitement. So that when One begins, One begins as a journal where some of this is going to be put down. But in the meantime, the personnel have certain needs and requirements which now begin to show because the vision of the whole thing, of moving forward to a new land, is no longer bubbling. It is now being put down on paper. It's not in the activities of people. So, now the bare bones of how this is all supported begins to show. In other words, you can see the scaffolding, and the scaffolding is the people who come and go and the fact that there are daily needs, which is something that is going on underneath the vision. But the vision isn't there right now; so all of a sudden, you can watch the bones working.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you find that as exciting, or were you disappointed?

HARRY HAY: The point is this: I didn't find anything because Jorn, my Danish lover, saw to it that I had nothing to do with that group because they didn't recognize him as Mrs. Founder-of-the-Movement; so he simply cut them all off.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did they attempt to reinvolve you?

HARRY HAY: Yes, yes, yes. They tried very hard, as a matter of fact. And I tried several times but found I couldn't get across the gap. He made it so unpleasant; he made my life miserable if I had anything to do with them.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This was still early in the relationship though, wasn't it?

HARRY HAY: Yes. I also thought to myself, "I've taken on a responsibility here. He isn't able to get along on his own." He doesn't have yet more than four or five hundred words in the language, and I don't speak Danish.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The story that you're now describing sounds like the story you hear from housewives who become feminists.

HARRY HAY: Yeah, yeah.

1.18. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 29, 1981

HARRY HAY: Well, I would say it's exactly the experience; as I said, it was a culture gap and a culture shock. But I did feel terribly responsible. Again, I'm now dealing with the early fifties, and, again, we don't have that much literature as yet on how to handle certain situations, certainly nothing as far as the gay movement is concerned. As I was saying, Jorn--

MITCH TUCHMAN: You haven't said his last name. Is that by design?

HARRY HAY: No, not necessarily by design. As a matter of fact, his original name, his real name, is Boethius. It's a very ancient Danish name. It goes back to about the tenth century. It's a very ancient Danish family. But maybe two years before he immigrated to the United States, he changed his name, as he is allowed to do in Denmark (we don't have that allowance here). He was allowed to change his name, and he changed it to Kamgren, because he was going to be a gay hat designer, and he had made up his mind that's what he was going to be; so he simply dropped his family name and took a name of his own. He's known today in Los Angeles, if indeed he's still here--I'm not sure that he is--as Jorn Kamgren. At this moment I've forgotten where I'm at.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, we were just going into the kind of restricted nature--how your activities were restricted.

HARRY HAY: Well, at this point Jorn has maybe five hundred words of English--and, as I said, I don't speak Danish--so that he is on the verge of having to maybe even go into the army, because this was a requirement in the fifties: that anybody twenty-one would have to open himself, if he was going to immigrate, he'd have to leave himself wide open to the draft.

MITCH TUCHMAN: There's no guarantee that they would be drafted, I take it.

HARRY HAY: There was no guarantee that he wouldn't be drafted, because his brother already had been drafted. His family had come here, and his brother had already been drafted. As a matter of fact, at this point his brother had gone through a bad accident in basic training and lost his leg. Well, anyway, Jorn couldn't see himself going into the army, and I couldn't see him going into the army either. And there was just the possibility that he might begin to develop as a good hat designer and hatmaker. So, in July of '53, he did go down for draft examination and managed to persuade them that he was really not the material they were looking for; so consequently he was classified 4F. As I said, I felt that I had taken on a responsibility here and I had to see it through. I didn't quite know what that meant either, but I felt it was something I needed to do.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are we talking of the period from '53 to '59, which you characterized as a cessation of activities when we last spoke?

HARRY HAY: Not a cessation of activities. What's going on is a tremendous amount of activity inside with me and a whole different experience than I had ever gone through before.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you cut yourself off from your former colleagues?

HARRY HAY: No, I didn't cut myself off necessarily, but I simply didn't go there very often, but I went into an extensive correspondence. During this period I also undertook to find out who we were; so that was when I began to build a library. As I have said much later, I probably could have written Arthur Evans's book twenty years before he wrote it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Arthur Evans's book is what?

HARRY HAY: Witchcraft and the Counterculture. Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture I think he calls his book now. Why I didn't write it is because I hit a major snag, which in 1955, '56 would have been-- Incidentally, I found the obstacle in the path that Arthur Evans never found; and I'm not quite sure I understand why he didn't find it, because it's certainly there. That is the fact that, let's say, between 1500 B.C. and 500 B.C. the berdache, as we might call the gay men of the ancient world, the men who wore women's clothes and who moved into a nonman environment and did nonman social and political services to the communities in one way or another as priest and as shaman, and so on, actually betrayed the women's movement. This is something that no gay publication in that period would have handled. In fact, I tested it out at one, and they were absolutely horrified and scandalized by the whole thing and said, "It's simply not true," and "you can't write that." So, I realized I couldn't tell that story; and unless I told that story, my history wouldn't be correct. So, I simply thought that, well, I'll wait some time, and maybe sometime in the future I can tell this story. And, of course, that time never came because I got involved in other things and forgot it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What were some of the highlights of that period?

HARRY HAY: Well, the important thing is that this is a period, for example, before any ancient part of the Mediterranean world, and certainly along the northern--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I'm sorry. I meant the period from '53 to '57. That's what I meant. Some of the highlights of that period we're speaking of.

HARRY HAY: Well, I did enormous amounts of reading, enormous amounts of reading. This is when I become familiar, for instance, with all the writings of Graves, Robert Graves. My thought process at that time was I read the book through and then I would read the book through a second time, and little by little the lines between the lines would begin to appear. Although most of his writing has the absence of the period of the homosexual people at all, or homophobia is already very much present and the stuff is being deliberately left out, being deliberately sort of deleted, as it were. So, what I have to wait for, as I say, I have to wait for the lines coming out between the lines, the words coming up between the words, to begin to see where those patterns were, and that takes time. You can read the thing two or three times, and then begin to see where the holes are. This is what I was doing: I was reading Graves, I was reading [Lewis Richard] Farnell, I was reading all the people who were writing on the Greek experience: Dodd--oh, I'll have to go back and look at it--Gilbert Murray certainly, Jane Harrison certainly; and then in modern times, Joseph Campbell here in the United States on the various cultures that he's concerned with. I'm aware of the fact that the gay people are there. In Mircea Eliade there has to be lots and lots of material. In James Frazer there has to be lots more than there is. We already know how Jane Harrison and James Frazer felt about it. They were always simply holding their noses and plunging bravely on but hating every moment of it according to their own preferences; so that whatever they do talk about as far as gay people are concerned, I'm going to be aware that it's going to be badly slanted and badly distorted; and wherever possible they're going to cut it out, or they're going to pretend it didn't exist. And it's that particular area that I want to find out about. So that I'm doing a lot of reading, and this takes a great deal of time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How were you supporting yourself at that time?

HARRY HAY: I was working as a production engineer in an industrial burner company.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, so that's already begun.

HARRY HAY: That's already begun. At this moment I'm paying alimony to my ex-wife for my two children, and this takes half my income; so we're living on very little. I'm trying to get this hat business of Jorn Kamgren going on the other half of it; so that my life is very circumscribed, and we go practically nowhere.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Where did you live?

HARRY HAY: Well, let's see. I lived first in what amounts to the Jewish district, just around Fairfax, to begin with. Then, later on I lived on North La Cienega in a small-- We lived in the hat studio; we lived in the back end of it, as it were. Then, finally we had a place on Westwood Boulevard, two or three blocks south of Wilshire, in another studio--but, again, always living upstairs from the studio proper. Let's say, the studio itself would be our living room, which could be converted. This was actually for me a very difficult period because most of Jorn's hat customers-- And I developed-- I became a part of the hat business, and I did a lot of work in relationship to that. One of the things that I invented, among other things, was the idea of doing fashion shows for women's clubs as part of their free entertainment, which I began in the spring of 1954. By the time I left the field, every designer in the country was doing this. I think, as far as I'm concerned, we were the first ones to do this. My idea was-- I worked out a portable business with screens and things. We took our line, for example, to the clubs, and instead of picking the prettiest woman in the group, you picked the dowdiest woman in the group. If you picked the prettiest woman in the group, the attitude would always be, "Well, of course, anything would look fine on her. Of course, I couldn't wear anything like that." But if you picked the dowdiest woman in the group, then the attitude would be, "If a hat will do that for her, think of what it would do for me." So, that psychology worked very well. It became a very exciting thing to do, and by the time I felt that my period with that was over, which would be the middle sixties, we had worked our way up to sort of doing major clubs and major shows at far bigger theaters, like the Miramar Hotel [Santa Barbara] for example, for yearly conventions and stuff. We were involved with a great many other designers by this time; they were all doing it. But in 1954, as far as I know, we were the only ones that were doing it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At what point does the HUAC come along?

HARRY HAY: HUAC comes right-- 'Fifty-four, I mentioned, was when I began these hat shows. In '55 HUAC showed up. I might say that that was interesting: in the spring--let's see, when would that have been? That would have been April of 1955--I had a brilliant idea. One, Inc., was not doing very well at this moment: the social services were in the doldrums, and they were having to think about moving to larger headquarters anyway; the old building that they were in at 234 South Hill was probably-- It went through several periods, but it looked like it was in the process of being torn down. It was an old rat-warren building anyway. It was something like ten stories high, and by the time you got to the ninth floor, you had the feeling that it swayed a little. It was a very old building. I think it had been connected to the Mason Opera House in an earlier time, and the Mason Opera House was connected by some kind of curious little tunnels down on the first and second floors. The Mason Opera House had been--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Right by Angel's Flight, then?

HARRY HAY: Just in front of it, between Broadway and Hill. Angel's Flight was across the street, between Hill and up to the top of the hill, which would be Olive. I had suggested that we form what we might call the Friends of One, Inc., which could be a group of peple who would be interested in doing fund-raising for the magazine One and for the institute, which would be a series of, possibly, classes or occasionally a seminar that might be held (of an educational purpose, but for this they would need funds). It occurred to me that maybe it would be kind of fun to have a social group around One, because One represented what was left of the old Mattachine idea. The so-called Mattachine Review and the Mattachine Society in San Francisco was already a sort of a gentlemen's Friday Morning Club. (The Friday Morning Club was a cultural event, the social-cultural thing for the women, which had gone on here since the twenties, I guess.) As far as we could see, they were getting nowhere. They were being absolutely nonpolitical. They were being sort of middle-class respectable. Well, they were sort of a gay Lions Club. This was getting nowhere, and it was certainly not winning adherents particularly. You were losing them most of the time. The Mattachine Review came out, and it was all showing how we're exactly the same as everybody else; it was pretty dull. So that One represented what was left of the Mattachine dream, and it was also doing social service, which Mattachine, middle-class and respectable, true, they'd not be concerned with street people and riffraff of that sort; so One was the only thing that was being concerned about this. I might say that one of the points that I had raised in the fall of '52--that was while the old Mattachine was still going strong--was the point that I felt that we ourselves as a group--and this was the old Mattachine--which was one of the reasons why we split, was that we should consider-- I always used to say that we have to consider that we are our brothers' keepers and, therefore, that the street queens and these street people, the transvestites, who were beginning to show in some numbers by this time, that these were still brothers of ours and that we had to begin to understand the various ramifications of our movement, and begin to recognize that we're all the same people under the skin, and begin to be, not tolerant, but listen. Most of the middle-class, respectable ones would say, "Who me? Be involved with such people as that? Absolutely never." So, this already was sort of the beginning of the split: the middle-class respectables all stayed with the new Mattachine Society, and the One, Inc., people became concerned with the street people and with the transvestites and so on. So, One was actually carrying on, as I said, some of the ideas that we had had in the original Mattachine. I had felt that the Friends of One, then, could begin to be involved with some of those people and be involved with some of those things and move in a social way. It could actually become in a way the successor to the old, original Mattachine idea that we had, and it could have a number of activities, and it could involve itself with picnics and dances and all kinds of things. So, I went down to One to discuss this, and it was something that began to move in a variety of directions, and it began to catch fire. They called me for a second meeting right around the first of May of 1955. I had been notified that the meeting was going to be held, and just three days before the meeting was to be held (after work about five o'clock, for instance, in their offices), I had got my notification that I was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that to show hats?

HARRY HAY: [laughter] No. I had an idea that I was going to have to--that they were going to ask me to discuss my-- I didn't know what they really wanted to know, but I knew that they probably wanted to know about my Marxist teaching classes, and I was pretty sure that, differently from other people, I would probably be asked two sixty-four dollar questions and not one. I would not only be asked if I was now or ever had been a member of the Communist Party, but they would also want to know what I had to do with the formation of the Mattachine Society. And I had an idea that they certainly wanted to know about my membership mailing list.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you the first person to be called, at least as far as you knew, on a sexual basis?

HARRY HAY: Well, you see, the point is that I didn't know what I was called for. You don't ever know these things.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had anybody ever been called and questioned on that basis?

HARRY HAY: No, no.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Certainly no one from the Mattachine?

HARRY HAY: No one from the Mattachine had been called. Because of the fact that I had had the mailing list, and then because there were a great many people* [on my Mattachine mailing list who were high-ranking engineers and design specialists in aircraft and related industries, whose careers depended on their being able to obtain their security clearances]. I was very much afraid that they* [the FBI] wanted to break my anonymity, as it were, and break into my knowledge, which, of course, is what the Un-American Activities Committee always* [tried to do].

MITCH TUCHMAN: But they didn't do this, did they?

HARRY HAY: Well, they didn't, but I didn't know this, because, after all, they don't tell you in advance what they're going to ask you about. But I had to assume that this was something they* [thought I] knew because, after all, it was, let's say, five years after the event, and I was pretty sure that they would have had that kind of knowledge. We were always concerned about who would want to break into your own confidentiality. This was one of the things you had to be so concerned about because from this time, from '47 on to that moment in '55, we had watched the Un-American Activities Committee probe into the private consciences of all kinds of people, and we had -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. found that there were only one or two very restricted ways by which you could keep them out. You had to be very careful how you operated. If you ever waived your right of privacy in one small iota, you lost it completely, and then they would simply walk in and take all the information you had because you had no way of stopping it. This is what I had to be concerned with because there were too many people who were working for aircraft or who were engineers, who were scientists, and so on, who had been part of our original membership, and they had to be protected at all costs, which was one of the things we had to be concerned with right from the first. So, when I went down to that* [One, Inc.] meeting, I told them about having been called, and I was aware of the fact that a chill entered the air immediately. I might say that most of the people who were involved with One were themselves, let's say, a little bit to the right of center.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Right?

HARRY HAY: Right of center, yes. They were not the radicals. There was one member who was still a radical, but all the rest of them were not. I didn't know just how far to the right of center they were, but they were really-- They ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. were very polite, and they didn't say anything, but the temperature dropped markedly about thirty degrees.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It was better to avoid you than--

HARRY HAY: Well, it was obvious that they were going to feel exactly that: that they simply couldn't afford to allow their image to be tarnished with me being around because they didn't know how much notoriety I would get in the papers as a result of being called before the House. They knew also that I would be a hostile witness. So consequently, all of these things being involved, they were very much afraid that the Friends of One would not get exactly off the ground if I'm the organizer of the Friends of One and I'm also the--

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did you feel when you left that meeting?

HARRY HAY: Well, I felt cut off, but I also recognized that, in a way, it was just very unfortunate this was all going to happen. I was really very sad about the fact, but I also felt that the Friends of One was a good idea, and I hoped it would get going anyway, but I didn't have much hope for it because I didn't know anybody else, other than myself, who had the enthusiasm for getting a thing like this started. I had seen Friends of This and Friends of That and Friends of the Other Thing happen over and over again because that was a typical left--what we call mass-organizational pattern and ploy all during the thirties and forties. Well, for instance, the original ACLU was actually made up of lawyers and people who were actually concerned with the cases; the people who were a part of what would become the ACLU chapters later on were originally Friends of the ACLU, the [American] Civil Liberties Union. So, the friends of this and the friends of that was a very common practice of left-wing thrust organizations in former years, and I had felt that it could be beautifully used in more or less the same idea and the same way for One, Inc. I was kind of sorry that I had been curtailed of this activity because I felt that I myself could do a very good job there. So, as I said, I was sad, but--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was it clear from that meeting that you were not going to have that opportunity?

HARRY HAY: It was clear that I was not going to, yes. It became clear that they were really quite afraid of being painted with the red brush.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And did your contact with them continue but in a strained way?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, but it simply-- Let's say that it was cool.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But it wasn't cut off.

HARRY HAY: No, it wasn't cut off because there was a deep bond of affection with all of us. Dorr Legg, for example, had come to Mattachine Foundation meetings, and Dale, as I said, had been one of the original organizers of our original five that go back to November of 1950; so there were deep bonds that were involved here. I think we all liked each other very much; we just regretted that this had come up. This is how we looked at it. At certain levels there was a cutoff, but underneath, the bond was always there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How about your relationship with Jorn: what effect did that have? Or, what effect did the subpoena have on your relationship?

HARRY HAY: Well, at this moment what was good was, he was very supportive. He felt that this was sort of [like] being crucified, as it were, by the federal government. Here he made no bones about saying, "Well, in Denmark this would never happen to you. This kind of curtailment of liberties: this can't happen." Which was true. In Denmark there was a certain liberalism as far as political activity was concerned. It was never quite true here. Even in the forties and fifties, they were far more liberal there than we were here even then, beginning with their King Christian, who, as you know, wore the yellow triangle on his sleeve the moment that the Jews were proscribed in Germany and who rode through the streets all during the Nazi occupation, rode his horse through the streets every morning, as he always had, to assure his people he was still there, although he had been forbidden to by the Nazi government. So, I mean this type of open resistance to oppression was a tradition in Denmark; so that my taking the stand as I did would be part of that same thinking in his terms; so I had no problems there. What I was concerned about was what it would do to our business because I had an idea that--as I said, most of Jorn's customers were a little bit to the right of Hitler; wealthy women nearly always are--that it might actually shrivel up our business completely.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How about your job?

HARRY HAY: I was very much concerned about that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were there any repercussions there?

HARRY HAY: My picture appeared in the-- Out of the fifty people or sixty people that were called, my picture appeared prominently in the Herald Examiner and in the Daily News--oh, that was the other paper I was trying to think of back in the fifties--as well as in the Times, and there was a long story on my examination. Nobody from my job apparently read the papers that weekend. They never saw it, and I never heard a word.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Didn't you have to go to Washington?

HARRY HAY: No, no, the hearings were here. The hearings were here. It was all in the local papers.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I thought you would have been able to show Mamie [Eisenhower] the hats.

HARRY HAY: I wish I were. If only that could have happened. No, dear, that didn't. It was all done right here.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I mean, Doud was her maiden name.

HARRY HAY: Mamie Doud. And her hats were terrible, I might say, just dreadful. So was her hairdo. But that's neither here nor there.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How quickly did things transpire? You got the subpoena, and were you down there the next week, or was it months and months later?

HARRY HAY: No, no. No, you had to-- That story is also told in Katz, and I don't want to go into that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why don't you deal with it in whatever way you wish?

HARRY HAY: OK. I had six weeks to prepare. I went to my--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Katz has quite a bit on this.

HARRY HAY: Quite a bit on that particular thing. It's just that to me that was one of the great painful experiences too because, again, I had been dealing with lots of heteros during* [my long, seventeen-year relationship with the hetero underground, left-wing movement], and there were people I was very fond of. This was when I found out in a -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. way, you might say, who my friends really were and who they weren't. When it came to the gay thing, they were not my friends at all; so they cut me out entirely. That was very painful and very difficult.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How long did the chill last?

HARRY HAY: The chill with those people? Some of it is only now being lifted, and that's thirty years later; that's quite a long time. No, this is-- I went through the experience simply because of the fact that they-- Well, for instance, for one thing, it wasn't known--although it should have been known by this time--it wasn't known that I had been dropped from the party as a basic security risk. There were still a lot of people who were caught under the picture that I had been kicked out as a queer* [for having been nabbed in flagrante delicto].

MITCH TUCHMAN: I'm unfamiliar with that. You were kicked out of the party at what point?

HARRY HAY: No, no, no. You see, the thing was that when-- Let's see, this would be the fall of '51. The party itself decided to go underground, based upon the whole HUAC thing and the McCarthy period. They felt they really had to go back underground where they had been, for instance, in the early thirties* [until the start of World War II]. -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And they weren't going to take you with them?

HARRY HAY: Well, what they did was, everybody went into a sort of a reaffirmation. What would you call it? Well, people renewed their membership in the party, as it were. You went through sort of an examination at this point. Those who were basic security risks were being dropped. At this moment I felt that I owed a great deal to-- Because, after all, I've always felt that I owed a great deal to the party: I learned a great deal from them. I learned a great deal from the people. I have no regrets about having gone through that period at all. I felt it was a great period, even in my own time. My feeling was that, then, the people inherent in Southern California whom I knew, with whom I'd taught, with whom I'd worked, after all, had respect for my contribution. I was being told by many of them that I shouldn't consider dropping out simply because I had started the gay movement, and that this was something that they and I could take in my stride. But I said, "Yes, but the problem really is the people in Ohio or the people in Pennsylvania who don't know me and have never had any relationship with me. If it ever comes up, if it's ever brought out in the paper that I'm also involved with the gay movement, they're going to feel betrayed because they're not going to understand." So I said, "I move for my own expulsion as a homosexual."

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, are you--

HARRY HAY: I'm talking about my relationship with the party.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I realize that. But I was going to ask a moment ago--I'll still ask it--are you saying that the Communist Party had the same attitude toward homosexuals that the State Department had?

HARRY HAY: Yes. I am saying exactly that. They did. My feeling was, this was something that they would have about a group, but individuals whom they knew they would feel differently about. This was where I was concerned.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And what proportion of the Communist Party, or of American radicals generally, were gay at that time, closet or open?

HARRY HAY: That's hard to say. If they would have been, they would probably have been sort of clandestine, or closet.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Or shall I put it this way: What does American radical politics owe to its gay--

HARRY HAY: I think it owes quite a lot to a lot of people who were involved. But just how many: I don't know if that's known even now. But I would think that there were chances that between the gay men and lesbians there could have been a good 10 percent; well, the same percentage that you have in the rest of the population, or as we recognized it then.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And they were not more willing to--

HARRY HAY: They weren't willing-- You sort of kept it all down because there was no discussion of it whatsoever. In the old party there still isn't. In the new left there is a lot of consideration but in the old left none.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, you were expelled at that point?

HARRY HAY: No, no. I wasn't. I wasn't. I gave them a full story on who I was and what I was involved with and what I had done and recommended my own expulsion. This went from the city to the state commission to the national commission, and it was being decided for about a year and a half. When it eventually came back down from New York, they had said, "No, we do not expel. We recognize many, many years of beautiful, wonderful, inventive, creative service, and he has to be dropped as a security risk but as a lifelong friend of the people." This was what I was finally dropped as. It was a very nice thing. But in the meantime, scuttlebutt had taken place here, and the scuttlebutt was that I had been kicked out for being a queer.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But what was the nature of the security risk?

HARRY HAY: Well, the nature of the security risk was, for one thing, I had not been-- The mere fact that I had openly started the gay movement would mean, among other things, that I was not material that should be in the party because it was in their constitution that gay people were basically --were being called security--State Department risks. We were basic security risks. We were open to blackmail were our private lives, our secret lives, to be known to the public. The fact that I was an open gay person was something they couldn't handle; they didn't understand that. So, this was the way it was put.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Let me return you then to the HUAC subpoena. Well, you recall what you've said.

HARRY HAY: Well, I just simply said, among other things, that the HUAC subpoena began-- This is '55, you see. By this time, the story of my being expelled has gone all through the whole movement, the people whom I have known very well here; so I'm still being cut on the street by people who would see me coming and cross to the other side of the street so that we-wouldn't-have-to-speak-as-we-pass-by kind of thing, which becomes pretty obvious. But I went to see my former friends who were the lawyers who would be handling this, because, after all, there were fifty people called at that time and the other forty-nine are already beginning to form their own sort of supportive groups: they're going to be having parties, raising funds for each other's court costs, and so on. I go to join that group, and I'm told that I can't because, after all, as they pointed out, the progressive movement is not going to con- done queers; so therefore I would have to go find my own attorney and pay my own court costs.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you think some of those forty-nine were gay?

HARRY HAY: A couple of them were, yes. A couple of them were closet cases. They were not open; they were closet. However, they were never given an opportunity to say; the lawyers told me.* [The gay issue never would have been raised with them since no one outside their own tight, little clique would ever have known they were gay, and they had not in any way related to Mattachine.] The lawyer John McTernan, who was probably the head counsel at that time, had been in classes of mine. We had been very personally close friends for ten years: his kids and my kids had all known each other, I had known him back in the days when I was married, and we'd see each other two or three times a week for years. So, to be told by this man that the party doesn't condone queers and that I had to go find another lawyer was a major blow. That I didn't expect.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that conveyed with sympathy?

HARRY HAY: No, with coldness. Coldness and a certain contempt.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And was queer the word--

HARRY HAY: Yes. -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: --that people used in that day?

HARRY HAY: Yes. That was the word that was used, and it was done with a certain coldness and a certain contempt, and it just cut me up because I wasn't prepared for that. I really wasn't. So, I remember simply saying, "Well, John, what do I do?" He said, "Well, I guess you'll have to find another lawyer," and I don't think he gave a damn whether I found a lawyer or I didn't. I assume he thought it was nothing he was concerned with. So, he gave me the names of a couple of people to go and see, and that was-- I had five and a half weeks at this point to prepare. You were always given six weeks to begin this. Three days before I was-- I was supposed to come to court on a Monday. Actually I would not be called before Friday, but I didn't know that then. The week of the hearing is three and a half days away, and I still haven't found a lawyer five weeks later. So, anyway, that was a bad time, but that story is all well told.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It's also in D'Emilio.

HARRY HAY: Is it?

MITCH TUCHMAN: I think so because I'm familiar with these outlines.

HARRY HAY: OK. Anyway, the point is it's well covered, and I don't have to go into that again.

MITCH TUCHMAN: For your life and for your political and other activities generally, what is the upshot of this experience?

HARRY HAY: Of the HUAC thing?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah. Is it major, or are there other things more important at the time?

HARRY HAY: I thought this was a major blow. It turned out not to be. It turned out that it-- Well, of course, it is. In one way it's terribly important because I was never able to get a decent job [in the systems engineering field, in which I had expertise and skills, because I would never be able to get the security clearances I would need]. That I never was able to do. The kind of work that I had done, for instance, during the war, the companies that I had worked for, I had very quickly, for some reason or other--because, I guess, I have a good photographic memory and I have a fairly good analytical mind--I very quickly found myself being involved with what was later going to be known as systems engineering, which is just beginning at this time; the whole business of the development of classifications and so on. I had worked out a way of setting up a Cardex system for control of materials.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, you explained that when we talked about Leahy.

HARRY HAY: I had developed this earlier with a company called Avion, which was the first company I worked for, and then, later on, the Gaffers and Sattler group (I've forgotten their name now, but they were something during the war; they were involved with P-38s and B-52s, assemblies and so on.) This whole idea of controlling materials by assemblies and subassemblies worked out so well that at one point we were told that we had--at one point, just one point alone--at the Gaffers and Sattler Company that we had saved something like three million dollars in materials, which is considerable. I could have gone on and explored this further in the whole idea of systems with some of the engineers with whom I had worked except that I couldn't get a security clearance. And I couldn't get a security clearance because of, first of all, the experience that I'd had with the party in '52, '53, which somehow or other had gotten into somebody's information, but I don't know what, and then the HUAC experience in early '55; that killed it but good. The FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] would call me every six months, and they've been doing that until very recently to let me know that any time I wanted to come down to their office and sort of change my mind and talk that I would be welcome to do so. In the early days they made it clear that I would not be able to get any kind of a security clearance for any kind of a job, for insurance, or for anything else until I did talk. So, that's part of the pressure that they use. They don't say this specifically, but the implication is there, such as "Well, you know, if you ever fill out any sort of an employer application which is sent to the FBI for screening, we probably are not going to be friendly to that application," is the way they would put it. It's never anything specific. It's always sort of a threat out there. But I do know that I did apply to work as a systems engineer at a number of different companies in '54, '55, and '56, and they always said, "Well, I'm awfully sorry, but you don't clear through the FBI." So, I just knew that I was caught in what amounted to a basic wage scale, and there I stayed for sixteen years; so that at this point now I get very little in the way of Social Security, and it's because in that period I was not able "to better my position," as the saying goes. So, yes, it had a major chilling effect on my life and in my life now.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You described--when we made a basic outline--you described this period as lasting through '57? What occurs in '57 that changed things?

HARRY HAY: Well, it changes the face not only of the gay movement but of cultural life in the United States; it's a very far-reaching thing. One, Inc., in 1955--I'm not quite sure how this operated, but it happened in the United States and it happened in Canada--the post office refused to disseminate the magazine because they said that the material involved in it was prurient. So, One decided that this could very well-- By this time we had the Supreme Court decision about the fact that materials which contained educative material could not necessarily be discovered as prurient. So, on that particular, rather vague pronouncement that had come out from the Supreme Court, One decided to sue the United States Post Office Department on the basis of having wrongfully refused to disseminate [the magazine] through the mails. This was in '55. It takes a long time to get-- You have to go through various courts, and finally you get to the Supreme Court. But they finally became a case that would be handled by the Supreme Court in, I think, early 1957; they knew that this decision would come. I think it was in June or July of 1957 the case was heard, and the Supreme Court decided, among other things, that this material was not essentially prurient because it was educative, and it was not attempting to-- Let's say, we were not recruiting, as it were. So, that the whole particular ruling was considerably ventilated. I might say, as a result of our case, Lady Chatterley's Lover is allowed in this country for the first time, and it can be sold, and it can be sent by mail from one place to another, because up until that time even hetero material of this nature couldn't be handled. All of a sudden, D. H. Lawrence becomes something that can be spread all through the country as a result of the trial of One, Inc.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who wrote the decision in your favor? Do you know which justice wrote the decision in your favor?

HARRY HAY: I don't know this. I imagine Dorr Legg at One, Inc., would know that, but I don't know.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you active in One, Inc., at the time of the case?

HARRY HAY: No, at this point I myself am not personally active in One, but, you know, whenever they have fund raisers I sent money to them. They would have their get-togethers, sort of their educational meetings, once a month on Sunday afternoons, and occasionally Jorn and I go. I'm in close correspondence with Dorr Legg by telephone at least once a week. I can find out all of what's going on in the whole gay movement from him because we used to talk frequently. And if I didn't talk to him, I'd talk to Jim Kepner, who is beginning to be interested under the name of-- He's writing for One magazine; he writes under the name of Dal McIntire. He has his column, which is sort of a column cover- ing what's going on in the gay movement across the world, "Tangents." (Eventually, when Don Slater pulls away from One, Inc., in the spring of 1965, he's going to refer to the whole magazine as "the 'Tangents' group." Jim Kepner never forgave him for that because this was something that Jim considered his personal property.) So, anyway, I talk frequently to Chuck Rowland at social services, I talk to Dorr Legg, and I talk to Jim Kepner. I might say in relationship to the HUAC thing--and I'm not sure this has been covered by either Jonathan Katz or D'Emilio--and that was that Chuck Rowland, who also had been very closely connected with what we would call the progressive movement--the progressive movement were the people in the left who were around the party but not necessarily in it themselves--he had said-- When I was talking to Chuck and telling him my problems with HUAC and the fact that I was going to be appearing before them, Chuck said to me, "Well, you know, you don't owe them anything anymore. Why are you concerned with them? Why don't you just decide to talk? What's all this business about holding back? What do you owe them?" Them meaning "the progressive movement". And I said, "Chuck, I guess you don't quite understand how I feel about all this. It isn't a question of what I owe them or what they owe me or how they mistreated me"-- and I would say they had mistreated me pretty badly. "But there was a kid who was very much caught up in that dream, that dream of resisting oppression, way back as early as 1933. I owe him a great debt, and it's to him I'm being faithful. He wouldn't have wanted me to talk; and so, because of that, I won't talk." "I owe this to me," I said. "I don't owe it to anybody else but that, and I want you to understand this. This is why I'm going through all this." I said, "But, you know. Chuck, I'd like to come and talk. I need help. I need friends. I need some kind of support. So, could I come down? Could we just hold hands, just talk a little bit the night before I have to begin appearing?" He said, "Oh, sure. By all means, come down." I went down, and he at that moment was being terribly busy and terribly important as the head of the social services division with people who were coming from Texas and coming from West Virginia; he was just all of a sudden very important. And I sat in his apartment that night for four hours waiting for him to get off [the telephone with] these important people so I could just get a little help. And I never got anything. And I went home at one o'clock in the morning having talked to no one and went to make my appear- ance the next morning. (I would have to get up at four o'clock in the morning to go rehearse in my lawyer's office for a few hours before I went* [to the federal building to report for my hearing].) And that was something I didn't recover from for a long time. That was the time I really got stabbed in the back by my own people. I've never forgotten that and, I think, probably never have forgiven him either. Could I hold that [tape] now? [tape recorder turned off] I might say, in this period between '54 and--the Jorn period: I'd say '54 to about 1960--that although I wrote a lot of letters to One, Inc., very few of them were ever published. I wrote one or two articles. Very few of them were ever published. I suppose you might say that I'm beginning to, as a result of my reading, as a result of my-- I spent a great deal of time alone at this point. I can't talk to Jorn because he really doesn't understand what I'm talking about. So, I have daydreams. I talk to myself a lot. I'm beginning to develop the ideas that, much, much later, late in the seventies, as a matter of fact, are going to come up, first, as "the gay window," "gay consciousness," and eventually "subject-subject consciousness." ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. This is all beginning to generate in this period. And it's because I'm going through this extraordinary living pattern --if you realize I'm living with somebody--what amounts to a Renaissance man. It's what's left of Renaissance culture, screened through a little gay man of the petit bourgeoisie of the twentieth century, but I'm getting a whole flock of this material, and I'm beginning to all of a sudden appreciate just what historical materialism in Marx is all about, and it's very formative in my thinking in the later period. But that's something I wanted to get in, because it wasn't lost, but it was something that-- It was kind of what happens when you become a hermit and you go live on a mountain in Tibet for a while. Well, I went through exactly the same thing only I did it right here.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In Westwood.

HARRY HAY: In Westwood, yes, of all places. But nevertheless I went through this period, and it was quite remarkable because it's going to result in an enormous, almost feverish activity in the sixties. It's those sixties activities I want to talk about because this has never been covered by anybody, and it's part of the reason why, when Stonewall breaks out in 1969, it just ripples across the country. Well, it ripples because, after all, we have been laying what I call a powder train throughout the sixties, and I think this has to be talked about. I mean, there were parades, there were people appearing on the air; John and I, for instance, appeared on the Joe Pine show, where we were so successful the guy asked us to do it a second time, which was not something that you think about happening in the sixties. We had open discussions on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley during the late sixties on the positive aspects of the gay life-style, and these were things that young straight people are going to say they've never heard of before. This is happening in '65 and '66, long before Stonewall. These are the things we have to be talking about, and this is never mentioned in any of the--

1.19. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE [VIDEO SESSION] JANUARY 22, 1982

MITCH TUCHMAN: Harry, we've discussed to this point what your activities, I don't know if it's fair to say almost curtailed activities, were in the period of the sixties, and we were going to begin today's session by discussing what you referred to several times as a powder trail laid throughout the sixties, or from '63 to '69, waiting for or leading up to Stonewall.

HARRY HAY: To Stonewall, right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I think that basically what we ought to do is exactly that: have you pick that subject up.

HARRY HAY: Actually, the story for this begins in San Francisco, and I'll just refer to San Francisco very briefly because we then had an edge onto the same thing that began to happen down here. In San Francisco--I think it would have been New Year's Eve 1964--a ball was given, and a number of ministers who had been working with gay people, particularly in what is known as San Francisco's Tenderloin, came to this ball. And the police who decided in San Francisco, as they do also in Los Angeles, to become the moral crusaders of the area, raided this ball, and they took everybody in. Of course, this particular night, they took in the minister of Glide Memorial Foundation; they took in the dean of Grace Cathedral and a number of people. These were all with the gay people who were at this masquerade ball on New Year's Eve. The bounce back from that was so enormous in the city that all of a sudden it was the beginning of what was going to be known as the police liaison with the gay community. But more importantly the ministers and the gay people got together, and they decided that they would set up a Council on Religion and the Homophiles, it was called, CRH, in San Francisco. I mention all of this because three or four months later Los Angeles decided to do exactly the same thing, and we set up the Southern California Council on Religion and the Homophile (SCCRH).

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were you involved in that council?

HARRY HAY: Yes. Yes. At that moment John and I and several other people are involved in it as the Circle of Loving Companions. The Circle of Loving Companions is the name that I had thought possible at the time of the Mattachine split, back in 1953, when they were trying to decide did they want to keep the name Mattachine or did they want to go to something else, and I had thought Circle of Loving Companions might be a possibility. The old group rejected it and kept the name Mattachine; so Circle of Loving Companions was lying around. When John and I came together, I and a number of dykes who we knew from One and other people set ourselves up as sort of a loose discussion group, and often we referred to ourselves as the Circle of Loving Companions. I mention that because the Circle of Loving Companions, for instance, in the seventies was the only open address, gay address, in all of New Mexico for five years. And the Circle of Loving Companions has been known through the sixties and the seventies and up until the present time, has been John and me and a number of other people who wish to be concerned with it. So all right, the Circle of Loving Companions begins to operate in the beginning of 1965. The people who are interested in coming together with us are young campus ministers, for example. There was somebody from UCLA, but I've forgotten now who he was. In the main we had Cal[ifornia] State [University] Los Angeles, we had USC [University of Southern California], here we were dealing with United Church of Christ, Methodist Church, Presbyterian,* [Lutheran. There were a couple of Catholic nuns who came to our meetings occasionally. But they made a point of never committing the church to anything. There was a Salvation Army street preacher who came, but I think he was coming as an interested person rather than as someone from the Army. Then there was a man who insisted he was sent as ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. an observer from Saint Paul's, the Episcopal cathedral which stood for years downtown on Figueroa between Sixth and Wilshire. There was a Unitarian campus minister from UCLA and someone from the American Friends Service Committee. There is a lot of social experimentation and community outreach going on amongst the Protestant denominations from the middle fifties through the sixties. There are by 1960 a half dozen best-seller books out on varying interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Nae Hamadi Library has been discovered in Egypt in 1947, and now translations of the apostles Philip and Thomas are expected at any moment. Episcopal Bishop James Pike had already christened himself as a vigorous critic of McCarthyism, not only in government but in civil life, and was emerging, along with Eugene Carson Blake of the Presbyterian Church, as a vigorous champion of civil rights, raising not only his voice but actions to meet Martin Luther King emerging out of the black community. So these ministers the SCCRH are working with are all part of that picture.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: These would have been ministers in those churches?

HARRY HAY: * [Most of the Protestant churches by the 1960s have staffs of maybe one head minister who is like the head administrator and, maybe, chief speaker. Working with him are younger ministers who have specific responsibilities, like a number two minister who might be responsible for all the Sunday school programs. Such a one was Ken Wahrenbrook, who was number two minister for education at Glendale Methodist. Or you had minister number three who was responsible for educational outreach to smaller congregations in rural areas and small towns, like Harggye Luykens, a dynamite young minister of the United Church of Christ, who was responsible for educational missions for Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico. Or you'd have say a minister number four who might be responsible for social services in specific areas, like Alex Smith who worked with problems around skid row and the jails in downtown L.A., and occasionally preached at the Methodist church in downtown L.A. at Eighth and Hope. In addition, the Quakers and the Unitarians and the United Church of Christ had campus chaplains like young Reverend [Lynn] Johndahl who served as social service counselors in the several college campuses around. Most of these young -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. ministers also doubled on campus as draft counselors and as conscientious objector counselors since most of them were passionately antiwar.] Apparently ministries have young people on campus acting as chaplains or as consultants or, I don't know, as points of reference. I think you have several here on the UCLA campus.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were these various chaplains specifically ministering to the gay community?

HARRY HAY: No. No, they were ministering to young people among whom were many with gay concerns. I would say, almost to a person--I said that nicely, didn't I?--"almost to a person," not a man, "person"--almost to a person, they were antiwar. Nineteen sixty-five is the beginning of the anti-Vietnam War pushes on campuses, if you remember. By this time, you have the Vietnam Day Committee on the Berkeley campus, and you've got the Free Speech Movement going on the Berkeley campus. In the spring of that year, John and I went up to visit my oldest daughter, who was living with her husband at that time on the Berkeley campus. She had been involved in one of the great raids on Sproul Hall, when they dragged young men and young women out by the hair of their heads and put them in paddy wagons, and so on, because of the fact that they were involved in antiwar activities at that time.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was she a student there at that time?

HARRY HAY: No. He was a student, but she wasn't. She was taking courses here and there, but she wasn't a student per se. We went up and participated in some picket lines and stuff with them on campus and had discussions. For instance, we found ourselves having open discussions on Telegraph Avenue about the positive values of gay lifestyles. I remember we were talking to maybe five or six kids in one of those open-air cafes and suddenly discovered that there were fifty to sixty-five people standing around. I'm apologizing for taking up everybody's time and they're saying, "Hey, no. No one's ever talked about the positive values of being gay before, the joys of being gay"; "We've never heard this"; "We have some friends who are gay, and we only wish they were here." So that, again, is the kind of thing that men of my age and men of John's age can do, and we were doing it in '65. This was four years before Stonewall.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Here in Los Angeles, the organization that you formed with the various ministers, was that specifically a discussion group about gay issues, or did that include the war and things like that too?

HARRY HAY: At that moment, it included primarily gay issues. They were concerned with young people coming out, young people beginning to discover their sexual identities on campus and feeling very much--not knowing how to handle it and how to move in that direction. And there we are working with ministers, beginning to give them some sense of how you would deal with gay people and how their feelings would be. They're beginning to discover already that they don't handle their young gay ministrants in the same way that they handle their hetero ministrants, and they're not quite sure why they don't. We're not quite sure why not either because, after all, this is not a time when this knowledge is in yet. So, we're all exploring these things together and exploring feelings together, and seeing how we move and seeing whether or not we can even find points of agreement with one another.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Where were you meeting?

HARRY HAY: Well, we met in a variety of places. We met in the Glendale Methodist Church, for instance, in the salon-- Not the salon: I guess it's the living room or whatever they had there. They would have various parlors where various groups met, and we would meet there. We used to meet downtown at the First Methodist Church at Eighth and Hope. Let's see.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did the police participate in this also or anyone from the city?

HARRY HAY: No, no. That was the San Francisco group; they had a fairly good liaison and rapport with the police department. Down here we didn't have.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you attempt to have one, and it was refused? Or it wasn't attempted?

HARRY HAY: * [No, we didn't attempt any approach to police liaison down here because the climate is very different from what San Francisco had--in this time. Sam [Samuel] Yorty, who had been a state legislator and head of the state's witch hunting "Little Dies" Committee, is mayor, and Ed Davis, the creep who is now the Republican senator playing up to his upwardly mobile Republican gays in the West San Fernando Valley, is the rabid, foul-mouthed, queer-hating police chief. You see in San Francisco as a result of the police raid on the New Year's Eve Drag Ball that netted all the big Protestant ministers in town and their wives, you had a mayor and a board of police commissioners who were embarrassed enough to listen. Nobody in city administration in Los Angeles was ready yet for anything like that. Over the New Year's Eve 1966-67, there were a vicious pair of police raids on two bars in the now Sunset Junction ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. area of Silver Lake, the Black Cat and New Faces; the two bars were almost side by side. The cops came in and deliberately and calculatedly provoked terror: out of the subsequent hubbub, they created a miniriot. They invaded and raided both bars, damaging a number of people, raiding and driving people into a bitterly cold night, making them lie face down on the ice-cold pavement while they beat and manacled their prisoners. SCCRH marshalled their group memberships to attend the arraignments, and organized events to help the legal expenses of those who would fight the case. In June of 1968, John and I, in the name of a counterculture ad hoc coalition of gays, blacks, Chicanos, women's liberation, and the newly emerging Peace and Freedom Party, will attempt to elect Mike Hannon on a general liberation-leaning platform for district attorney. We don't succeed, but we are invited to dialogue with elements of the city police administration. In particular with one police commissioner, from Century City, who was being recommended as understanding of the flower children kids who were in open revolt in various parts of the city. In our dealings we wanted to protest raids on bars like Black Cat and New Faces and we wanted to protest the entrapments that took place nightly on Sunset between La Brea and Crescent Heights and on Selma between Cahuenga and Highland. The dialogues, presided over by Chet Samson of One, Inc., were apologistic farces, of course. We simply got told what the cops would and would not hear.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who was involved from the gay community in this?

HARRY HAY: We had at that time, let's see, One, Inc.; Dorr Legg was involved. We had a group that was moving.* [That is to say, in addition to being a group who put on dances once a month at Carolina Pines on Melrose, they had bimonthly political meetings as well. The basic organizers were Steve Ginsberg, Mike Kinghorn, and Jim [James] Kepner. Thomas Hunter Russell, who was a law student at the time, was an active P.R.I.D.E. member, but I don't remember his ever coming to an SCCRH meeting.] They called themselves P.R.I.D.E. (Now, I've forgotten what the hell P.R.I.D.E. meant.) In the spring of 1965, One, Inc., split into One, Inc., and the Tangents group.* [One, Inc., went on being Dorr Legg and, every other year when they'd get a little money to pay people with, Jimmy Kepner. Tangents consisted of Don Slater, his longtime lover Tony Reyes, Billy Glover, and Billy's lover Melvin Caine, and various ex-One cronies who supported Don's split off from One. The split, you know, was quite a thing. Over a weekend, Don Slater absconded with One's -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. library, and most of its collected papers and files. In the ensuing court case, One got about one-half of the collection back.] So that we had the Tangents group involved also. We had the League for Social Understanding with Jerome Stevens. We had the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Los Angeles chapter, which included Sten Russell and her lover, Helen Sanders, and a number of women who were involved with that. DOB, like the Circle of Loving Companions: one moment it would be large and the next moment it would be small. Let's see. The Circle and who else?* [There would be Melvin Caine, who while a member of One, Inc., had gotten interested in the Monastery of Saint George at Las Vegas. Somewhere, in the late fifties, 1956 or 1957, a Father Bernard showed up, who purported to be of the Order of Saint Thomas. The Order of Saint Thomas had been established in Madras by Saint Thomas himself and the order ostensibly had been missionizing ever since. In recent centuries the Roman Church didn't recognize their legitimacy, and Constantinople did. Father Bernard was quite an interesting man. He had been educated in Rome; he had been assigned for some years to the Vatican Library. ------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. He said, when he first surfaced at One, Inc., I think the spring of 1957, he had lived for many years in the Madras district of southern India where he had labored and studied in the Malabar rite, as the Saint Thomasite church of southern India seemed to be called. Later on, in the sixties, Father Bernard will deny that he labored in the church missions of southern India, and he will wave at us, though never allow us to make close scrutiny, a faded copy of an ancient Uigur manuscript, describing how Saint Thomas himself established the Malabar rite, how from 400 A.D. to 1500 A.D., the Roman Empire divided into the Roman Church and the Eastern Church gradually developed the Syro-Chaldean rite. In 1545 the Roman Church, under the Jesuits, returned to the Malabar Coast, yet even today in southwest India the two rites exist side by side. Be all this as it may, when we, at One, Inc., begin to know Father Bernard, and his companion, Father Tom, a gorgeous gentle giant of about twenty-six, whom he had found when he was three or four and raised and educated him, they lived in a trailer on a few acres of desolate sand and brush on the northeastern outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada. They had attempted without success to establish a colony and mission, and now they were proposing to build a monastery of Saint George at Las Vegas. Father Thomas had developed quite a fine talent for wedding photography, and already he had the makings of a good business. Friends had already helped him achieve tax-exempt status; through whose good offices donations to One, Inc., and later to CRH, would be laundered. Father Bernard gave many talks at One's monthly Sunday afternoon sessions on the homosexually implicit aspects of the Thomas tradition and related topics. People from One started going to Las Vegas for weekends and helping with building the monastery and its two chapels and embroidering vestments. Several of One's members eventually were converts to the Syro-Chaldean rite and went on to be ordained through the quite explicitly homosexually ecstatic ordination tradition into the membership body of the monastery. By 1961 they had converted about fifteen to twenty people, had ordained four or five new priests, and Father Bernard had consecrated his young lover Thomas as archimandrate, which in Western terminology translates as archbishop, I think. Back in 1956-57, I think, Father Bernard's monastery of Saint George had managed to become a tax-exempt corporation and, in the late fifties, early sixties, before One, Inc., had managed to get their tax exemption, Saint George Monastery would receive donations for One, Inc., and "launder" them and then send them on to One, Inc. Father Bernard was always making new translations of the Gospel of Saint Thomas, who, as you know, was friendly to affectionate couplings between men, to One's monthly meetings. There was much coming and going between Saint George and One. And somewhere around late 1963 or early 1964, Melvin Caine, then still part of One's entourage, started being interested in being converted to the Order of Saint Thomas. By 1966, he was an ordained priest in the Order of Saint Thomas, and was assigned by the monastery to establish a mission here in Los Angeles. There were negotiations between him and the Eastern Orthodox Diocese about his taking over the defunct parish of Saint Herman's in El Monte. Another Angeleno, Jerry Joachim, who brightly tried to revive LAMS (Los Angeles Mattachine Society), the joyless second society operated from 1954-56 by Ken Barris which died of disinterest in 1963, converted also to Saint George in about 1965. Anyway, Melvin Caine and ostensibly Jerry Joachim started our CHR.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the upshot of this group?

HARRY HAY: We involved ourselves with quite a number of things. The dialogue that went on between ourselves and the ministry was considerable. Occasionally, issues that had to do with philosophical points were brought up in the congregations. For example, in the United Church of Christ in Manhattan Beach, at one time there was a need to try and find parents who might be interested in coming together to discuss the problems of their children. It went nowhere, but at least it was tried, and the minister himself spoke on it several times since '65, and again he did it in the spring of '66 that I can remember.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did any incidents occur here similar to the incident in San Francisco that would have called for any other kind of action or organizing?

HARRY HAY: * [Yes, there was such an organizing instance, but it happens further on in our story, in February of 1967. In this period we did a number of retreats.] For instance, what would happen: I remember at one time we had sort of a retreat down in Chautauqua Canyon, down in Santa Monica, and at this point we invited somewhere around fifty or sixty ministers from Southern California. The ministers themselves didn't come, but their social workers came, and the teachers who were Sunday school teachers, for example, or people who were involved with young people's groups who went into the mountains or went to the beach or went for weekends and so on would come. We would discuss what it is like to be growing up gay, what are the problems: how we see ourselves when we're fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen; how we think; what we want to do; because they were beginning to realize that they were running into these ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. kids, running into these kinds of situations at camps, for example, and what did they do, how do they handle it? Did they segregate or what? How did they handle it? We were delighted this was coming up because it gave us an opportunity, for example, in several of the religious schools, in several of the Sunday schools, to be able to send some of our speakers in to speak.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And were you among those speakers?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I was among those.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And would you go alone, or would you go with John?

HARRY HAY: Several times I went alone. A number of times John and I went together and acted as a couple.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And did John do speaking engagements of this sort too?

HARRY HAY: Separate engagements, no. Either he and I went together, or I went alone.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I was going to ask you basically what role you played in committee meetings and also what role he played, because this is sort of his first appearance in the tapes and so I don't really know.

HARRY HAY: Well, actually, I'm the one with the diarrhea of the upper and lower lip. John more or less stays silent. He doesn't talk a great deal. When he does talk, he will speak specifically out of his own experience, but he hadn't got a good deal of organizational experience by this point. I'd had a lot; so consequently I was always involved in one thing or another. The whole idea of the outreach to the community was beginning to be important here, and we began to see that we had a way of doing it that would keep us within the law as it were; so that the church is acting as an umbrella, and under that umbrella we're able to make a variety of contacts that we couldn't make before.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At the same time that this sounds rather positive, were you having any difficulties or frustrations with anyone trying to stop this or giving you any problem?

HARRY HAY: Well, the people who had been giving us the problems--I'll have to admit there was a lot of struggle, there was a lot of struggle going on within these different meetings because the social workers and the young ministers, the assistant ministers, the assistant chaplains, and so on, are running into frustrations all the time and not knowing how to handle them and coming back to us with their frustrations and their problems as to what to say here, what not to say here, how to do this, and how not to do this. At one point John and I came up with an idea of how to keep-- In the whole business of the antiwar movement, we thought of a wonderful way to bring the draft to a grinding halt; and so we went to a number of campus ministries and explained this, and they said, "Well, if you could only get some lawyers to look at this so that we can see what the legal situation is here, maybe this is something we can do." What had occurred to us was this--as a matter of fact, this is still an issue--it should be seen as one of the rights, as far as the Bill of Rights is concerned, that Congress or the government has no right to invade private conscience. In this regard, the questions that they would have-- For instance, I don't know if you know this or not, but on the draft forms that you made out during the war when you were being conscripted into the army, it was very shortly determined that-- Well, first of all, let's see, it must have been about 1942 that they finally cut out the fact that you marked a box that said whether you were white--whether you were Caucasian or whether you were black or whether you were something else. That was simply left out. But in the thirties and up until about 1942, you had to say what race you belonged to on the form that you filled out. Well, that was one of the early things that was cut out by the Roosevelt administration. Then about '44, you no longer had to put whether you were Christian or Jew, because in those years you also had to do that. So, when it was all of a sudden determined that the administration or the Congress had no right to either invade the question of race or the question of religion, well, then the next thing would be private conscience in itself. Now, that step was never taken. And that was the thing that we were trying to get people to understand: that that step also had to be taken. So that actually what we should do on the draft forms--everybody should do that; not just us but everybody--when it came to the thing: "Have you ever had any homosexual tendencies?" you should simply write across the thing, "None of your damn business." Now, had they done that, and had everybody done that, the draft boards, the homophobes that they are, the whole thing would have come to a grinding halt because how do they know what they were getting. But the point is that everybody had to take that stand. Well, campus ministers, young campus ministers who were all by this time violent antiwar people—they were keyed up on it—thought that that was a wonderful idea. They said, "You've got to go to National Lawyers Guild and get them to give us a legal ruling on this as to how we do this so the kids don't put themselves into jeopardy while they're doing it." So, I went to the National Lawyers Guild, and do you think I could sell them on this? Ha! The honchos wouldn't be caught* [dead doing such a thing. Scream, holler, yell, "Why they (the Congress, the government, the administration, whoever they are, the neighbors down the street, the guys in the locker room) might think I was--" I said, "Well, suppose they do think that. What difference does that make? Let them think what they want! It's what they do that you have to be concerned with." But some of these guys in the National Lawyers Guild whom I'd known as fellow progressives for years were falling all over themselves with homophobia: "Oh no! Help, help, my reputation (my bull virginity) is at stake." It was too funny, but there was no budging them. Obviously. The ploy we had offered, protesting congressional invasions of private conscience by simply writing across the face of Congress's sexual probings, NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS, was a fate worse than death. They'd rather keep the war effort going than let Congress make the wrong implication. This is one of the huge differences between the way gays see and the way straights see.] "Oh no. At this moment my purity is at stake, so consequently there is nothing we can do about that." I couldn't get them to move; we couldn't get them to see that. ---------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were there any specifically gay ministries and gay social service organizations at that time, or was that before that?

HARRY HAY: No, that's long before that. I might say, in the latter part of this story, we begin to run into Troy Perry, who is going to be the MCC [Metropolitan Community Church] , but that will not come till spring of '69.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, he wasn't involved with this at this point?

HARRY HAY: He hasn't come into our picture yet. He doesn't really begin to show up, as I said, until, I think, the spring of '69.* [I think Troy has begun to have Sunday meetings of two or three people in his home in Huntington Park in the fall of '68, but the first picket line he and any of his flock take action in is a CRH picket against State Steamship Line in downtown Los Angeles in February or March of 1964. And the kid who lost his job for being gay was Gale Whittington, who was a minion of Troy's flock. Troy was on that picket line, and so was Alex Smith, pastor of Hope Methodist Church in downtown Los Angeles.] A lot of those discussions were fascinating because these guys would come up with all these problems and these ways of seeing. Of course, here we are all becoming ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. experts on the Bible, you see. Actually, the Bible is a false issue. It really shouldn't have come up at all, but in this period, we thought we had to deal with all these matters. I have to tell one thing that was kind of amusing. I don't know if I mentioned this to you before or not, but back in the fifties--'56, '57, somewhere in there--I had been invited to do a lecture on a Biblical background for, let's say, gay history at One, Inc., at their One Institute series. I worked out a lecture, which I referred to as "The Moral Climate of Canaan in the Time of Judges." (Pretty fancy title, don't you think?) It was a fascinating topic because I found myself getting into a whole flock of things I hadn't ever thought of before. But, among other things, in order to prepare myself for this I had five copies of the Bible:* [I had the Revised Standard, which is the modern Protestant text used by most of the contemporary mainline Protestant churches today; and the Masoretic, which is the contemporary Jewish text; the James, which is the Episcopal; the Douay, which is the Catholic; and the Peshitto, which is the Aramaic or the Maronite one from Lebanon.] I was checking all these ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. things and was going at them, first, line by line and verse by verse, just checking what they had to say and, with all their notes, checking what they meant by all of these things. I came to the conclusion about--I guess it must have been the winter of '56--that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is told twice in the Bible, and I wondered-- I had to then begin to find out why; so I began to get into Hebrew studies to find out what this was all about. Then I finally decided that the sin of Sodom was not a sexual sin; it was a sin of inhospitality. I worked this out because I went-- By this time I had to go to the Talmud, and I came to know all the stories in the Talmud. Now, there are hundreds of stories about Sodom and Gomorrah in the Talmud; not a single one of them is sexual. There are all kinds of inhospitality. Then you begin to realize if you look at the map and what they have to say, you'll realize that the knowledge of this period is that camels can go seven days without water, but the eighth day is the crucial day. Sodom, for example, is an oasis--and a very big oasis--and it's eight days away from its nearest neighbor. So, consequently, it was a most important-- In that respect you'd have to see it would be a sacred oasis. And it really is indeed that. So that inhospitality in a sacred oasis has to be a terrible sin. As far as the desert people are concerned, it would be the worst sin that could possibly be had. The reason they're wiped out is because of that inhospitality. In their particular situation, sex wouldn't mean very much and in that time it didn't. So, I'm telling all these stories and I'm writing all this stuff down, and it appears in--* [I prepare it as a pair of lectures for the fall 1957 at One Institute, but One Quarterly is delayed and Volume I, numbers 1 and 2, don't appear until April and June of 1958.] So this report appears in two sections. The moment that it appears I get attacked: "Why didn't you mention--" Oh, dear, I've forgotten his name now: Dean-- At that time, he was dean of Canterbury Cathedral. Oh, [Derrick Sherwin] Bailey, "Why didn't you mention Bailey?" Well, I didn't mention Bailey because I didn't know who Bailey was. But it turns out that Dean Bailey of Canterbury Cathedral, England, writes a book at the same time I'm writing my lecture and we both come to the conclusion that the sin of Sodom is the sin of inhospitality. Five thousand miles away we come to the same conclusion. He doesn't know me, and I don't know him; so neither one of us, of course, mentions the other. But, of course, he has the credentials and I don't; so, consequently, I should have mentioned him. I really got ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. attacked by the homophile community all over the united States because of the fact that I didn't mention Bailey. Well, anyway, this is one of the beginnings of things. This knowledge all comes to my great advantage in the sixties when I'm now dealing with the young campus ministers, because now we can mention all these various things, and we get into a whole variety of really very interesting, very learned conversations. They were a lot of fun, which means, of course, then that the groups on campus begin to be involved this way. I might say that there were quite a number of young men and young women who liked these discussions and enjoyed them who were not themselves necessarily gay but interested in all of these things. So, we began to have meetings that might have thirty or forty people in them, twelve of whom might be gay and are intrinsically interested, and the others are interested because it's a way of looking, a way of talking, it's a way of beginning to savor us as personalities and not just the sexual act, which it would have been until now.* [And not just as "wicked or degenerate homos" who performed deviant sexual acts, which had been the only way we had been seen, or looked at, up until now.] ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Would any of the students in the audience speak out, or were they all kind of very cautious and closety nevertheless?

HARRY HAY: The ones who spoke out would be the nongays, you see, who had nothing to lose. The others were still a little unsure of themselves.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is it fair to characterize this period in the sixties-- I mean, this powder train of which you spoke: did it consist primarily of this sort of opening up of the consciousness of nongays, or were there other aspects to it that you were involved with?

HARRY HAY: Well, I mentioned that because there is the beginning of just the touches of that along these peripheries where this is beginning to happen and when we're beginning to discover there are a great many people in the counterculture generations that are beginning to come where the homophobia is not quite as pronounced, as it were, or, let's say, where the edge is-- At the intellectual level it's possible of seeing that there are many ways of approaching this thing, and it's not the boogey that it necessarily had been before.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You're talking, then, mainly of the consciousness of the straight community.

HARRY HAY: At this moment I'm talking about that. Now, for instance, as far as the gay community itself is concerned, little by little we're beginning to reach—as we're talking this way--we're beginning to reach young people in the audiences who at least hear that there is such a thing as the One Institute, for example, because Dorr had been carrying on a number of discussion group classes. One, Inc., continued the discussion groups which the first Mattachine had instituted to start with. This they went on doing.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were the participants in the discussion groups prior to this people of the generation of the founders of One, Inc.?

HARRY HAY: No, nearly always younger ones. A few people, for instance, in their forties would come but not terribly often. The ones who were really interested were the young people twenty-five and thirty who really wanted to know about themselves.* [The generation of the founders of One were, with the exception of Don Slater and his love Tony, all members of Mattachine. The average age of Mattachine members was twenty-five to thirty-five. I was, next to Dorr Legg, probably the oldest Mattachine member. In the original Mattachine steering group, I was thirty-eight to forty, Chuck was thirty-three to thirty-five, all the rest ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. were thirty and under. By 1960, One had gotten conservative enough so that a number of forty-five-to-sixty-year-olds had bravely ventured to attend their monthly Sunday afternoons.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, then, it wasn't the sixties per se that changed the kind of age cohort of people who would be active and conscious and all that. I mean, was it always young people coming in, eager to--

HARRY HAY: Well, for instance, in the Mattachine, in the original Mattachine, in the discussion groups that we had, the people, I would say, averaged from twenty-five to forty then. And I would say, it goes on being twenty-five to forty.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That's what I meant.

HARRY HAY: I don't think that changed particularly, except, for instance, with the college students who are some of them younger, not all. Anybody over forty, at any one of these times, is usually more cautious. They might have come to discussion groups, and they might come to something that's very well attended, but they're not themselves going to be pioneers in anything, at least that's been our experience.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were there little--I don't know what to say--acts of bravado or flashes of that sort of thing coming from the gay community in the sixties?

HARRY HAY: I want to come to that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: OK, fine.

HARRY HAY: I want to lay this general background, say, for 1965: how it's beginning to move and how we're beginning to see.

MITCH TUCHMAN: OK, yeah.

HARRY HAY: It comes around into February 1966, and at that time a number of groups who had been-- Let's say, One had branched out and had gone-- They had One in New York and One in Chicago and One in Kansas City, I think. Then, by this time Mattachine had--this is the second Mattachine, the respectable one--had reached out and there was a Mattachine in Denver, there was a Mattachine in Washington, and a Mattachine in New York. The one that is still going of the whole group is the Mattachine in Washington, D.C., which is Franklin Kameny. Franklin Kameny was an astronomer, who, I believe, in 1954 was kicked out of his job for being gay. He has more or less carried his work-- His is another story, and a very fine story in itself. But he doesn't belong to my type of flamboyant gayness. He is the more respectable sort. But anyway, he's done very fine work in his own field. But these different groups came together in Kansas City, and they decided they were going to set up a national organization, or a national committee of organizations, let's see. They came together to explore this idea in February of that year. They decided that they would do something together, each in their separate cities, and they picked out--why they picked out this day, I will never know--but they picked out Armed Services Day, which is May 20, for something to go on in every single city. I heard about this and came together with the Tangents group with Don Slater, who had gone to the Kansas City meeting, shortly after, I guess, by the end of February. I decided that, if I possibly could, I was going to swing it in terms of antiwar: I mean, "Armed Services Day--Shaft the Draft," one of those things, which is a little complicated; it's a double negative, and as I found out, it's almost an impossible task, but this is what I was going to do. [laughter] I got us into some funny situations too. I persuaded the whole group to go with us on that. The young kids on the campuses would probably support some kind of a parade or some kind of an activity on May 20, and we could get widespread support, and we would certainly get a lot of widespread interest going if we were on an antiwar basis. It happened that the Tangents group themselves were all good Republicans, but they were so carried away by the idea that they could have a widespread influence on people that they were willing to go on at least a neutral basis. I got them that far. I was pretty sure that I could carry --that the Southern California Council on Religion and the Homophile would go along with this. As it turned out, Dorr Legg is also a Republican, and he didn't go along with it either. But the ministers did; the ministers thought it was a great idea. So, here I am, you know, the one queer, and all the rest of the straights are all--boom!--"We're going to go into the antiwar business." We were all going to do something on Armed Services Day, and it's going to be just fine. As it turned out, little by little they all sort of pulled away and said, "Well, we're terribly busy, but if you can get it going--" You know, the usual cop-out. It ended up that finally we thought, at first, we would have a parade and then found that that wouldn't work out. We finally decided that what we would do, we would have a motorcade. We set up a motorcade for May 20. Then we were to get together and work out slogans and jingles and things we were going to put on our signs, and we were going to have maybe even live signs or things that would have cartoons or something that would be exciting to look at--and that all fell apart. Little by little, it finally worked down to the fact that John and I wrote the whole damn motorcade. What we did was, we got large boxes--they were six feet long and two feet high and two feet wide-- that you could lash up on top of cars.* [We had sealed the boxes so that they had rigidity, and then we put lengths of rope through two places at the bottom edges of the boxes so that you could tie the ends together through the top of the car windows and so secure the boxes on top of any car model.] It also meant that we had four sides we had to write on. John and I wrote all the signs. We eventually had fifteen cars in the motorcade; so that meant sixty signs.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Where did the motorcade go?

HARRY HAY: It started down Hollywood Boulevard. It went down Hollywood Boulevard; it went downtown. It went down Hollywood Boulevard and then to Alvarado and then downtown and around the plaza and down Broadway and up Spring and around Pershing Square and then back out to Wilshire Boulevard and up Wilshire Boulevard and out through the Miracle Mile to Fairfax and then up Fairfax* [past the Farmers Market to Santa Monica Boulevard where the radio and TV cameras flagged us down.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, this was part of a larger parade?

HARRY HAY: No, this was Los Angeles. ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But the fifteen cars were part of-- Were they part of a larger--

HARRY HAY: No, no, no. The fifteen cars were it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That was it.

HARRY HAY: That was it. As a matter of fact--I don't know if you've ever seen a motorcade of that nature--that's a pretty big motorcade as motorcades go. When you have it all staggered the way they are, it was about four blocks long, and for that period this is enormous. Nothing like this had ever happened before. No one had ever used the word gay on a large sign going through L.A. on a Saturday afternoon before.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What kind of reaction did you get, like from the newspapers, for instance, if any?

HARRY HAY: Well, to give you an example, I told you about the fact that we had gotten conspiracies of silence from the Los Angeles Times several times by this point. We made the TV news that night, I might add, but the first questions that came out of their mouths, from the radio, from TV, from the newspapers were, "Did anybody throw any tomatoes?" "Did anybody try to stop your car?" "Were any rocks thrown?" "Did anybody get hurt?" In other words, blood and guts. If there wasn't any blood and guts, they really weren't interested. We gave them a press conference at the end of this thing, but they really weren't interested unless there had been some kind of violent altercation. And there hadn't been. There were a great many people who made movies of the thing because they caught us at various times along the line as we came along. There were a number of interesting reactions. People would stop and stare. And the signs were rather good because we were talking, again, about the fact that Congress has no right to invade private conscience. We made that the key point of our issue. And we made the key point that we were, again, a gentle people and that we were a nonviolent people and that war was not in our way. And we felt, among other things, that here we spoke the heart of many. So, it was an antiwar parade, anti-armed forces parade, done by gay people. A number of the campus ministers volunteered their cars--* [Oh, and here's something I should have remembered. The antiwar/antidraft groups on these particular campuses--Cal State Los Angeles, Occidental, and Los Angeles City College, I think--put out leaflets covering our antidraft arguments, so some of the young antiwar heteros were along the route to cheer us also. Reverend [Lynn] Johndahl from Cal State Los Angeles had volunteered his car. Ron Olson from Pasadena's Fuller ------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. Seminary too volunteered his. Alex Smith of Hope Methodist downtown drove John's and my second car (we had two then). Reverend Kidd of Hancock Park Lutheran didn't go that day. Ken Wahrenbrook, whom everybody thought would also abstain, rode with me. Harggye Luykens of United Church of Christ drove her car and brought three women with her. The Unitarian minister who was either from UCLA or Los Angeles City College drove his car. I guess we never had more than five people to a car.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: Men and women?

HARRY HAY: Men and women both, right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And you stuck to that one issue? You didn't go to other gay issues?

HARRY HAY: * [We don't think as yet in terms of issues which can be projected as gay rights issues in what we now call the public sector. At this point, "consenting adult practices" are legal in only one state. The American Civil Liberties Union hasn't agreed as yet that a concept such as gay rights has legal validity. This won't come until late 1968. This motorcade's signs are the first in the United States to set itself against actions Congress made against us. Our signs were the first gay signs in the country to ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. say that certain congressional positions versus gay people are wrong. An interview with Paul Coates published in the Los Angeles Times preliminary to our motorcade made the point that we yearned for the first-class citizenship right to be eligible to join the armed forces so that some of us could say, "Shaft the draft!" This was still a yearning to confront. It was not yet unilinear! The Black Cat picket line in February of 1967 is the Los Angeles gay action wherein the gay community takes a stand against police brutality: protesting entrapment, protesting brutality, protesting invasion of privacy.] So, as I said, it was on the radio; it was on the TV news, and I don't know that-- I think the New York Times noted-- I think they were the only ones that did note that there had been twenty-five such demonstrations throughout the country on that day.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Similarly organized to emphasize--

HARRY HAY: Well, they noticed that all of a sudden that had happened but there were different things happening in different cities, but it was obvious--

MITCH TUCHMAN: But they had this gay theme to them?

HARRY HAY: Yeah.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But weren't there other things going on on that day too to commemorate Armed Forces Day? Would there have been the usual parades with tanks and stuff like that?

HARRY HAY: Yes, there were, but ours was the more colorful; so, consequently, even here in L.A., the tanks were only just briefly mentioned, and several pictures of our parade were shown. But what was important here was that most people had been terrified. Most of the groups in town who were part of the Council on Religion and the Homophile backed away from this. We were the only ones: The Circle and the Tangents were the only groups that went through with it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And what effect did this have?

HARRY HAY: One, Inc., simply said, "We'll have no part of this," and they didn't.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did this have the effect of galvanizing them for future--

HARRY HAY: No. No, it was just simply the beginning of a thing. In the course of that, for example, John and I appeared on the Joe Pine show. The Joe pine show was always something that most people were kind of terrified of, but there were the two of us, and it was kind of interesting because when people called in--you know, people always called in on the Joe pine show--anyway, they'd say, "Well--" He was kind of caught by this whole thing. When I would dry up, John would take over. When John would dry up, I would take over. Most of the people didn't understand what this was all about. They couldn't understand, for instance, why we wanted to become eligible to join the armed forces, which is one of the things I was trying to get at. I wanted us to have the right to join the army so that we could say, "Shaft the draft," because, after all, we had no reason to say, "Shaft the draft," if we couldn't get in anyway. So, I wanted to be a first-class citizen, to be able to join it if I wanted to, so I could give it the finger. And this is the point that we made on the Joe Pine show. Well, that point went across all right, but he kept saying, "I can't understand why you want to join the army." He said, "Now, for instance, I can't imagine--Supposing that I were in high school and I had to go take a shower with the girls, well, I don't think I could control myself." And I said, "Look, Pine, if I didn't know how to control myself in the showers by the time I was fifteen, I wouldn't have had a full set of teeth to get through high school with. If you can't control yourself, you're in trouble, not me." And by this time, we had him on the ropes. He was going, "Uh, uh, uh," you know. Well, this was kind of fun because this had never happened on the Joe Pine show before. When we got through with our first interview, the producer came out and said, "Hey, fellas, that was great. Do you mind doing a second one?" We said, "No, no, no, fine. Go right ahead." So, we did a second show with him.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You taped another one right then?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, right then. We went right on through and did another taping, which was kind of fun. We really enjoyed this one because we got him coming and going on a couple of different points. He had never dealt with people-- Most of the people who had gone on his program as gays--and he had had gays before--had been defensive, and we weren't.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And what had their stance been?

HARRY HAY: Well, the moment you take a sort of a defensive position, if he sees that and he asks the question, and you back off and you go into "Well, uh, uh, uh," then he's got you. We never let that happen. He would ask one of those things, and we would say, "Oh, hey, wait a minute. You're doing it from your point of view. Let me speak from my way of seeing." We didn't have the words gay consciousness then--this is '65, '66--but we're beginning to move in that direction. I began to realize also that-- I wouldn't let him ask a question that way. I would say, "Look, I'll have to rephrase it my way," and by the time I was able to do that, then I could move in another direction. So, these were interesting sorts of confrontations. Again, as I say, this is '65, but lots of people saw that, and there were lots of call-ins. Then, of course, the Joe pine show was a syndicated thing; he had other places in the country than L.A.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, I was going to ask you: Was that a local show?

HARRY HAY: No, it wasn't. Apparently not. Apparently not because we picked it up on radio one morning; they were talking about the Joe Pine show in Kansas City the night before. People had called in, and they were asking questions even then. Oh, yes, he had a radio show too, and they would say, "That show you had the night before," and they would ask him questions about what he'd said the night before on the TV show. We heard that one morning, and we got it from Canada at one point; so apparently it went many places. So all kinds of people are now beginning to hear gay people speak in an entirely different way than they'd heard before. This is important in this period. These are just little--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is it just coming out of L.A., or was this going on nationwide: more and more people being on the radio and on TV?

HARRY HAY: Well, I think people being on the radio and TV as a result of the Armed Forces Day, that happened in a number of different cities. It happened in San Francisco. It happened in Kansas City. It happened in Chicago. Then there were other issues in other cities that were beginning to surface, and so people were speaking.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The reason I ask you that is because you've often said that there's a real distinction between the East Coast and the West Coast in the movement--

HARRY HAY: There is.

MITCH TUCHMAN: --and I wondered if you were making here an argument for the leadership of the West Coast in general.

HARRY HAY: No. In this period, no, not necessarily, not yet. A thing is going to happen, which I will mention now-- I have been giving you a broad side again. I haven't been being chronological exactly, but I will come to a certain point, and then we'll begin to see what the differences were, or one of the major differences. Let me see, have I covered everything I wanted to cover on that? Well, one other thing: I was on the Joe Pine show, and we were also on the Melvin Belli show. That was disaster because Belli was, again, one of those people who doesn't let you finish a sentence. He will always allow you to start to do something and then he'll say, "Oh, that's wonderful," and he hasn't heard the end of the sentence, which may be a complete turnaround of where he wants to go. He wanted us to be wanting to join the armed services. I didn't get to the point of telling why we had it; he simply cut it off. So, there I am standing with a statement that I didn't want to make. However, the Belli show was probably watched even more than the Joe pine show was, and that was, again, all over the country. So, again, a pair of men speaking as a couple, as a gay couple, in a positive fashion had a very wide effect because, again, the different organizations begin to get letters in from the people who would mention the fact that this was the case, or campuses would talk about the fact that this was the case: "How wonderful to hear gay people speaking," and "Maybe the climate is beginning to change." It's all just these little straws in the wind, but gay people, anybody, any oppressed minority needs these straws in the wind to begin to make them feel that maybe the change of climate is beginning to take place and maybe we can take heart and maybe we don't have to be so afraid, and so on. So, these were already happening. Then, again, because of the fact that we would appear on this, they would find out whether or not we could come to speak at their high school and maybe come to speak at their boys' club or something like that. That began to happen, not very much, but it was beginning. Maybe we would have four, five engagements in 1965, and then there would be twelve in '66. So, it's beginning to spread. Little by little and very slowly, but nevertheless it did begin to spread. Now, later on in '66, 1966, in San Francisco, the idea of forming a national organization-- San Francisco decided to host a national convention of people coming from everywhere to form the national organization. This was in August of 1966. Just prior to that, they decided to have a four-day retreat of the Council on Religion and the Homophile on a national basis; so that they invited, for instance, Robert Triest--I think he was the Yale Divinity School, head of the Yale Divinity School—and a couple of other men: one other man from the Harvard Divinity School, somebody else from New York. There's a Riverside Divinity School too; somebody came from there. Then there were a variety of ministers: Baptist, United Church of Christ (which is the old Congregational Church, I believe), and Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and so on. No Catholics, but nevertheless all the Protestant groups were represented. It was a four-day retreat at the Belvedere Hotel and a whole series of workshops by people who wanted to come on their own. John and I decided that we wanted to go up for that, and so we did and participated in it. These were very interesting, powerful, biting, incisive discussions on the whole feeling of religion. I remember, at one point, I developed for myself a definition of what I considered love. I had never done this before, but at that particular workshop I found myself doing this, and it's one that we've stayed with, and many groups have used ever since. I simply said that I felt that love was giving that other person, a particular other person, all the space that they need to grow as they need to grow without any strings attached. This is what love is, to create that space in which they may grow as they need to grow, as they would know from themselves. Immediately, Robert Triest of Yale Divinity School said, "I'm going to write that one down because this is much better than anything that I know, and I can go along with this. This I can see. This is a contribution from the gay community. It's a great contribution."

MITCH TUCHMAN: The thing that strikes me immediately is that it's a definition that has no conjugal aspect to it at all.

HARRY HAY: Right, right. I'm speaking now of love and within this, total growth, of which, of course, your sexuality has to be very much an important part. But however you need to grow, this is what I give you. At another point, we are able to talk about the beauty of our sexuality and the fact that our sexuality is the doorway to our spirit, which is, again, rather the difference-- After all, the old Christianity has always been that carnality, or sexuality, is the denial of spirit. I was making the point that it was the doorway to spirit. I said to the ministers that, if you can appreciate that I look in a glory hole and I can see the Holy Ghost descend, you will know what it means to be a gay person and you will know what sexuality means to us. All of a sudden the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the Episcopal cathedral, the young man, [Robert] Cromey, said, "I think I get what you mean." Two days later, he actually used it very definitely in answering someone else. He said, "I can conceive of this as a possibility. And when you can begin to realize this, you can begin to see how these people see and how they feel about themselves." At one point, we'd had a--just the NACHO, the people from North American--oh, my God, how does it go?--North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, NACHO--that's it--when they began to assemble, we had a workshop of all the ministers who arrived from all over the place and the various delegates one evening in the basement of Glide Memorial, I guess, in San Francisco. These guys were talking about opening their ministry to consider the gays, and I began to realize that they were getting patronizing as all hell. They were beginning to sort of swell. They were getting their usual macho honcho-- Even though they were ministers, it was beginning to operate, and they were sort of egging each other on. At that point, I got up, and I said, "Will you excuse my saying so, but I want to just remind you Christians"--I said this very specifically--"I want to remind you Christians of one thing, and that is we've been around a lot longer than you have. Not only around a lot longer than you have, but you have stoned us, and you have tormented us. You have driven us from your temples, and you have burned us at your fires. And with all of that, we can say that we have come through this with our integrity and our sense of respect intact. If you can match that, I will talk with you. But don't ever take me for granted, and don't ever think I don't have these things, because I do." And I sat down. Whereupon there was a-- I had just dropped a block of ice or slapped a wet mackerel across the face, but they stopped it--and they stopped cold. They didn't go anymore with this patronization again because this was something I wouldn't put up with. They began to be a lot more respectful. Later on a black man got up and said, "I can see what you mean." And I said, "Well, the one thing I want to say to you too"--his name is Cecil Williams, he's a very well-known reformer and crusader in San Francisco now, and I think he's probably still connected with the Glide Memorial, which is the Methodist downtown church in San Francisco-- and I said to him, "The next time that you sing, 'You've Got To Cross That Lonesome Valley,' just remember we've been there too. We also, each one of us, have to cross that valley and by ourselves and alone. So, just understand that's who we are also; we've gone through the same experience as you have." It all of a sudden developed a rapport between ourselves and the black ministry in San Francisco, which I think was probably very good for all of us because we began to see that there were parallels in their oppression and in ours. So, we're beginning now to see parallels of our oppression and the way we think and the way we need to move in order to become first-class citizens, which were very similar to that of the black people. This is the beginning of our own education and our own growth. One of the ministers from united Church of Christ, his name was Caldwell.* [Clay Caldwell. Formally, he was the Reverend Clarence Caldwell, but he liked to be called Clay. He served as chairman to us.] He was not a gay man but sympathetic within the church group; so therefore he acted as our moderator to get the national organization going and get it to moving in general directions. This was a group of both men and women, you see, because the Daughters of Bilitis from their chapters all over the country were also involved in this. I'm not sure, but it seems to me that there were some fifty organizations that were involved in this. At one point, one of the young ministers from down there--I can't remember his name, but he came from Fuller Seminary in Pasadena,* [a handsome young redhead from Fuller Seminary in Pasadena by the name of Ron Olson. He had been a very enthusiastic and active member of SCCRH here in Los Angeles. We had hoped he could have come up to our wonderful four-day retreat with the ministers from all over the country, but neither he nor any of the other Los Angeles ministers got up to San Francisco for more than the last two or three of the historic gay ten days in August 1966. So he hadn't heard any of our discussions with the ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. ministers.] He got up, and he said he thought that all the homosexuals needed to do was to discipline themselves a little bit and to cut down on their sexual activities; you know, the usual Sunday school approach, you might say. We had talked to this guy for a year. This is the kind of thing we would have expected two years before but not now coming up. As a result of his remarks, he reduced the entire assembly to shambles. At that point everybody was up at everybody else's throats. I mean, it just destroyed the entire thing, and we thought, "My God, this whole* [national consensus we've struggled so long and so hard to build, as well as this conference, is falling apart.] We're just never going to bring it back together again." And to think that this came from one of the people whom we had introduced as one of our leading ministers, who was sympathetic, from Los Angeles. So, hands went up all over the place, and all of a sudden Reverend Caldwell, the conference moderator, said, "I will recognize the oldest organized homophile and the youngest organized homophile in this assembly." So, he gave me the floor first. And I don't-- This is something I'm mentioning now-- I don't exactly know how to explain -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. this because it happened to me a couple or three times; it's strange, I went up, and I remember finding the microphone and recognizing that I didn't have to speak too loudly because I could hear my voice sounding out over the room; so I remember tempering myself to the microphone. I remember saying something about the descent of the Holy Ghost, and so on, the thing that we had talked about four days earlier. I don't know what else I said. I have no idea what I said. I must have spoken for about five minutes. All of a sudden, I was aware of the taste of the next word that I was about to say in my mouth and suddenly realized that I hadn't the foggiest notion of what I'd said before that or what I thought the next word after that was going to be. And so I said the word, and I sat down. And I got a standing ovation. people were* [laughing and crying and hugging each other. The room was suddenly full of warmth and love and enthusiasm. All kinds of people here hugging and kissing me and] saying, "YOU brought us back together again," and "Can I quote you?" I said, "Yes, if you can find out what I said, you can quote me but I haven't the foggiest notion of what I said." I didn't know. -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. The youngest, Vanguard, spoke also, but it wasn't necessary. Something had happened, and I had said something. All I can say is, at that moment I guess that I must have experienced what is known as possession because I haven't the foggiest notion of what happened or what I said; but everybody's going around with their eyes beaming; so I guess it must have been OK.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In recognizing the oldest and the youngest homophile organizations, was there already a sense in such meetings that there was something different in what different generations would have to say?

HARRY HAY: Yes. The youngest organization at this point-Here's where we're going to find the wonderful difference between ourselves and the East Coast. The Glide Memorial Foundation in San Francisco, because of the fact that they were ministering to the Tenderloin in San Francisco, which is Market Street and the flophouses along there, and the hustlers along there, and the hookers, and generally the down and out, the winos, and so on--Market Street and the Tenderloin is the skid row of San Francisco--and Glide acted as the ministry to them although they were a few blocks removed from this area. It had organized the young hustlers. Now, this is '66, mind you. This is the beginning of what we will call the counterculture. In a way, it's the beginning of the whole hippie movement in San Francisco and around the Haight. It is the beginning in the sixties, we'll come to its apogee in '68; but this is '66, and it's already beginning in quite large quantities. So that there were thousands and thousands of young people in San Francisco [who were] fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. These are young gay men who have been thrown out of their homes for being gay, have been kicked out and told never to come back, or maybe even in some cases the families tried to kill them--all kinds of dreadful, harrowing stories. And here are all these kids on the street in San Francisco with no visible means of support--no jobs, no skills, too young, so that they couldn't get work permits if they wanted to; people who were not only dropouts from high school but even junior high school--and nowhere to go. So that Glide had opened up their basement to these kids. And very shortly, they formed their own organization and they called themselves the Vanguard. And the vanguard: they scrounged around, as other people did. They got together with Green Revolution and the Diggers and so on. The Diggers also made regular deliveries to Glide Memorial basement to help these kids. And so they were able to, with what Glide itself was able to come up with, the kids had enough money so that they had at least one meal a day. They had a place to take a shower and where they could shave if they had to. Then other groups were helping them with free clothing, and so on. They were a part of the whole counterculture in that regard. But they were hustlers. There was a guy by the name of Guy Strait who had a paper in San Francisco which was known as the Cruise News and World Report. He was sued by U.S. News & World Report, and as a matter of fact, they lost. But anyway, Cruise News and World Report had a column that was known as "Meat Rack," and the "Meat Rack" told you what was going on among the hustlers and what were good hustling streets and what the going prices were and [laughter] all the essential information. So, here are the kids who are hustling by day and early evening, and then they had their own organization. At one point, for the people who had been at the retreat, they put on a dinner for us one evening, and it was very nice. They served dinner one evening, and then, later on, they served a breakfast. They were real cute, and they were very cooperative, and they were delighted to be dealing with other gay people, different ages, and so on. It was a very interesting feeling, a whole sort of inkling, a feeling of a very large family of people. It was just wonderful working with them, and they were wonderful working with other people. They needed the contact with older people. This they had missed, and all of a sudden, here they were getting the contact with older people who were affectionate and loving and not necessarily exploitive.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is there a distinction between San Francisco and Los Angeles? We've talked at times about the distinction between the East and West, but how about in California?

HARRY HAY: Well, I would say that there isn't that much difference between Los Angeles and San Francisco, no. I would say that the West Coast, pretty generally, seems to have a fairly cohesive attitude, and they are more or less the same. Anyway, let me show you what is going to happen at this point. So, Vanguard had their own spokespersons, and Vanguard would be the youngest group; and so Vanguard had a number of fiery young speakers. The Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco and the Circle of Loving Companions in Los Angeles were insisting that the Vanguard should have equal representation with everybody else in this group. We swung the West Coast people into thinking in that direction. The East Coast went along with it because they didn't want to make an issue at this moment. We had made so many issues by this time that they didn't want to show another division; so they went along with it too. But they spent the next two years trying to get rid of Vanguard, because the vanguard gave their image a bad name. After all, you couldn't say these kids are going to look like nice, middle-class, respectable people who would pass for anything else; so, consequently they were always trying to get rid of the vanguard. There was a group in San Francisco called SIR, which was the Society for Individual Responsibility--something like that [Society for individual Rights]. They were a men's organization in San Francisco, and they became fairly large, and they became fairly prosperous. By '68 they had become fairly prosperous.* [In 1966, though, they had accomplished much in their five years of activity. They'd just gotten their new building. SIR had been the work of Bill Beardemphl, Bill Plath, Dorr Jones, and others, around 1962 and had begun to come together, as had Mattachine earlier, to be social as well as political. In April of 1966, they had become large enough and cohesive enough to swing renting a whole small three-story building on Sixth Street, just south of Market. During the ten days in August 1966, they put on a terrific drag show one night. The building had one floor for offices and small meeting rooms, one floor for stage shows and banquets, and one floor for a ballroom with bar.] They were probably a group of maybe a couple hundred men. They were a little -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. embarrassed by Vanguard too because, after all, Vanguard were their tricks, you see, and they were the paying customers. So the paying customers and the tricks were not what you call always-- They always felt that the kids should be respectful because, after all, we're older people, and we're responsible people, and we're business people, and so on; and the kids couldn't see it that way. John and I found this highly amusing; we thought this was really loads of fun. [laughter] So did the women. The women were very interested to see that these guys were really-- The ones who were taking this attitude were really pompous asses, and they really should have been cut down to size. But there wasn't very much of that. Mainly the people around Glide and SIR were able to get along with the kids fine; so it worked out. But the East Coast couldn't make it; they just couldn't make that at all. They had a real class-conscious thing going here. You see in a way, the East Coast has always been sort of respectable petit bourgeois; so they're really concerned about how they might look to their fellow Lions Club members. This generally always was their attitude. Here on the West Coast we had a far more open attitude about it. For instance, they would have an East Coast conference get-together; we had a homophile conference on the West Coast, and we'd have a get-together; and then we'd get together for a national one. In the spring of 1968, we had a wonderful resolution, that came from the West Coast, which began, "Whereas the homosexual has no image to lose ..." And this [laughter] did not pass the national organization at all. The East Coast was just absolutely insulted by this. We had always taken the attitude that we had no image to lose; so this was a bunch of nonsense. So, you always had that class difference. You had sort of a Harvard, good-old-boy attitude as far as the East Coast establishment was concerned, and we never had that at all.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Basically, what were some of the other stations on the powder train?

HARRY HAY: Well, by '66, when we had this national organization, we're already beginning to get coverage. We get coverage in the Wall Street Journal. We get coverage in the New York Times, and so on. With that, then there are a number of prestigious types of universities who are going to ask us to speak. We're speaking on university campuses not infrequently. We still don't have-- The whole idea of a group on campus won't come until after Stonewall, but the idea of speaking at sociology classes and anthropology classes and even philosophical or history classes begins to happen. I can remember several times being invited here [UCLA], I think, to a couple of off-campus places, where I spoke on what it's like to be a gay person and what it's like to grow up as a gay person, and so on, and what part we may have as far as the antiwar movement is concerned and tying that in with gay matters.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I'm just for a moment looking at notes that were compiled the first time we met, and I'm amazed that all these things--Glide Memorial Church and the conference--are things you mentioned then that you would be mentioning in the future. You did mention, though, a pamphlet in 1966 written by you and by John.

HARRY HAY: Oh, that's right. That's right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I'm really amazed frankly that we did this outline at one time, and every single thing you've discussed today, with two exceptions--and I'll give them both to you--have just developed as you've talked today. Tell me about the pamphlet.

HARRY HAY: Very glad to have met you [Ron Grele]. He has a very interesting face, by the way. I'm looking at the [video] camera, but I'm also looking at him occasionally. It's a very expressive face, a very responsive face.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, really?

HARRY HAY: It's far more responsive than yours is. [laughter] Incidentally, could I have some more coffee?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Why don't I just turn this off for a minute, we'll take a break? [tape recorder turned off]

HARRY HAY: One of the things, for instance, in talking on the tape today, talking to the video, for example, I'm aware of the fact that what is so difficult to get across, to explain, are the climates of these different earlier times and to realize that, for example, you may think of the sixties as a time of a certain free breath going through. Well, it does, but women's liberation has not yet dawned and women are still the property of men in everybody's thinking. Gay people are still sick, or people who are-- We're sick then. Sexuality per se is not being discussed, as it is going to be discussed almost in an explosion at the end of that decade and all during the seventies. But in that period, we're still very much quiet. We're still buttoned down in this regard. It's still not the thing you talk about. Last night, for instance, on public service broadcast there was a review by David Schoenbrun on what had happened to the old left. Among the people that he had speaking there was Andrea Dworkin, who is probably one of the national spokespeople, if not maybe even the national founder of the radical lesbian feminist movement, and she was talking about the fact-- She was saying that when people in the old left, or in the left per se, at the end of the sixties, when people began to recognize that women's liberation had something going for it and it was important, and the left was beginning to embrace women's liberation, but when women came out and began to say that they were the owners of their bodies and they had the right to decide what their bodies would do and what they wouldn't do and how they would use it and how they wouldn't use it, she said the men of the old left withdrew, and they have withdrawn ever since. They were simply not ready to face the fact that women were still not their property and their chattels. She said, this she could tell was when the left failed because all of a sudden they left the women hanging. And the women are still, at this point, not part of the old left per se. They can't bring this point in; if the women are going to come into the left, they are going to have to leave that outside the door. I thought to myself this is an interesting point because--although I don't consider myself a feminist man--I take the position myself that I will walk with feminist positions wherever they and I are still in subject-subject or consensual relationship; but the moment that they go back into subject-object thinking, I'm gone. I'm not in that direction any longer. Nevertheless, I find myself in agreement on many points, but I'm not in agreement with the women so long as they take the mother-knows-best attitude, and I'm very much afraid the lesbian feminists in most cases are exercising that old taboo.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Maybe before we comment on new events I should ask you to--

HARRY HAY: The reason why I mention all this is because I happen to think this is an example in the eighties of the type of repressions that were certainly all around us in the sixties.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, tying into that, the things you've discussed--the various councils and discussion groups and committees here and in San Francisco both on the gay side and on the straight side--were there distinctions in the participation and attitudes of men and women. For instance, when you spoke with representatives of various churches, did you find men and women equally open to the discussions, or were there distinctions? What did you find?

HARRY HAY: There were interesting distinctions. Generally speaking, the women that we would be dealing with--and here we noticed it very much--we were always dealing with the ministers' wives. And the ministers' wives were the sad-sack people who were thoroughly-- Let's say, most of them were thoroughly indoctrinated with the importance of their husbands' positions.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Were they sent as emissaries of their husbands to these sessions?

HARRY HAY: Occasionally they were, or they would be on a telephone when you'd call up and you'd get Mrs. there because Mr. wasn't home. But you were not dealing with persons; you were dealing with imitations of the minister. We were always dealing with substitutes of the minister. There wasn't a person there many, many times, and as a gay person, you're very conscious of this, very conscious of the fact that here are women who are dreadfully repressed, but probably not by their husbands, but by the system and certainly by the church that they were caught into, the religion, the religious order, whatever that amounts to. However, occasionally we would run across women ministers. Now, these were something else again. These were women who were-- Again, these were women who were horribly repressed, but you could feel the seed of change and the seed of wanting to be able to speak out. This was something they suddenly discovered they could do in a gay circle. With gay men and gay women, they could be themselves, and we sort of encouraged them to be themselves, or we might even egg them on. For instance, they would come in at the beginning of the session with [a shrug], and maybe two or three hours later they would be flying almost. Then all of a sudden, one of the men would come in and we would encounter this woman who at this point had unbuttoned her stays, as it were, and he was shocked by her forthrightness or her openness. Then all of a sudden, she would catch herself-- you could watch this go on--and she would suddenly realize that, "Oh, oh," she had been walking around in her stocking feet, as it were, with pants unbuttoned, as it were, top button undone so she could breathe, and you don't do that in front of a minister. Immediately you would see her sort of pull back. Then we would say, "Hey, where are you going? Where are you going?"

MITCH TUCHMAN: How about on the gay side? Where there distinctions between what the lesbians wanted and what the gay men wanted?

HARRY HAY: Yes, lots of differences. There was one bone that was picked back and forth, back and forth, and I was always very sorry about that because it really shouldn't have been as big an issue as the women would make it out to be, I think. They had a point there, but I think the men could have been called in a far better way. In the fifties and the sixties, the gay movement is always being concerned with the the raids by the police on sexual meeting. places. Remember at this time we're still totally illegal; so it doesn't matter where we meet--whether we meet in bars or in public toilets--we're going to be illegal, and we were going to be raided; and we were being raided constantly. By the sixties we're already beginning to train lawyers who meet with the different groups and get ideas from the different groups, and the different groups raise funds to help pay for these lawyers and help pay for these trials, and so on. There are quite a number of important trials that come up. I've forgotten: I think in the late fifties or early sixties there was an important trial here in Los Angeles, no, this was Long Beach, called the Bielicki case. Bielicki was a man who had been apprehended in a stall in one of the public toilets. I mean, it was a pay stall. He had paid to go into it, and so on. The police would spy over the edge or down from the top, and so on. The state supreme court eventually decided in the Bielicki case that this was an invasion of privacy, and the police had no right to enter this way. So, all of a sudden, that closed down, and that type of surveillance stopped in public toilets. Now, this was a great step forward because this made it possible for gay people to, you know, explore each other sexually in certain ways which had not been possible before, and it was the law of privacy that made his--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this case here in Los Angeles?

HARRY HAY: I think it was either here or in Long Beach.

MITCH TUCHMAN: About what year was that? The same period we're speaking about? The middle to late sixties?

HARRY HAY: It may have originally surfaced as early as '59, but it took a number of years to make its way through all the courts, and eventually it was decided by the state supreme court, and I think the main decision-- I get the sense that it was around '65 that this happened. But as I said, numbers of different groups have come together, and we have a number of lawyers, by this time, who handled cases for One.

MITCH TUCHMAN: But on the distinction between the men and the women, is it the fact that--

HARRY HAY: The women got terribly tired--

MITCH TUCHMAN: --these sorts of meeting places and therefore hadn't been exposed to that kind of repression?

HARRY HAY: The women were not exposed to that type of harassment, and as far as I know, the women's bars in this period were not being raided. So that the women are always saying they're tired of coming together and having to talk about nothing but "washroom sex," as they would always call it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is there not the equivalent among lesbians?

HARRY HAY: There hadn't been any harassment in this period, no; so, consequently, they were not dealing with legal situations.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You mean, in the eyes of the police, a lady is a lady even if she's a lesbian cruising the johns?

HARRY HAY: Well, at this particular point I don't think the policeman is necessarily sensitive to what a lesbian is. And also, I don't think the lesbians ever use the washrooms, for instance, or the toilets or the restrooms as clandestine places of meeting. In fact, I'm sure they didn't. Their big problem was being fired from work. In other words, if they were going to be harassed at all, it would be in the work place. I don't even think they're being bothered in the home place at this time. I think that will come later. So that their harassment is in the work place, and they are concerned, I think, with social mobility. I think they're concerned with being outcasts on a social basis and in the work place.* [They're beginning to battle the men in the trade unions. They're beginning to protest the sexism not only in the work place but in the union meetings. They are beginning to raise the issue of equal pay for equal work not only economically but ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. politically as well.] I think these are the main problems as far as they're concerned. So that when the groups come together, nine cases out of ten, it's the men and their problems that are being discussed and not the women. And this is true. However, I must say something else--and this is something we can bring in right about now--I think it would have been the Aldersgate meeting, and that would be the spring of 1967, March of 1967; it would be the Western Homophile Conference done under the auspices of one of the church groups because it would be one of their retreat houses that we would use for our conference-- people came down from San Francisco. The Dorians came down from Seattle. I would say offhand, there were probably six, maybe seven, maybe eight groups from Southern California, and maybe seven groups from San Francisco, and one from Seattle. So, this is the group that comes together; there were probably about forty people who came together. And the women in San Francisco are beginning to talk about working out sort of institutional rapports on a-- There was a regular-- Oh, dear, I wish I could remember the name they had for this. They were working out a sort of blow-by-blow relationship between various civic groups and gay people. They were beginning to develop sort of a rapport through the church.* [A young minister by the name of Ted McIlvenna and the Daughters of Bilitis were all hopped up on a group interrelational process which, I think, was called "situational ethics." This was a way of making traditional church attitudes (in this case Episcopal through a Joseph Fletcher, and Presbyterian through Ted McIlvenna, and United Church of Christ through Glide Memorial) flexible in dealing with the social-political community issues that were boiling over in various parts of San Francisco because of the flower children in June, there in 1967-68-69.] One of the churches--I think it was the Congregational Church--had citizens' committees on various things of issue in San Francisco.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The gays would have a parallel--

HARRY HAY: The gays would have a parallel group, and then occasionally they'd meet together; so they were beginning to develop a kind of dialogue between these citizens' groups within the church and the gay people within the church.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It sounds like the gays though were structuring themselves to-- They were sort of institutionalizing themselves in a mirror image of the-- -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

HARRY HAY: Of the hetero community. That's exactly--

MITCH TUCHMAN: Especially the hetero religious community.

HARRY HAY: At this point it's the religious-civic community.

MITCH TUCHMAN: That sounds like this way danger lies.

HARRY HAY: Well, you're quite right about that, but nevertheless this is a beginning. As a matter of fact, this is one of the reasons why San Francisco is structured the way it is now. And it has something to do with the fact that my claim, as you know, is that we are not heteros, and therefore when we imitate the heteros we do it badly. We either overdo or we underdo; usually we over-. I had been calling on people to get away from imitations of the heteros. But that's neither here nor there. That's for later. So, this is beginning to happen. So, as I say, these civic groups are beginning to have a dialogue between the two, but the gays are certainly into exact imitation of the hetero groups up here. However, the situation allows for itself, because of the forums within the Glide Memorial Foundation--it's the Methodist Church in San Francisco--and then the Church of Christ, and the United Church of Christ, which allows for similar things. Now, we didn't have parallel types of activities in L.A. between the churches and the civic groups. This is San Francisco, because, after all, San Francisco is still like New York: people live downtown. Many people lived downtown, while here they didn't. So the spread here gives for a different situation. All right. So, this is beginning to happen in San Francisco. And the women come down to report on this interesting dialogue that's going on between the CRH in San Francisco and these civic groups. They're beginning to say that this is the way you get power. You get power by getting people on commissions, and you begin to get people to see that there isn't that much difference between you and them and you have contributions to make. So, the women are moving in this direction in San Francisco, and they're trying to suggest the same thing to us down here, and we're balking on this because we feel that this is not the way to go and that we don't show how we're exactly the same. I had started-- Lawrence Lipton had written a book called The Erotic Revolution, which came out in the spring of '65, and I had done a review on the thing. When I was reading The Erotic Revolution, it was to me a revelation because I suddenly discovered what the heteros were up to. So, while most of the groups, and certainly all of the groups in San Francisco--the Mattachine, the Daughters of Bilitis, and so on--had been taking the attitude that we are exactly the same as everybody else except in bed--this was the old rallying cry of the sixties--as a result of reading The Erotic Revolution by Lawrence Lipton, I came up with the announcement at one of the western homophile conferences--I think in the fall of '66--that in my considered judgment, and having read this book, I decided that we were exactly different from them except in bed, that in bed they were doing the same things we were doing. But outside of that, we were entirely different from them. So we're exactly the opposite of them except in bed. This was something that kind of blew everybody away because they weren't prepared to handle it, not then. Anyway, at the Aldersgate conference, the women kept saying, among other things, that women think differently about this and women think differently about that and the women think differently about something else, and I suddenly thought, "Well, you know, we've never heard from the women." Always there are women and men in the different groups, and usually the women are outnumbered by the men, say, three to two. And whatever positions they have on various things usually get outweighed by what the rest of it is because we're moving democratically, and all this. So, on one evening--this was to be a four-day conference; I think it was the evening of the third day--I scheduled a workshop between eight to ten to meet in a certain place, and it was going to be on the women. "The Women Speak" was the way I held it, and I invited all the key women. They were all there: Del Martin, Phyl Lyon, Helen Sanders, Sten Russell; these would be the four leading voices in the Daughters of Bilitis on the West Coast. They were all there, and a couple of other women from San Francisco whose names now escape me. I don't remember. And, you know, we sat in this room for two hours, and they couldn't come up with anything, not anything. And the reason why, as they explained much later, was that no one had ever asked them before. They had never been asked to speak from a woman's point of view in the gay movement. This has never happened, and they didn't know what to say. Now, for instance, when the women came together, they had all kinds of women's things to talk about. But this was a general group and there were men present, and they didn't know what to say. Finally, about a quarter of ten--in other words we sat for an hour and a half, and nothing happened--and about a quarter of ten Del Martin finally said, "I know this is embarrassing, and I don't know what to do because we have never had to formulate it, but I think maybe the thing to say is that you don't see us. You see your projection of what you want women to be, but that isn't who we are." This is when I first began to understand what the projection is all about. And I said, "In other words, we put a figure out there with some hooks on it, and then we hang this projection on you. Then so long as you hide behind that projection, we're talking to that projection. We're not talking to you." Del said, "Yes, that would be a very good way of saying it. This is what you do. You make of me your mother or what you want your mother or your teacher or somebody you admire very much in the female world to be. You put that figure out there, and so long as I move all the things and make the mouth work and hang the things, fine. But that's who you see. You don't see me." And then she said, "Maybe I shouldn't be saying that to you gay brothers. I am saying that of the men I work with. I'm talking about the Reverend Caldwell or the men in Glide Foundation. They do it, and maybe I think that this is what I do to you also." She said, "But this was the first time we have ever been asked to formulate this. So, consequently, that's the best I can come up with." Now, this is in '67. By 1970, Del Martin will have finished this thinking in such a way that she will write a rough letter, whereupon the women simply divorce themselves entirely from the men's movement, and they begin the separatist thing. But this is the beginning of it. I just thought I'd mention it because it was very interesting that in the seventeen years, shall we say, since the beginning of the movement until then, the women had never been given an opportunity to speak. And because they hadn't been given an opportunity to speak, when the time came to speak, they didn't know how to formulate it then. I mean, this is an example of what total oppression can do, because these are wonderfully interesting, interesting articulate people, who at that particular moment on that particular issue couldn't be articulate at all. Yet in three years, they were able to become wonderfully articulate, and the whole thing began to come out. But the point was that this is how you start: you start from wherever you are. You do what you can. I mention it only because people sort of say, "Well, were the women in the movement?" Yes, they were. And they were very passionate women in the movement long before this. At the very beginning, in my first Mattachine, there were probably ten women, and as a matter of fact, we had one very valuable, very articulate woman on our steering committee right from the start--or not from the start, but in the third month, I guess, after the start--and she was there for three years.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who was that?

HARRY HAY: Ruth Bernhardt, the fine photographer in San Francisco. When the first Mattachine failed and the second one took over, Ruth withdrew from the movement, and insofar as I know, she has never been near it since. She's now one of the great women photographers in America. She was then too, but nobody knew it then. She was just beginning.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you want to go to this-- Well, I mentioned because you mentioned a pamphlet written by you and John in the earlier period. Perhaps you could tell me not only what it was, but how you happened to--the context in which it arose and then what it was.

HARRY HAY: Well, it came as a result of the summer conference in San Francisco and the sort of self-revelations that we made in that religious retreat we had with the ministers, the formulations that we came up with. We began to conceive of the Circle of Loving Companions at that moment as a service organization. I might add that in that summer conference, in those three or four days when that national conference was going on, there were a number of young people who came, who were not necessarily hustlers, who were simply relating to vanguard because it was the only avenue by which they could enter the discussion. Suddenly, John and I conceived of the Circle of Loving Companions as the voice of dissent. We invited anyone who wished to speak, particularly on a dissenting point of view, to speak in our name. Several times we took the microphone, turned it over to young speakers who had things they wanted to speak about as teenagers, or as adolescents or as young people, issues that were not being addressed by anyone else, and so they wanted to bring such things up. For example, there was a long, long complicated discussion in this period on child molestation. In 1966, for some reason or other, something had come up. There must have been a national case of some sort, and homosexuals were being referred to as child molesters.

MITCH TUCHMAN: All of them?

HARRY HAY: En masse. It happens every so often. Every time they have another child molestation case, and it happens to be that a gay man, then all gay men turn out to be child molesters. However, nine cases out of ten, the child molester is a hetero, and then they don't say all heteros are child molesters. We were working on that, but at the moment everybody's feeling very guilty.* [Well, not everybody, but certain speakers from P.R.I.D.E. in L.A.; from SIR in San Francisco; from Dorian in Seattle; One, Inc., in Chicago; and a speaker from a group in Connecticut. In the words of San Francisco's paper Cruise News and World Report, "the meat-rack cruisers," they, in the main, were the ones feeling guilty and exhorting each other. Or they were saying that] maybe the gays were -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. overdoing it. And they were getting too conscious of themselves, and so on, and saying we should stay away from it or we should discipline ourselves or we should take on the responsibility of reducing the image. One of the teenagers wanted to speak. I was delighted he did want to speak because I wanted somebody to come up with the opposite point of view. It was that particular conference that I came up with my formulation the first time, and when I simply got up and said, "Well, I was a child molester," and everybody [gasped in horror]. I said, "I was a child and I molested an adult until I found out what I wanted to know." I said, "In most of the cases that I've ever been able to think of, and I want you guys to think about this too: most child molestation cases, if the guy's fourteen or over, it's the kid who wants to know; it's not the adult who's just dying to get into his pants. It's probably the other way around. It's the kid who badgers and works it out until finally, all of a sudden, the adult lets him know what he wants to know." But I had said this, and I'm a fifty-four year old man saying that;* [although I'm making the point, I'm not necessarily giving it the passion and weight it deserves.] --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. This youngster wanted to speak from San Francisco, and so we allowed him to speak in the name of the Circle of Loving Companions, and he did. He was about nineteen, I suppose, and he described exactly the same thing: what he had done when he was fifteen, and how, for instance, his family, who had known something about this, badgered and badgered and badgered and badgered to get him to talk, and he wouldn't. Then eventually he got thrown out by his family, not because they knew about him, but because he refused to testify against someone else. So he was giving an example of this and saying that all the kids he knew--He knew of a lot of cases, and this was exactly the same situation too. He was saying this whole sort of holier-than-thou attitude that some of the older homophiles were taking was all wrong. This was not the way to go about it. And the women became interested in this point too because, you see, the women found themselves much more interested in what the kids had to say than in what their older purchasers had to say. So, as I said, as a result of opening our microphones to the voice of dissent-- And on several committees later on that we found ourselves on where the women weren't adequately represented, we invited women to speak through the Circle, and they did that also. So in the fall of '66 we came back, and the Tangents group decided that they wanted to do some kind of a-- I don't actually remember why we did all of this, but on one day in October a number of different groups were invited to-- Oh, you, I forgot all about something that happened also in '66, but also again it happened in '67. We used to have here yearly, something called a Renaissance pleasure Faire, and it usually was put on as a benefit for KPFK.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This thing where you were handing—

HARRY HAY: OK, did I already talk about that?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, you have.

HARRY HAY: OK, well, that was also in '66, and we had handed out some things on sexual liberation. In October of that year, for some reason--I think it was again in connection with something else for KPFK--the Tangents group, which was right around the corner from KPFK, decided to have some kind of a booth or a bazaar or a fair. We wanted to have different homophile organizations and groups give out literature on what they did and how they served the community, and so on. So, John and I wrote up a pamphlet on the Circle of Loving Companions as a service organization because of the fact that we were no longer young, and so, consequently, we were concerned with servicing and counseling, giving help and comfort wherever we could, and so on. And we wrote this little pamphlet that had to do with ourselves as a service organization and how we saw how older homophiles could act as a servicing organization not only for gays but to the community as a whole. This is what this pamphlet does. It has a number of formulations, including the one that I gave you on love as a way of seeing, and a number of different points. I still have copies of that pamphlet, and I'll add it--

MITCH TUCHMAN: You gave me some material initially that I have in a file here.

HARRY HAY: But I doubt that I gave you that. I don't think I would have thought of it then.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, I see. OK.

HARRY HAY: So, I'll add it to your collection of stuff.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I want to ask a question (I don't know if this is the appropriate time): when Word Is Out comes along, which is much later, you had said when I took this initial set of notes that the sixties were not properly handled.

HARRY HAY: Yeah.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I wonder if you want to discuss that while you're talking about the sixties rather than wait till the seventies.

HARRY HAY: What I really wanted to do, I wanted to give you this whole story on CRH.* [What I really wanted to do was to try to help people understand how differently we had to see ourselves before we had made our first confrontations, before we had dreamed up words and phrases by which we could see ourselves as legal, before we had developed ways and means to see our needs as valid civil rights. I mentioned a few pages back that our L.A. motorcade demand that Congress had no right to invade private conscience was not being said in so many words even by the left. All our picket lines up until that motorcade--East Coast or West Coast--had been pleas. This was a demand, a confrontation. L.A.'s second confrontation was the Black Cat picket line of February 1967. By February, a number of us had listened to the arraignment pleas of many of the New Year's Eve Black Cat and New Faces raids experiences. The Los Angeles Times fifteen-year-old policy of conspiracy of silence was no longer important. Tangents magazine for February had a story on the raids. P.R.I.D.E. Newsletter had a paragraph, the L.A. Free Press had full coverage and pictures. Many of us had begun to perceive that the vicious crowd-control maneuvers the police were uncorking against the blacks, the Chicanos, and now the thousands of -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. flower children who nightly hung out at Venice or along Sunset Strip, beginning at the Fifth Estate, had been first tried out and perfected against the as yet helpless, as yet still invisible and voiceless gay community. In February of 1967, gays, blacks, Chicanos, flower children shared their angers with one another and decided they would demonstrate together on one night. There were five demonstrations: South-Central, Eastside, Venice, Sunset Strip, the sidewalk of Sunset Boulevard outside the Black Cat. The Black Cat demonstration was coordinated by SCCRH. It was no longer a respectful plea (and for this SCCRH lost several of the bourgeois churches, Hancock Park Lutheran, and Glendale Methodist). It was a demand that police brutality be stopped, that illegal search and seizure be stopped, and that police entrapment and provocation be stopped. There were one hundred and fifty in the line that night and three to four hundred people attending the rally and bull-horned speeches after. Morris Right, who stood on the sidewalk with a sign that said something like "Heteros in sympathy with gay concerns," was pushing members of his househould into the line right smack in front of me. I'll never forget his saying to Lee Ditters, "Stand straight and really march. You're ten feet tall tonight." He was right. We all were ten feet tall and saying, "¡No pasarán!" I wanted to give you a whole- rounded picture on what SCCRH in L.A. was trying to do. I wanted to give this whole story.] I wanted to give you this whole story on the idea that we were already now beginning to go out to universities and even high schools and talk in the hygiene classes and in the sex classes about what it means to be gay and how gay people see and how they relate and that this isn't something that comes about because of a bossy father or a recessive mother, or what all the rest of it is, but how we began to recognize our differences at a very early age, and so on. We already were beginning to talk about this, and so that there must be at this point-- From here, there are probably ten or twelve people, including women, because women went also, who are going to high schools in Los Angeles County, in Orange County: for instance, in Laguna, Orange, Santa Ana. We're going to San Pedro and Wilmington. We're going to San Juan Capistrano. There were a couple of groups in San Diego, I mean, a couple of people in San Diego, places where we would go. We would be invited to [University of California] Irvine, Cal State, different community colleges, and so on, to speak. So that we're already beginning to reach out. We're beginning to give ideas that there are people who can be doing things. A number of our speakers go out and discover that, in talking to high schools in 1968 and '69, that the kids were already accepting this point. For instance, one of the things that I found rather interesting was my own daughters, who were [in 1964-65 and again in 1966-67] going to high school in the [San Fernando] Valley. One of my daughters said to me that she liked to go out with Joey because he's such a good dancer. I knew that she went dancing on Friday night; so I said, "Well, why don't you ever invite Joey to go with you to the--?" They went to that AJC, that American Jewish Congress meetinghouse that's out there in van Nuys or Sherman Oaks. They had dances and things on Thursday nights and Saturday nights. I said, "Why don't you invite Joey to go with you to that?" And Kate, my younger daughter, said, "He can't. He's gay, and he goes bowling with a gay group on Thursdays." Now, this is my youngest daughter telling me, and this is 1967. It's such an open, easy way of talking, but I suddenly realized that the kids already are beginning to recognize this, and our speakers are beginning to find that this is the case: that the kids already have sorted themselves out. The kids who are gay go on Wednesday nights to a gay group, and they dance there, and then they go somewhere else; so they're not available as they might have been before. So, there's a lack of homophobia among the kids themselves, which is not necessarily reflected in either their teachers or their parents. So that when we begin to talk at these places, the questions we get back and the attitudes we get back from the various groups on the campuses by '68 and '69 begin to reflect a wide difference from what the speaker expects when he goes. So that we begin to recognize that a good deal of the work that we had been doing in the earlier parts of the decade were already beginning to bear fruit in all these various areas. So that there are a great many people who are already beginning to see sexuality and their own sexuality as not the bugaboo that it had been in the forties and fifties. So that they're already-- And when, all of a sudden, Stonewall breaks and the whole idea of groups begins to make its appearance, there'll automatically be groups forming all over.* [I should insert here because I don't think I've ever mentioned this before that in practically all the cities of, say 50,000 and over, there are by this time gay cliques, and certainly in San Diego, in Los Angeles, and in the Bay Area, social gay organizations who are pretty exclusively pleasure groups, such as the royal courts. In -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. San Francisco, we have contact with them through the Tavern Guild. Individual bar owners who belonged to SIR, like Bill pfath, conceived of a union of gay bar owners and waiters to build a war chest to help each fight the state Alcohol and Beverage Commission who oversaw the state's liquor licenses. The ABC was always trying to close down some gay bar or other, even as ABC and the different cities' boards of health would gang up occasionally and close down a bathhouse. In the fifties and sixties, the bathhouses are not yet the posh health club-type meeting places they became with the unlimited clientele unpenned by gay liberation. It would be through Bill Pfath, in San Franciso, that many of us in L.A. would first meet José Sarria, eventually to be known as the First Empress of San Francisco. In L.A., we had contact with the royal courts and pleasure groups. Through Don Slater's Tangents group, a Tavern Guild tried to form here in L.A. but it never developed the scope of the one in San Francisco--mainly, I think because of Roy Harrison's GGRC (Guys and Gals Recreation Club more intimately known as the "Gay Guys Riding Club"), a strictly commercial and quite successful underground enterprise, which didn't make a massive fortune mainly because the payoffs to the police and necessary public officials were so extensive. GGRC would have membership meetings a couple of times a year, at one hotel's private dining room or another, to discuss how to whip up support for the huge Halloween or valentine or Spring balls which would be fundraisers for the war chest. Otherwise the meetings would be sounding boards for the kinds of activities the membership wanted next--whether to take over a "B-picture" western town movie set (which were always available for rent), or to lease a yacht and go cruising around the backside of Catalina for a weekend. Such activities were mainly for the crowd with money, or for the new crop of cute numbers in town who had caught the attention of the crowd with money. None of these groups, or activities, were in any way political—except in San Francisco when the Tavern Guild would put on a bash to raise money to fight a court case or to publicize some event that SIR was putting on. Or except, in L.A., when through the Tangents group--we wanted well-wishers to line the streets when the 1966 motorcade went through--it may have been people from GGRC who took the movies we saw of that parade which we've not been able to find again since. GGRC here in L.A. occasionally made soft porn, semiprofessional home movies which they'd show, by invitation, say four times a year. Which were sexy and outrageous and great fun, particularly if you knew the people. One of them that John and I saw, back about 1964- 65, seems to have been the pilot plot for the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford opus, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?] Now, I can talk about that, but I wonder if we ought to get into that today, which is the Stonewall explosion.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Well, I think that our idea had been to cover the sixties up to Stonewall.

HARRY HAY: Oh, we're not going to go beyond that?

MITCH TUCHMAN: It's up to you.

HARRY HAY: What I'll do is, I will cover up through the Stonewall explosion, which comes to, let's say, March of 1970, because it's what happens when this carries over into that. [tape recorder turned off] I'm not only talking about Word Is Out, I'm talking about, for instance, the many histories that have been written. A guy by the name of Don Teal wrote one on the gay militant. There were other books that were written. Most of these were written by people on the East Coast who assumed that everything always happened on the East Coast, and there were faint reflections on the West. The truth of the matter is that almost all of the important things that have happened on the West Coast have flowed east again. I would say in a way that one of the reasons why that probably happened--and this, I think, probably may be difficult for some people to swallow--but we're far more adventurous here on the West Coast than the East Coast is. We don't have any qualms about trying new ideas.

1.20. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE TWO JANUARY 22, 1982

MITCH TUCHMAN: Are you suggesting that the histories and Word Is Out both tended, then, to reflect the East Coast perception of the development of the movement?

HARRY HAY: Well, in the first place, Word Is Out was never conceived of as covering the history of the movement. This was simply happenstance because that's whom they were talking to. They were talking to "the horse's mouth," as it were; so they asked me those questions. But Word Is Out rather prided itself on the fact that they were not going to be political. As a matter of fact, this is one of the great criticisms that came up in the gay movement: the fact that they weren't political. But they hadn't intended to be. Peter Adair and his associates, and certainly his sister and mother, are not necessarily politically thinking people. They were concerned with the gay movement and gay people but not as a political entity, not as a political force in the community. So, as far as Word Is Out, this is really not an issue at all. I did discuss a great deal about the movement in the Word Is Out. I gave them, oh, five or six hours of tape, of which maybe a small portion got into the book and none of it got into the movie. I'm sorry about that. I wish there had been more, but then I can't really fault them for that because this is not really what they intended to cover in the first place. I really am talking about the various articles, and I am talking about the articles and dissertations and even books that came out of the gay movement in the middle to latter part of the seventies which always just assumed that nothing ever happened on the West Coast that hadn't already been invented on the East Coast. Here I felt that the sixties had been woefully handled, because the point had always been made-- Really the point had been made over and over again that nothing ever happened in the gay movement before Stonewall. The point that I had been making for quite some time was that powder trains had been laid all over the country before Stonewall, or Stonewall simply wouldn't have led off anything. Of course, Stonewall happened in--what?--in June of '69, and nothing very much happened before December of '69. But all of a sudden, in December of '69 things began to happen--pop, pop, pop, pop, pop--all over the place, and this I can tell you about because I know how it happened and why it happened. But this, in a way, really is another story. I don't want to get into that today. That's a new chapter. I did want to get into the teaching we had done in the sixties. I did want to get into the fact that because we were speaking out in different high schools-- Although I think we started doing it in Kansas City; they were doing it in Saint Louis, they were doing it certainly in Portland and Seattle, they were doing it in Minneapolis, they were doing it up in Dayton, Ohio. I don't know much about Cleveland.

MITCH TUCHMAN: These cities that you're mentioning: is it because you're familiar with the people who were working in those places?

HARRY HAY: I'm only familiar with things happening in them but not necessarily with the people. By this time, there were monthly magazines like the Tangents magazine, monthly magazine, and newsletters coming out from different places. For instance, the L.A. Free Press began to handle material. John-- Oh, dear, I saw his name, but I can't remember it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Not Art Kunkin?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, Art Kunkin did handle quite a bit of stuff. Jerry Hopkins in his column used to handle stuff. There was a guy who put out a paper called Open City; John [Bryan]--I can't remember his last name all of a sudden now. He put it out for a year. It was a very good paper. He carried a lot of gay things. The organization called P.R.I.D.E. put out a monthly newsletter, which was known as the P.R.I.D.E. Newsletter, and I think by late '67 or early '68, they changed it to the Los Angeles Advocate. Then that became the Advocate paper, and then it went on and then was bought by Goodstein in '75.

MITCH TUCHMAN: By whom?

HARRY HAY: David Goodstein in '75. The L.A. Advocate became the Advocate generally and began to handle national news by, I guess, by late '69, early 1970. There were all kinds of different activities going on by that time. As a result of the sixties, as a result of the whole counterculture thing of the sixties, gay people suddenly began to find themselves being sort of tapped into and moving in cooperation with and in adjunct to other things that were going on in the counterculture movement. For example, in just the turn of 1966-67, two little bars that we had on East Sunset Boulevard (not very far from what is known as Sunset Junction, just maybe a couple of blocks west of that)-- There were two bars together, one called New Faces and one called the Black Cat. On New Year's Eve 1966, the cops pulled a real provocation in that bar. A couple of the plainclothesmen got up on one of the walls and started to pull down posters and signs that were on the wall. For no reason. People began to protest their doing this, and at this time they began to shove. They created what amounted to all the events of a riot in that bar. Then they arrested everybody. It was a freezing cold night. They arrested everybody and forced them to lie down, faces to the sidewalk, outside in this freezing weather for about a half-hour before they finally piled them into the paddy wagon and took them away. So that the gay community as such protested this. We all went down to the trials at the courthouse and generally acted a sympathetic audience while they were being arraigned, and so on. I think at that time, of the thirty-two men who were arrested or something, twenty-four people pleaded not guilty. So, there was going to be a major trial out of this. As a result of it, we decided to throw a protest around--* [As a result of the trial developments, the SCCRH, L.A.'s gay coordinating group of the period, decided to put on a protest demonstration against police brutality. The two bars themselves, the Black Cat and New Faces--two bars catering to gay customers, and side by side on the north side of Sunset Boulevard--in the area now known as Sunset junction, were not cooperating with their gay customers. They were being very friendly with the police instead. So we decided to put on a major protest demonstration and picket line in front of the two bars. In February of 1967, the L.A. police were beginning to provoke the young peoples' counterculture scene. One of the big hang-out places for the thousands of young people who thronged the Sunset Strip--from Crescent Heights west ------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. to La Cienega in this period—was a three- to four-story ramshackle building on the south side of Sunset Boulevard just west of Crescent Heights Boulevard which housed a coffee house called the Fifth Estate. On about the second or third level below the coffee house, was Art Kunkin's original office for the Free Press. It was the last Saturday night in January of 1967 or the first Saturday in February that the L.A. police pulled a shocking and major provocation of the mass of young people, totally blocking Sunset Boulevard from curb to curb in front of the Fifth Estate and on west. John and I had just bought some "mod" pants at Leidler & Leidler, who had a shop on Crescent Heights Boulevard about half a block south of Schwab's Drug Store. It must have been around nine p.m., the cops--in full riot gear--massed themselved literally into a flying wedge, and charged the crowd swinging their nightsticks. It was an incredible and horrible sight. The cops allowed no TV cameras nor newspaper photographers. They charged deliberately and it was obvious that they were intending to create a stampede, and that's exactly what happened. The strolling masses of young people were instantly transformed into a terrified mob of screaming, frantic, hysterical kids scrambling to dodge the relentlessly flailing nightsticks and trampling each other helplessly. The crowd in front of the Fifth Estate suddenly shoving west against the mass of strollers now packed into a tight crowd where some people were no longer able to stand upright. The cops were shoving youngsters into paddy wagons right and left. It was a real melee. So through the agency of the L.A. Free Press, the kids hanging out at Fifth Estate, and at the Ash Grove on Melrose, and at the Troubador on Santa Monica Boulevard, and at the Venice Ballroom at the beach and the Where, decided that on a given night--I've got the feeling that it was on a Thursday night, about the middle of February 1967, the counterculture youth movement decided to mount four major protests against police brutality simultaneously in four different points of the city. And the Free Press columnists like Art himself and Jerry Hopkins and John Bryan, who was working for Free Press in 1967, would coordinate. We of SCCRH informed L.A. Free Press that there wouldn't be four simultaneous protest demonstrations that night--there would be five--and that we at SCCRH would mount and maintain our demonstration against police abridging peoples' rights to gather and protest and against police brutality and we'd do ours in front of the two bars. We hoped that someone from L.A. Free Press would come and take our pictures too.] So that there was going to be a protest on Sunset Boulevard to protest the police action there. There was going to be a protest at Ocean Park. There was to be a protest somewhere, and, in South L.A. there was going to be a protest, and ours. There were five going on that one night. What happened was that groups of people would start out at one and go to the others all the way around. So, all of a sudden, we had our lines swell to about five hundred at one point as people came from different-- The ones came from South L.A. to join ours, and people from Sunset Boulevard to join ours, and then we went with them and joined theirs. There were these five groups simultaneously, and we're all working together with each other. It hadn't been planned; it was a sort of a thing that just happened.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Which of the two bars was the disturbance in: the Black Cat or New Faces?

HARRY HAY: I think the altercation was in the Black Cat, but both bars were raided. I mean, it happened in one, and then it spilled over into the other. But that Black Cat demonstration (which incidentally was addressed by Alex Smith of the First Methodist Church downtown; so therefore the CRH was involved in that too), Jim Kepner spoke. Mike Kinghorn spoke from P.R.I.D.E. I've forgotten who else. But it was an interesting line because it was the first time that Morris Right and any of his people ever did anything in the gay movement. They came and joined the picket line that night. I can remember very well because it happened he was pushing them into the line right in front of me. I remember he was saying to them, "Walk straight tonight because tonight you're ten feet tall." I remember because the kids were scared to death to be in a picket line. But anyway he was pushing them in. He himself didn't come into the line, but he was pushing others in.* [As a matter of fact, Morris stood on the curb, on the south side of Sunset. Our picket line circled in the street. Morris was holding a big sign that said something like "Heteros in sympathy with gay concerns." There was a picture of him with this sign somewhere around--maybe in the L.A. Free Press archives. Maybe even Don Slater at HIC [Homosexual Information Center] may have one. Anyway, I do know that the following year (1968) there was a dustup down at Lee Blaze's bar in Wilmington or San Pedro--and there was a gay protest picket line down there, too. And there was a picture of Morris and his "sympathetic heteros" for ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. that occasion also. I think Lee Blaze still has it--I think he had it on display at the Archives a year or so back.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: What had he done till then?

HARRY HAY: Well, Morris had been-- This is the middle of the period that John and I had been working on Morris. We'd been working on Morris since '65. We'd been trying to get him involved with a group, a very important group, a very important antiwar group, called the Dow Action Committee. The Dow Action Committee did outrageous things, and they were always getting into the newspapers, and they were always having confrontations with the police and the FBI. They picked out various Dow Chemical things, and they would lie down on the steps, or they would block entrances. They were doing nonviolent things of one form or another.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, he had been an activist?

HARRY HAY: Very, very active. This group swelled from-- It would drop down to fifteen or would swell to fifty. But Dow Action Committee was always doing something dramatic. And, of course, the truth of the matter was that all of the people who were in the Dow Action Committee, or most of the activists in the Dow Action Committee, were gay, but not openly so. They were clandestinely gay. But gay consciousness and gay inventiveness were certainly a part of their act, and so they were always doing these wonderful things that were calling attention to what Dow Chemical was doing. I guess the first people to call attention to Agent Orange might very well have been the Dow Action Committee. And this was Morris's group. They did wonderful jobs in this regard. But Morris, for instance, because of the fact that he was active in the antiwar movement, was always having big parties at his house. He had a house on West Fourth Street, just west of Figueroa, in the downtown area on West Fourth. It was not a very large house, but a great big, old yard. So, he was always having fund-raising parties in this yard. John and I would always go. And many, many times we were the token queers at the party. And, of course half the people at the party are gay, you understand. But because of the fact that they've got visiting firemen from the East and part of the antiwar movement and people who are anti-Vietnam or antiwar or whatever who would be visiting, we would get trotted out and introduced as "members of the gay community." And we would tell the visiting firemen what the gay community is doing. Now, here's Morris and all these other people all sitting back and being neutral about the whole thing. They're being straights at this moment, and we're being the token gays. You know, like the token blacks, and the token women, well, we were the token gays. I've been the token gay at a lot of Morris's parties, explaining to these people what the gay community is doing. At that time, I was also active in the Traditional Indian Land and Life Committee as well as the gay community; so I'm speaking with two hats on these things. But nevertheless, I just wanted to point out that I have been the token gay at Morris Right's parties, and this is kind of a funny situation. We used to say, "Morris, for Christ's sake, why don't you come out and do something?" Well, he did. As I said, he came into that picket line at the Black Cat on New Year's Eve of 1966-67.* [That multiple demonstration night I was describing to you at the Black Cat in mid-February of 1967.] Then in June of 1968, a guy by the name of Mike Hannon decided to run for district attorney. As you know, in the city we don't have partisan elections; so that you run on your own kind of thing. He came out of an office that had been doing wonderful work on draft evasion and on nonviolent draft resistance and conscientious objection and so on. So, I knew of him vaguely through this office. We had approached him on a number of issues, and he was very concerned about entrapment. He was very concerned about ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. the police and the sheriff being involved in what he considered illegal things, and he thought it was high time that there was someone in the district attorney's office who turned fair ear to this. He was willing to run on an antientrapment platform. So, John and I conceived of sort of a four-pronged citizens' committee to support Mike Hannon for district attorney on various things that he would stand for. So, we got ten people from the black community, we got ten people from the women's liberation, we got ten people from the Chicano community, and we had ten people from the gay community.* [He came out of the law office of J. B. Tietz, a firm who had specialized in antiwar issues, draft evasion cases, conscientious objection and nonviolent resistance. For years J. B. Tietz had been serving as one of the Traditional Indian Land and Life Committee counselors in the matter of the young Shoshone draft resistor Richard Williams, who insisted that the Treaty of Ruby Valley forbade Shoshones from taking up arms against a foreign state. We took this case to the Supreme Court but the Court declined to consider it.] And Morris Kight and two of the other members of his household were part of our committee of ten people from the ------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. gay community. So, as far as I know, this is the first time that Morris's name was added to a gay thing in a newspaper, and it was a half-page ad that we had in the L.A. Free Press. I remember it because John hand-lettered the whole thing. It was a very handsome ad.* [We had some very interesting people out of the black community, Margaret Whiter for instance, who knew their names were appearing on a 'Mike Hannon For District Attorney' ad with the names of gay people and names of prominent women, among the latter being a Chicano, Julia Luna Moret, and an American Indian urban activist, Stella Montoya. All the people whose names were on the ad knew the names were purporting to show we were acting all together.] We had some interesting people out of the black community who knew that they were appearing with blacks, Chicanos, Indians, and gay people, that they were all to be together on this one thing, in concert on this thing. It was just a nice thing. And then we got Mike Hannon to come and speak to us several times. We had a rally at Griffith Park one time, and we had him come and speak to that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What were you doing in this period? Had you retired from your job? -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

HARRY HAY: No, John and I manufactured kaleidoscopes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What about the job you had downtown though, that systems engineering job?

HARRY HAY: Oh, I left that job in '64 and came and joined John as a systems engineer in his little factory. I joined him in the summer of '64. In September of 1964 John's wife decided to find in me the other woman, and so she and I had sort of a contretemps, in which we came to sort of an armed truce which was to carry us through Christmas. Then Christmas of that year, John and I went to New Mexico and sort of scouted out the possibility of moving the factory to New Mexico and possibly setting it up in conjunction with one of the Indian pueblos that I knew there, because this pueblo was beginning to expand out and would be willing to build us a building so long as we brought an industry to their area. So, we were exploring the possibility of doing this, and we came home in January of '65, and John held his usual little board of directors' meeting of his little company around January 20, and right in the middle of it--I remember we were living in a little apartment right in the front of the factory on Washington [Boulevard]--and all of a sudden he comes in to me ashen-faced and said, "They've taken it away from me." It turned out that his wife had gotten together with her sister and his mother, and they had taken the factory away from John because of the fact that he was being under the undue influence of a dire person, namely me. So, he all of a sudden was being kicked out of the factory. He was kicked out as president, and he was kicked out as manager. Presumably he would come crawling back in short order, and everything would be fine because the kaleidoscope factory was his invention; they were making his patent. But he didn't. He and I worked out a-- I had an insurance policy, and I turned that in, and we lived on that for three or four or five months, and then we borrowed some money from my mother and lived on that for another two or three months. We eventually got the factory back. As a matter of fact, he worked out a divorce settlement, and as his half of it he got the factory back. For a while it was touch and go, and for a while it was very, very difficult. And I'd never been the other woman before. Anyway, I had to go through that experience. It was very difficult, very trying for both of us but also very good. We learned a lot about ourselves, about each other, and how to live, how to relate, and so on.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You didn't go to New Mexico at that time?

HARRY HAY: We didn't go to New Mexico because we had nothing to go to New Mexico with, you see. We didn't hold the patent; we didn't hold anything. We had to stay there. So, that plan came to nothing. We got the factory back in April or May of 1966, the following year around, and then we started moving in from there. Then John and I operated it together. I was able to use a lot of the systems engineering that I knew in various ways to improve it and develop new models and things of that nature. About the same time we-- This was the beginning of all the interesting counterculture things that began to happen on KPFK. There was a guy named peter Bergman, who had a program called "The Wizard of Oz." And "The Wizard of Oz" was sort of a radio talk show. All the kids who were beginning to revolt in one way or another were able to call "The Wizard of Oz" and ask all kinds of questions. A lot of the kids were already beginning to experiment with pot and LSD and so on, and so they're talking about their experiences over the air, and they're beginning to get advice by various people on various things. When they can't talk to their parents, they can talk to the wizard, and they can talk to other people as a result of that talk show. So, through that, one day on one of the things they mentioned something about a group of Indians, a group of Hopi Indians, who had come to town. They had talked about the plight of Indians, and so on. I had known Hopis myself—I think I discussed what we had done with the Hopis back in '27--so my ear was caught by that, and I wondered what that was all about. I went out to see my old friend Harry James, who had been the leader of that boys' organization long ago. He was still living out at Lake Fuller, something like that, in a place which now belongs to UCLA as a matter of fact, and I went to see him. He said, "There's something going on in the Hopi camp, and it's around this man Craig. I think that this group that you're talking about, this is something he started. I think there's trouble. You should go. You should go and check into it. You should make it your responsibility to go to find out about it." Having heard about it on KPFK, I called them, and they said they'd be having a meeting, and it would be up on the slopes of holy Mount Cahuenga. I thought, "Holy Mount Cahuenga? Well, what do you know about that? It turned out to be holy. I didn't know that." I go to this meeting, and it's a bunch of very interesting counterculture people of a whole variety of persuasions, and a couple of young people from San Francisco who are putting out a paper called the Oracle, who are a part of this Indian committee also. They're caught up in the Hopi prophecies, and so on. We liked the sound of the people and what they're talking about and what they're doing. It doesn't sound quite as ominous as my old friend had thought it was. I thought we would explore it further. And as only John Burnside can do, he immediately gets very wildly excited about these things, and he volunteers my services. Not me. He volunteers my services: "Oh, Harry would love to do this," and "Harry would love to do that." And he hadn't asked me whether I would or not. And I'm not too sure that I did want to, but nevertheless, as I said, I found myself being volunteered. They needed a place to meet inside instead of on the slopes of a mountain all the time, and so John said, "Well, why don't you come down, and maybe--"

MITCH TUCHMAN: Oh, the meetings in the factory?

HARRY HAY: --hold the meetings in the kaleidoscope factory. So this is how it all started. We started meeting in the kaleidoscope factory, and they just went on meeting for the next couple of years there. This took on a wide variety of activities of interest for us both. What was important here, in a way, was our contact with "The Wizard of Oz" put us also in contact with Art Kunkin in the Free Press for the Indian committee, if nothing else. But we also used to bring in various gay matters. At one point, a guy by the name of Jerry Hopkins, who had a column, had a column and a page as a matter of fact, in the Free Press, opens up a "head shop," as he called it, here on Westwood Boulevard, which he called Headquarters. And Headquarters decided that they liked kaleidoscopes, and so they used to buy a lot of our teleidoscopes and kaleidoscopes too. Eventually, then, every head shop in Southern California bought kaleidoscopes from us too; so that people like Jerry Hopkins and other people who were all involved with KPFK or with the L.A. Free Press were always coming into the kaleidoscope factory at least a couple of times a week for something, either for news on the Indians--what the Hopis were doing next--what's happening with kaleidoscopes, or buying stock for their things. And little by little, I got them to the place where I began to call them to account for various things that I would see of an antigay nature or not-a-very-friendly-to-gays-nature in the paper. And little by little, I was beginning to challenge them on a whole variety of things and begin to look at things in a very different way. I'd say, "Look, you are making a very great show of the fact that you are not bringing any of your parents' attitudes on anything. You are changing their attitudes on sexuality, on whether or not you should marry or you shouldn't marry, shacking up here, and doing all these various things. But why do you bring homophobia with you? Why don't you leave that one behind too?" Well, that was something I wanted to challenge them on. So, they began to think about this. They began to challenge. There was a group of kids who came down from Santa Barbara every couple of weeks; they had a shop up there. These were the type of people who were also very heavily into using LSD and pot as ways and means to confront and get rid of hang-ups. All of them were beginning to discover that they had the possibility--now this is interesting; I'd forgotten about this-- This is '67 and '68 when this was happening. These kids are beginning to discover that they have the possibility of a homoerotic attraction to each other, and they're a little worried about this. So, I'm finding myself about to counsel these kids and say to them, "Look, do you have a dream, or do you ever have a vision of the person whom someday you will meet and who will be the perfect person for you and you will spend your life with?" And they would say yes. Most of them had had that. And I would say, "Well, I want you to envision that image in your mind right now." And I'd say, "Who is it; a man or a woman?" And they'd say, most of them would say, "Well, it's a woman." And I say, "OK, if it's a woman, this is the person you're looking for, and someday you will find her. In the meantime, enjoy each other. Acts are only acts. So, enjoy your homoerotic relationships. Have no guilt about it because this is an exploration which is part of your consciousness. Only keep the clear blue flame at her feet clean because this is who you really are." The moment that they heard this, they could all relax. Then they would start coming back and telling me about the experiences they had had with each other, but without guilt at this point, because I said, "This is simply an exploration of who you are. This is only one of the many facets of you, but it doesn't mean that's who your personality is." So long as they didn't feel that their identity was attacked, they were OK. So, consequently, I began to see that possibly this is one of the entries by which we help people get rid of homophobia, because when they do not feel their identity attacked, then they're not in trouble any longer. This is something we're only beginning to face up to now, but I realize now that I was talking about it then, '68. That was almost twelve, fourteen years ago. I don't think anybody else in the gay movement was, but this was something I was very fascinated with because here were these young kids coming and talking to us very openly in ways that I'm sure they were not talking to anybody else. There might have been one or two gay people among them, but I rather think not. I think that these were simply people who were beginning to discover their own homoeroticism, which is now something that's beginning to surface among the draft resisters who are not gay but who are also not the typical macho men either. They are not competitive. They're not aggressive. They're gentle, but they are hetero; so that they begin to discover things about themselves. Their problem, again, is the problem of identity. If we can set their identity problems at rest, we can explore their whole nature, and this is fine. Now, what's interesting is that we may very well discover that homosexuality is a natural expression of heterosexual men, which is very possible. This simply means that they're capable of homosexual relations with each other and enjoying them. They are not gay. So long as they begin them, treating each other as sexual objects, of course, in the same way as they see and treat their young women. As I now am saying to them: gay people are a separate people from you, an alien people if you like. Once they hear that, they'll buy it because, after all, it doesn't attack their emotional-spiritual identity. Then we don't have a problem. So, anyway, I'm just simply bringing all that up because this is coming up in 1968 in my own consciousness. And from that, in that same period, I'm going to come up with the allegory, the metaphor that I need, which in 1970 will give me what I call the "gay window." It first appeared in the summer of '68, and just at this moment, in talking to you now, I'm wondering how much that had to do with these conversations I used to have with the young kids from Santa Barbara. Maybe that was the origin of it, and I haven't, up until now, wondered where it was, but I think that's it. I think that's where it came from. I think at the moment I'm run out.

1.21. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE JANUARY 26, 1982

HARRY HAY: In a way, if anything's important about the story that I've been telling all along, it's that I've been maybe trying to give you an idea of the diverse roots out of which the gay movement comes. In other words, it proceeded even in the sixties. Because things that have not been said, random things which have not been-- For example, probably as far as the counterculture movement was concerned, the flower children movement in San Francisco (which presumably culminates in the summer of '68 in what was known as the summer of love, I think, by most people throughout the country and by the media in general) begins probably with the publication in San Francisco by a couple of brothers out of the Haight of a paper called the San Francisco Oracle. And the Oracle was put out by men who were gay. There were an awful lot of people in the flower culture who were gay people. The Diggers were primarily gay men. These are things which are presumably not known, but nevertheless-- I know this is seldom mentioned, but it was pretty much a gay point of view. It was sort of the beginning of the gay window in a way. The whole perception, not the whole perception, but certainly one of the large perceptions of the Great Mother, the appreciation of the Great Mother, or mother nature or spirit and so on, is sort of a projection of the Indian movement, the American Indian movement, and of the classic Greek myths. The way of seeing the Great Mother, is to a large extent a figment, shall we say, of the gay vision, into which the counterculture people, men and women, found themselves fitting very nicely. As we ourselves, John and I, have learned in the last few years, we began to recognize that so many of the philosophers who have written a version of what we call the human condition, we're going to be discovering now are gay men. We're talking about how the whole human race is seen from the gay point of view. So that it is not surprising to see that this particular beautiful sort of counterculture point of view might have come out of the gay vision in 1965, '66. So, this is sort of a diverse thing that I'm talking about. Other forces that came into this thing in '67 and '68: there was a thing that was quite important in the thinking of the counterculture, one of the great products of the counterculture probably was a committee that was known as the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life, and out of that particular one comes the whole traditional Indian movement, and out of it also comes the American Indian Movement, and out of it comes the paper known as Akwesasne Notes. All of this, again, has to be seen as a combined contribution of not only hetero vision, counterculture hetero vision but also gay vision as well. There were a number of gay people who contributed enormously to that whole movement, that whole way of seeing, and the committee itself actually openly modeled itself on the original Mattachine Society by operating-- Instead of operating by unanimity, as Mattachine did, they operated by consensus.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Which movement are you speaking of that operated on a model: the counterculture or the Indian Land and Life?

HARRY HAY: The Indian Land and Life Committee, which is considered probably one of the most enduring results of the counterculture because it had far-reaching effects that went into the next period and are still being noticed now, for instance, in the Native American Fund and the American Indian Movement and other things of that nature, which are all products of that time. They have to be seen as a combination, an open combination of young counterculture hetero people and gay people because, as I said, the committee itself operated on the basis of saying-- I had told them, for instance, how Mattachine operated and said, "Unanimity is too slow. Try using consensus." So that they did use consensus, but they were always talking-- Whenever they got into a jam, they always said, "In that Mattachine movement that you had, did you ever have a problem like this?" And we'd go at it and look at it. So, again, these were all part and parcel of it, and all of this is beginning to move forward towards what is eventually going to be known as Stonewall. By this time we had talked about gay things in Indian movements from here across the country--here, in Nevada, in the state of Washington, in New York--and there had been a gay person, an open gay presence in all of these places, where maybe there hadn't been a gay presence before, where already now it's beginning to appear and it's beginning to contribute. It's beginning to be noticed that it's giving a contribution somewhat different from what other people give.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How is this contribution channeled? I mean, for myself I can't remember, for instance, hearing about or being truly cognizant of Indian Land and Life in the sixties or in the seventies.

HARRY HAY: Well, you yourself might not have been, but for example, there were national TV programs, for example, on which the Hopi--Rolling Thunder, for instance, who eventually begins to travel with Bob Dylan--were flashed coast to coast, giving programs, talking about prophecy, talking about the American Indian way of moving, and so on. Great numbers of people were very much concerned with and very much interested in it. High schools all of a sudden began putting on such programs. Colleges were concerned with these things. National projects took place. There was a case of American Indians who said that their treaties with the United States government, signed in the middle or the latter part of the nineteenth century, forbade them to take up arms ever again under any circumstances, and one case such as that of a young man who was drafted and who refused to accept the draft on the basis of this Indian treaty-- this was the Treaty of Ruby Valley in this particular case--Richard Williams's case went to the Supreme Court in 1969. Janet McCloud of the Nisqualli Indian people took the fishing rights to the Supreme Court with the help of Marion Brando. These were national cases. I don't know why-- If you saw them, maybe you saw them and didn't pay any attention to them because this wasn't your particular field, but I would say that thousands, maybe even millions of people knew about these things. Whenever the L.A. Free Press, which was a fine paper in the sixties under Art Kunkin, came out with Hopi Indian prophecies on a centerfold, or something like that, they published hundreds of thousand of copies, and these were immediately picked up free of charge, as it were, because the Liberation News Service allowed for that, and picked up by every counterculture paper across the country. My guess is that millions of copies of this went out. For instance, when the American Indian Movement started with the ruckus at Wounded Knee in '72 and '73, they got offers of support from all over the world. I mean, people were writing in from Australia and from Berlin and from South America and Italy and everyplace else.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What aspects of that movement then did you feel percolated into the gay movement?

HARRY HAY: It didn't percolate into the gay movement. The point is that people who were active in the gay movement were active in it, and so, consequently, they made their own particular contributions along the line. In my particular case, I acted in the berdache position, helping a hetero medicine man get back together with his hetero chief when neither one could afford to lose face. I would step in between and say it was my fault, you know, anything to get these guys back together again. I had one conversation that was going on between Rolling Thunder in Carlin, Nevada, and Oscar Johnny in Elko, Nevada. Now, Carlin and Elko, Nevada, are 50 miles apart, but they're both talking to me 750 miles to the south, long distance, collect on my bill. And I'm getting these two guys back together again in the Shoshone tribe. These are the types of situations that I could do and did. Nevertheless, these are not of any great moment now except that the Treaty of Ruby Valley and the redivision of the land that's going on with the Shoshone--this is now-- I don't know what court it's in. It's in one of the courts--federal district court or somewhere--even at the present time. It just so happens that I'm the person who found that original map. This was one of the contributions of the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life, which met in the kaleidoscope factory. It's hard to say, for instance, this is the gay contribution per se, except it represents a kind of way that we have of looking at things. We gay people have a way of looking at hetero problems and saying, "Well, you know, it's interesting, but there are certain aspects of this that these people are not looking at because they probably, let's say, their pride forbids them to ask certain questions." Well, we don't have any problems with hetero pride; so we can ask the questions, and we do, and all of a sudden sometimes turn up some surprising information that nobody else has thought of. As a matter of fact, we went out to UCLA as I remember, and we were looking up some information on Ruby Valley and found a mention-- I think it was the name of a surveyor. I had said, "Well, if he was a surveyor and he was well known, there'd have to be maps that he made that must be on record, and I would think they would probably be on record in the state of Nevada." I've forgotten how we looked this stuff up, but somehow or other we did this, and we worked it through a man who was acting as our constitutional lawyer. He was the man who took the Richard Williams case to the Supreme Court.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who was that?

HARRY HAY: As a matter of fact, I just found a copy of that this morning. It's right next to the UCLA Law Review. Berg his name is. Charles Berg in Beverly Hills. With the help of Charles Berg, we were able to get at old federal records that were part of the War Department because they were survey maps that had been made. One of them was the general area as it was known at the time. It was the basis for the treaty of what was known as Ruby Valley. We found that particular map and had it copied in large copies and turned it over to the Indians. This, again, was sort of a contribution that was made, shall we say, by a gay man looking at situations and picking up little cracks in the sidewalk that nobody else was looking at and all of a sudden discovering that this was where our information was. The maps that they're using at the present time are the ones that we got Charles Berg to make copies of; and I had the copies made out of the kaleidoscope office. So, in other words, it's a long, roundabout situation, but nevertheless, here these people had been fighting like cats and dogs, and nobody had sought to find where the maps were.

MITCH TUCHMAN: The original material.

HARRY HAY: Yeah. Probably by this time, had they thought of it, they couldn't have mentioned that they'd thought of it because it would have been to lose face for "why didn't you think of it sooner?" So, again, the gay man says, I had nothing to lose in that situation; so I could offer it--and I did. It made me a laughingstock, as it were, among the Indian people for a while because "why hadn't I thought of it before?" But I had nothing to lose; so, consequently, I simply said so. I said, "I don't care if you laugh or not. The point is we have the maps. The maps are important. Let's go with that." This situation happened a number of times, and eventually Indian people, Indian men, particularly ones who needed to cry-- They couldn't cry in front of their own people, but they could cry in front of me because, after all, I was a queer and that didn't count; so they could cry. So, I became the sopping cloth for a number of Indians who felt terribly pushed around by their own Indian people. Presumably Indians don't do things like this, you see: they're not unkind to each other; they are not pushy with each other. The hell they aren't! They're just as homophobic and they're just as "white man" as anybody else is. I know because they would tell me about it because they didn't lose face to cry in front of a queer. This was their attitude in a way: the berdache is the person outside the village. He isn't a man, and so, therefore, they could unburden. Well, it's the same thing as what happens in a confessional with a priest because the priest is not usually a human being; he's something other: he's an institution. The berdache, the medicine man, the queer priest, in that respect is an institution too. And so, consequently, you don't lose face to talk to an institution. So, this was a service that, as a member of the Traditional Indian Land and Life Committee and as a spokesperson, I served to a great many people. So that what has happened is that, all of a sudden, Indians and people close to the Indian movement who used to say that we didn't have any use for queers, finally decided that Scotch queers who were interested in Indians were probably different. Any way to work out classifications makes it possible for you to say, "Yes, well, I can understand that," and I still don't lose face to myself." Oh, the heteros are so funny in this regard, and the Indians are no different than the white man in that regard. So, this is, again, part and parcel of the material. What is actually happening is that the idea of thinking about gays as other than a criminal act is now percolating into many areas of the country. This is what I'm trying to suggest, and because of the fact that people, all kinds of people, are coming at the Indian situation, as they did with Buffy Sainte-Marie and all the various things that came out about the Indians in '67, '68, '69, and the films that are being made--all the avant-garde filmmakers are doing things with the Indians and the return of the buffalo, and all the sort of romanticism begins to appear in that time--in all of this there was a certain amount of the gay window appearing. Things are coming forward. John and I, for instance, move around openly as a couple during all this time. We are photographed as a couple. I mean, everybody else have their girlfriends and boyfriends, and John and I are together. We would sleep together in the same car. We sleep together in the same sleeping bag. We go all kinds of places, and we are together always. We appear on radio shows, and we appear on radio shows as gay people, but with the same pair; so that little by little people are becoming accustomed to this. They're beginning to be aware of the fact that we are an inseparable pair, and this is something that they're beginning to look at and recognize and respect. So, again, these things are beginning to appear. Where before they had been hidden, where before they had been clandestine, where before we had always pretended to be something else, we didn't do that. Whenever we felt like holding hands, we did. We're simply introducing the idea, without necessarily fanfaring it, in all kinds of places, where now when they talk about it, they're not going to be able to deny the fact that these are gay people and that they're making a gay contribution. I mean, this is all I'm saying. I'm always talking about the need to understand the climate, the feeling of repression, the feeling of fear, the very real threats in which we lived in the period, say, prior to 1969. I think maybe one of the best things that you might have that's available, certainly to students at UCLA, is the UCLA Law Review, Volume 13, Number 3, that was published in March of 1966. In that is a huge project by Justice Stanley-- No, the foreword is Justice Stanley Mosk-- It's called "The Consenting Adult Homosexual and the Law: An Empirical Study of Enforcement and Administration in Los Angeles County." But the truth of the matter is, it's a six-part project, a very extensive study. In the earlier parts of it, they discuss law enforcement and the legal position of the homosexual in all the different states of the Union. And so you're dealing with the United States in the way things are seen and therefore what law enforcement's all about and what the attitudes are as far as justice and cases are concerned.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How central would you say that the treatment by law enforcement agencies of homosexuals is to the entire society's perception of homosexuals?

HARRY HAY: Well, probably not too different because a great deal of this material is the material that would appear in the media.

MITCH TUCHMAN: In other words, arrests and raids and--

HARRY HAY: Arrests and what the police have to say about the case and how the case is being looked at in the courts, what the arguments on both sides of the thing might be.* [For instance, in the Los Angeles Times or in the Oakland Tribune in San Francisco's East Bay area you're still going to read about trials concerning some poor, frightened, little queen who's been picked up for having sex with some consenting adult behind a fence somewhere. And the judge will be quoted as thundering down, "This is the most heinous, the most appalling story of human degradation I've ever had before this bench. I'm only sorry the law doesn't permit me to put you away for life ..." Etcetera, etcetera.] -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Where do you think the police attitudes develop? Are the police, in essence-- Do they lead the rest of the population in attitudes toward homosexuals? That is, if they're pulling raids, [is] the rest of the population likely to be antigay? Or do they lag behind the rest of the population?

HARRY HAY: No. In some respects, in the late fifties and early sixties, the police, both in Los Angeles and San Francisco, seemed to feel that they represented the moral climate of the area. They felt like, in a way, they were sort of the moral enforcers of the area. The famous raid in San Francisco on a gay ball that was held New Year's Eve of 1964, in which all the ministers who were involved got arrested, the police, in putting the ministers in jail-- There was a very famous statement in the San Francisco Chronicle, along with a picture, where the police chief is saying, "If these ministers are not going to uphold the moral law, then it's up to the police to do so." So this gives you a sense of just how justified and how morally superior they all felt about it. They have the same attitude in L.A. too.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is there a significant change? Do you think that the police, first of all, were representative of the moral attitudes, and do you think at this point they've changed or that they're any more or less representative? How has their position evolved?

HARRY HAY: Well, I don't know. I think, as a matter of fact, that's changed a great deal really. I think that now there's a plurality of people who no longer necessarily lean on the police for their knowledge as far as gay people are concerned because there's been so much in the media and there have been so many cases of people that they know about. So many kids have come out to their own families; so that there are very few families that don't have a little bit of knowledge about this.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Do you think the police basically are reading the same articles in Time and Life and just in general are becoming more aware and less interested in pursuing harassment?

HARRY HAY: No. I think that, for instance, when we have people like [former Los Angeles Police Chief] Ed Davis around and so on, I think that, as we have found, that the police have a quota system. I think that they're expected to turn in-- I think their budget shows that they have apprehended so many moral offenders in the course of the year, and this brings them in a certain amount of money in the budget. They have cleaned up so many prostitutes, which are young male hustlers along Santa Monica Boulevard, and they have turned over so many baths where immoral things are going on and the neighbors have complained, and then they have busted up some adult bookstores where a lot of unmentionable things go on: you know, I think that they have all these various classifications in the budget, and they're very busy filling them all. I think, at some points, when you have an Ed Davis, for example, around, who feels that he is Mr. Moral Law all by himself, or at some point where maybe the Moral Majority has had a successful campaign in the L.A. Coliseum and made hundreds of thousands of converts, at this moment the police feel justified in showing just how much they've helped clean up. Other times they lose track or get interested in something else. In that period the quotas all fall off because the cops are too busy going somewhere else.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I know something that we were going to discuss. I don't know if this is the point. It's something that interests me, and I wonder if you'd mind taking it up for a moment--

HARRY HAY: Sure. TUCHMAN. --and that was the business of lawyers and how they pleaded cases. I'm thinking specifically of Shelly [Sheldon] Andelson. I don't know the whole story, and I shouldn't slander him on tape--that probably colors anything I'm going to say--but what role have the pleas that lawyers advised homosexual clients to take-- How has that figured into the system of repression or nonrepression or things like that?

HARRY HAY: Well, that in itself is a good story, and I should have been touching on this along the line because there was a tremendous change, I would say, from about 1957, '58. After that the Supreme Court case-- One [Inc.] won its Supreme Court case in 1957, which made it possible then to send materials that had to do with homosexual life-styles through the mail. From that time on, the climate does begin to change. It could also be that by this time more lawyers had been able to bring psychologists and psychoanalysts and psychiatrists as witnesses in trials. So that there is a beginning of a sort of a climate-- As I said, I think we have begun to move from being a criminal act to being a "sick you" or a "sick them." And so as we moved into the "sickie" part, and therefore psychiatrists were used as reliable character witnesses or as witnesses testifying to the condition, and so on, there is the beginning of a certain leniency within the law that hadn't been there before. More lawyers are getting into it. More lawyers know about it. In 1950 and '51, for example, the only lawyers who were going to fight these cases at all are going to be radical lawyers who are accustomed to carrying unpopular cases to term in the courts and who are willing to put their lives down on it and fight on these things. So, in that period there were only going to be radicals or labor lawyers who were capable of taking what looked like a just cause, even though it was totally unpopular, or maybe even from certain points of view unsavory, and carrying them to justice. But later on it becomes a lucrative and more fashionable area. In the early fifties, the only other outside of the radical lawyers who would fight the cases, the only other lawyers that were involved were two: Harold Weiss and Gladys Towleroot. She was a tall woman. She was famous for wearing these absolutely outrageous hats. I mean, she even outhatted Hedda Hopper, so far as I know. Both of these people made a great practice of "buying." They bought witnesses, I think occasionally they even bought juries, and they certainly bought judges. They were well known for this. Back in 1950, when the dollar--let's say, the dollar of then would be about the same thing as fifteen dollars now; it's an enormous difference in values--their price for handling any case was nothing under $2,500, which for the average ribbon clerk, shall we say, was something that you'd pay for the rest of your life. You just couldn't raise that amount of money. They always charged that, and they would not take a case unless you paid for it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So that they could make a vast fortune on fairly unfortunate defendants.

HARRY HAY: Yes, they did. In other words, these were bloodsuckers of a particularly nasty occasion. One of the very first things that the Mattachine thought they would try to do is make it possible for people to be able to fight their own cases in court without having to go through these people. The Mattachine would try to collect descriptions of the plainclothes vice cops who were always entrapping people. Just like the stoolpigeons in the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC] cases, where one particular stoolpigeon would be the same denouncing victims in maybe all five cases of a single day's hearing, so would a particular fairly good-looking hunk who was well hung be the denouncing vice cop in, say, five cases all heard in a single day. So Mattachine hoped to put a file together exposing those entrappers. I think at one point, in the summer of 1952, we were able to circulate descriptions of about five of these cops.* [The second thing Mattachine wanted to do was to try to make it possible for gay brothers to fight their own ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. cases in court without having to go through these lawyers, that is, Gladys Towleroot or one of the people in Harry Weiss's offices.]

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, these are hardly great heroes and heroines of the gay movement at all.

HARRY HAY: No, they certainly are not. However, the one thing that I must say, and that is that it was a terrible shock to me to discover that the lawyer for the Gay Community Services Center was Sheldon Andelson, who comes out of Harry Weiss's office.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, that's the story.

HARRY HAY: That's the office he comes out of, right. And so, therefore, I don't-- I'm shocked to discover that. And he's still playing these funny games. He still fixes things. I know a friend of mine, Billie Moritz--I'm sure he doesn't mind my telling this story--fell afoul of the law. As a matter of fact, I think he was picked up in some type of a sexual thing, and he was not guilty. It was a case of mistaken identity. It was something that he really wanted to fight because he felt that he could win.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This happened to Moritz, or he told you about it?

HARRY HAY: No, no, Bill Moritz. Something happened to him. I don't know when: '73 or '74, something like that, while he was working at the center. He was doing some work at the beginning of the center, and something happened, and I don't know what the story involved. But the thing was he was innocent, and it was something he wanted to fight; he wanted to exonerate himself. But because he was working with the center at that time, he let Sheldon Andelson know, who was the lawyer for the thing, and Andelson fixed it. And Billie was furious. Andelson fixed it, and it cost [Moritz] $1,500 or something. Billie was absolutely furious. He didn't want to go through that. He didn't want to pay that. He wanted to fight it. And Andelson said, "Oh, no, no. I can't be bothered with this thing. I'll fix it, and it's taken care of, and that's that." Well, it was a plea bargaining or something of the sort, but the point was that Billie wasn't guilty, and he didn't want to go that way, but he had no choice. Andelson simply decided it for him. I think there's been a lot of that. I wanted to make a mention of a particular person who begins to appear by about, I guess, '56 or '57. His name is Herbert Selwyn. Herbert Selwyn became a very fine, old friend of One, Inc., one of the first plea bargainers perhaps but nevertheless a very interesting, very devoted man who pioneered the whole question of how gay entrapment and how gay issues in the courts might be handled in a way that was kind, in a way that didn't destroy the person, in a way that made it possible for the least amount of psychological and emotional damage to take place. Selwyn himself was not a gay man but nevertheless a very kind and a very powerful-thinking man.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is it now possible to find numerous gay and hetero lawyers to handle these cases without victimizing the defendant?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes. Oh, sure. Oh, yes. But I would say that the first person to enter this field so that you weren't a victim was Herbert Selwyn, and in this regard I wanted to pay him respect because he did a lot of fine work in that early period.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I wonder, is it appropriate to jump to Stonewall?

HARRY HAY: This is a very good time to do that, I would think.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I wonder if the thing to do is to ask the famous Pearl Harbor question: Where were you when the news of Stonewall came? What was your reaction? What did you think of it?

HARRY HAY: Well, where was I and what was I doing? I was heavily involved in the spring of 1969. I had become very interested in the Black Panthers. It happened that a paper that was very friendly to the Black Panthers was in the same building where we were, and also that spring I had had Willie Brown's bill to legalize consensual sex between same-sex adults. The first bill came out, and we all had petitions to support Willie Brown to bring it up on the floor of the state legislature in Sacramento. I passed out a petition all through the black community with the help of people who were involved with the Black Panther movement down here. They were all very friendly and all very helpful, and I got hundreds and hundreds of signatures in the black community. This was the period when the Panthers were planning for a big conference in Oakland in April or early May of '69 to unveil their plan for what they called the people's control of the police, or community control of the police. So, we wanted to be very much involved with that. We went up not only speaking for the native American Indian community but we also went to speak for the gay community in Los Angeles, representing the Southern California Council on Religion and the Homophile, speaking in our own name as the Circle of Loving Companions, and just generally participating with people that we knew from here. We had been busy sort of representing an open gay, positive life-style in the black community near where we worked and lived and were known, and also our participation in the community conference in Oakland. I guess I was in the middle of helping the traditional Indian people--the Nisqualli and the Puyallup and the Tula-lup in Washington and the Hupa in Northern California and Yurok in Northern California and the Shoshone in Nevada-- get ready for their big summer traditional American Indian conference, which was to be held that year at Onondaga [New York]. They were going to be reading the great law of the six nations of the Iroquois. This was going to be a major thing, and it meant that they had to raise hundreds of dollars and get what amounted to caravans going from about nine or ten or twelve parts of the West, including the Hopi country. That year the Papago Indians in the south were going to be doing something because they had run out of water some six months before, and we had organized major water runs from San Diego, from the mountains in between California and Arizona, into that area, sending them water trucks to keep themselves and their stock alive. They had, therefore, suddenly realized that they had a great place in their old traditions, and there had been a restoration of traditional thinking in the Papago country and also in the Pima country; so they would all be going to the meeting of the Indians at Onondaga. So, I had my hands full of a great many things, when all of a sudden the news of Stonewall-- As far as I was concerned, here were young people speaking out against the police, and I thought that was great. But, then, I had already been speaking out against the police for a long time in my own life; so, it wasn't that great. What was important, what was happening here was that these were young people speaking in ways that young people had not done before and all of a sudden showing themselves as being, in this respect, in line with the same kind of young people who were speaking out against the repression in their lives all over the counterculture. It simply became all of a sudden a gay explosion of what the flower children had been by this time doing for several years. So, it caught the people of that generation and suddenly told the young gay people they also have a place in the sun; they also walked tall if they wished. It acted as an immediate catalyst for them. But as far as I was concerned, it simply was the fact that I'm so glad that another group of people have caught on and that they have their own reason to be going. But it wasn't an explosion in my life.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did it in any way affect what you were doing though? Willingly or unwillingly did you find that you had to-- Since this was an event that was well known to people who had increasingly become active, did you find that it was necessary to incorporate this event into-- I don't know quite how to ask it. You know what I'm saying?

HARRY HAY: I know what you're saying. You see, the event took place, and all of us were overjoyed. We immediately began calling some meetings of people here. But the people that we called here, again, the people that we were getting ahold of, were a few firebrands, individuals who had written in to us or whom we had come across. No particular thing from any university, not yet. As a matter of fact, we met in the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] Hall; 447 North Hoover was the first place that we met together. There were a wide variety of people whom we had not seen for quite some time who all of a sudden decided to come back, people who had been active at One (by this time, One and Tangents have been irrevocably split). There were people who were supporting Don Slater. Joe Hanson and his wife, Jane Race, showed up. We hadn't seen them at meetings for a long time. Leo Lawrence, who had been a firebrand organizer in San Francisco. For instance, we'd had a number of picket lines here in L.A. by this time. We'd had a picket line at State Steamship. We'd had a picket line at Tower Records. Let's see, the State Steamship picket line was February or March of 1969, I guess, and then the Tower Records picket line was either in April-- This was going on simultaneously in L.A. and in San Francisco because young guys had been fired for being gay. So, we'd picket them at noontime and had signs about the fact that we were being kicked out because of our life-style and of our sexual orientations, which had nothing to do with the type of work we were doing on the job, and so on. SIR [Society for Industrial Rights] in San Francisco by this time had had several suits against the phone company because they wouldn't carry a gay ad in the [yellow pages]. We had had strikes against Sears Roebuck and places like that because of the fact that they were doing spying in their restrooms. These we took to the open public now. We were talking about entrapment. The possibility of doing all this had been made possible by the support of the flower children and friendly stories in the L.A. Free Press and in Open City, which was another paper that we had at this time, and in the San Francisco Oracle. I think [in the] last [session] I talked about the Black Cat case and New Faces raids of 1967. Well, from there on out the underground papers were friendly to us. They were friendly to anybody showing the positive life-style. So, there were several interviews with us and pictures of us in the paper and so on. Any time that we took on an action of this sort, it was covered by the counterculture. Now, at this time the State Steamship picket line, I think, was even covered by the Los Angeles Times because we had the ministers from-- Several of the Protestant churches were also involved in those picket lines, and therefore this became a form of news.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At what point did you leave Los Angeles?

HARRY HAY: To go to New Mexico?

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yes. Does that come in right in here?

HARRY HAY: No, it doesn't come until the following year, and so there are some stories to be told before that. One of the groups that begins to make an appearance in '69 is the Metropolitan Community Church, because a number of us know Troy Perry and we always see to it that he's always included in all these picket lines. As a matter of fact, the State Steamship line thing comes about because one of the young men who was involved in his church happened to be the young guy who got fired from State Steamship. I can't remember his name now. Anyway, he was a very pretty boy. It was in the course of the picket line that Leo Lawrence, the firebrand from San Francisco, comes down to cover with a story for the underground press, the story of our picket line, and sees this guy on the line-- Don Burton* [or maybe Gale Whittington] was his name--and immediately carries him off to San Francisco, whereupon the State Steamship picket line folds because our prize pigeon has flown the coop. Then, after that, I think Tower Records we were doing because it was a sympathy strike with what was going on in San Francisco. But there was a lot of ferment, there was a lot of sort of radical work going on both in L.A. and in -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. San Francisco in the spring of '69; so that Stonewall happens to be, at that moment, New York's answer in a way to the ferment that had been going on here for quite some time. So, it's not as important to us on the West Coast as it was perhaps to the rest of the country. But the story in itself and the rest of the country and the things that the young people did, particularly the queens who were in the bar, and their resistance to the police was simply a turnabout in the attitude of gay people. What had happened was, we had always been on the defensive, trying to prove us right. All of a sudden it turned around, the other way around, and we were telling the others to prove us wrong. And it was an entirely different-- It was simply that whole business of a turnaround, an abrupt turnaround. It was like going through the looking glass. All of a sudden we were telling our oppressors, "You prove us wrong," which is simply the reverse of the medal. But we were just as justified to take that position as we had been to take the other in the first place. So that with the coming of Stonewall and with, actually, people turning the battle, as it were, taking the other side of the medal, it simply suggested a technique which had not been done before, whereupon immediately the zaps began to appear, when other people began to take the position that they could prove us wrong instead of [their] proving themselves right. It simply became a technique by which young people suddenly saw they could move. I think this was what was terribly important about Stonewall. Here, as I said, we began to have these series of meetings. We actually had meetings about once a month, trying to find a way to do something, trying to find a way to motivate this thing, to gel it. And we didn't get anywhere. We didn't come up with the gimmick, as it were, We couldn't find it. By about November, Don Slater, whose Tangents group at this point had an office at 3774--it was down the block from KPFK--on Cahuenga Boulevard-- It was just the other end of the block from where KPFK was, or is now. (It wasn't then. They were farther up in the pass at that time.) [Slater] offered us his space for meetings, and so we held meetings there on Sunday afternoons. This was beginning in November of '69. There were a number of us: Jim [James] Kepner, Morris Right, John, and me. There were assorted groups of people. Important to me at that moment was a young man by the name of Ralph Schaffer, who was a friend of Morris's. We met several times. We talked about what we might be able to do and how we could think of putting ourselves together and how we might-- What we needed was a form of organization. Ralph Schaffer turned to me about the middle of November and said, "You were the one who started the original Mattachine. How did it operate?" So I talked about how the original Mattachine operated. Then I said, "But that was a difficult way to do. Now--" and I told them about the Indian Land and Life Committee. I said, "However, we've had this group meeting in our kaleidoscope factory, and it is a group of between three hundred and five hundred people, and this is how we operate: instead of operating by unanimity, we decided to do the reverse of that, but we were using the original Mattachine as our model, and we are operating by consensus." I told them what consensus was. I told them about spokespersons and moderators and made mention of the fact that our meetings were always that whoever showed up was the meeting, was the consensus in other words; and that we didn't have officers, we had spokespersons; and we didn't have dues, we shared on a contributing basis. Our rules and regulations were simply the operation by consensus. Immediately this caught on. He liked it. Everybody else liked it immediately. Morris, I remember, showed up at the meeting with twelve pages, single-spaced, for a constitution. That got set aside for the idea of operating by consensus. We came to an agreement to operate by consensus with spokespersons and with this whole process that I had been discussing about the middle of December. I remember that at that meeting there were people there from-- This is the counterculture period still, and there were a lot of people who were visiting here from Saint Louis. There was somebody who was visiting from San Diego and San Bernardino, but they had some friends from Saint Louis. There were some people from San Francisco. There were some people from Chicago. They all were part and parcel of the group who finally decided to operate by consensus. I do know that we heard within about two weeks that there was a group in Chicago who had decided to operate by consensus. Saint Louis had decided to operate by consensus. San Francisco had decided to operate by consensus, although they hadn't done until that time. We heard a month later that New York was going to go by consensus. So, the whole thing spreads by consensus, but it starts from here. It starts from the Southern California Gay Liberation Front, and it in turns spreads.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Gay Liberation Front, did you say?

HARRY HAY: We called ourselves Southern California Gay Liberation Front. The consensus idea comes from the Indian Land and Life Committee. Within a year, every group in the country was operating by consensus. But I think that we have to see that it comes out of this funnel, and in this strange way, it comes from the original Mattachine by reverse.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the nature of your involvement from that point forward?

HARRY HAY: Because we had had chairpersons up until then, we decided from there on out we'd have a moderator. It was my suggestion that we have a moderator for each meeting, and I was asked to act as moderator in January and February. By this time, Don Slater, realizing that this was not anything that he could control and that it was moving in anything other than respectable, middle-class positions, asked us to leave his office. By this time, we had moved the Indian Land and Life Committee out of our place into headquarters of their own, and we simply moved the Gay Liberation Front into the kaleidoscope factory.

1.22. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO JANUARY 26, 1982

HARRY HAY: The truth of the matter was that we had moved the Indian committee out of the kaleidoscope factory by about September of '69 because I began to get a sense that we were going to be using that space for Gay Liberation one way or another. Indeed we did because in November of 1969 we decided that we wanted to begin to do something. We felt like the gay people wanted to begin to express themselves in some way or another. We sent out a call through Tangents and through One, Inc., and through MCC and P.R.I.D.E. and the various groups that we all knew about, the Circle of Loving Companions mailing list, and so on, that we were going to have a picket line at Barney's Beanery. Barney's Beanery had had for years a sign that said "No Faggots Wanted," or "Faggots Stay Out," over the top of their cash register, and we decided that now was the time, if any, that they were going to have to get rid of that because so many gay people went to Barney's Beanery at this point. So, we called a picket line at Barney's Beanery, and it was known over town that we were going to have that picket line. It was a wonderful occasion. It just was a wonderful occasion. There must have been five hundred, six hundred people on that line. It crowded [Santa Monica] Boulevard, and traffic was stopped in all directions. We had the loveliest signs. The signs were all made at the kaleidoscope factory. We had a couple of workshops to make signs. [inaudible] was making their own. Some of them were most elaborate. John and I had two little Smokey Bears in a loving embrace because, after all, that was who we were. So, we carried this double sign; that was ours. Other people had other signs, whatever they wanted to say and whatever they wanted to do. Some of them were real joys. It was a perfectly joyous picket line. We saw people on that picket line that we hadn't seen in years by that time, some of the people who had not just come out-- Well, maybe they'd been doing other things for the counterculture and other picket lines and other demonstrations and antiwar things and this and that. But there were just people that we hadn't seen in a long time in a gay context. So, it was a lot of fun.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did the sign come down inside the beanery?

HARRY HAY: What happened was that Morris Right and Alex Perry and Troy Perry and--I forget; somebody else--maybe Jim Kepner went along too. I was involved with keeping our people going on the lines outside; so that wasn't my responsibility. But they went inside and talked to the [person at the] cash register and talked to the people inside, and I think they took the sign down for a little while. I think it was down for all of two or three weeks, and then it surreptitiously made its way back up again. But there were lots of stories in the paper about the conversation on both sides and the confrontation and this and that. It wasn't very sympathetically handled in the Times, but of course the Free Press and the counterculture papers all over the country made a big thing of it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is the sign up there today?

HARRY HAY: Oh, it got back up there again.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And it remains up there?

HARRY HAY: I think so. I think that it changed hands, and the new owner couldn't see that he had anything to do with it or he was afraid of Ed Davis, the police chief, or some damned thing. Anyway, it's back up there again now, I suppose. But we made a big issue of it in that time. It became known nationwide, and I'm sure that Barney's Beanery got publicity such as they had never had.

MITCH TUCHMAN: They also got publicity from the Ed Kienholz sculpture. I'm sure that probably made them known worldwide.

HARRY HAY: Oh, sure.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I've seen that sculpture in Dusseldorf, I think it was. I mean, Barney's Beanery has traveled.

HARRY HAY: Oh, yeah, right. And in a way, that's kind of too bad because the original Barney's Beanery was grand, and the beans were great. I can remember back in the thirties when it was just starting out. It's too bad it had to change. It was like Andersen's split pea soup, the original place. Well, those are different things I've never told you about. For instance, when we were kids, when I was seven, when we first came to the United States, we lived in Tustin, which is outside of Santa Ana. We used to go to Newport Beach on Sundays, and we would pass by on the way home from Newport Beach to Tustin, we used to pass by a little, old shack that would have flaps, wooden flaps stuck up on the sides and on poles, and the folks had berry pies for sale. And Mrs. Knott was very nice, and my mother always used to like to buy loganberry pies on the way home from Newport Beach. I'm talking about 1918, 1919; this was when Knott's Berry Farm started out. When I used to go up to Stanford--I used to drive up and down here--we used to go through a funny, little town on the highway. Just after you turned in from going through Gaviota Pass, you used to pass through this place called Buellton. There was this funny, little counter: it was a single-counter place. It had a counter, and then it had some tables along the wall. I don't think I ever remember seeing anybody sitting at the tables because we always sat at the counter. If you were driving late at night and you're coming through there, you'd stop. They had desultory coffee, and the pie wasn't very good, but they had the most delicious split pea soup, just delicious. But it was this tiny, little counter. I think that lady's name was Andersen, and it was on the main highway. The main highway was two lanes at that point. It wasn't what it is now. It was very different: Buellton was a post office and a gas station and a couple of places, and this was one of them.

MITCH TUCHMAN: It still is.

HARRY HAY: We used to stop, going and coming, for the split pea soup. Everybody knew about the split pea soup. It was a nice place. This was the beginning of the Depression, and you got a good bowl of soup. Then we used to tell guys about that during the war, when Camp Roberts was up farther north. They'd all come down for weekends either to Santa Barbara or L.A., and everybody we knew, we always told them to stop off at Andersen's and get a bowl of split pea soup. But pretty soon, Andersen's was getting hundreds who were stopping, and they had to get bigger, and you can see what happened to it. I look at it and think to myself, you know, I'm not too sure that the split pea soup is as good as it was. John and I went up to a draft resistance meeting in Berkeley at end of September of last year, 1981. And on Highway 5 now, Andersen's has a place at a turnoff called Santa Nella. So, we thought when we were going up, well, why don't we stop at Andersen's just for the fun of it and see what the split pea soup is like. This was last September, and, honey, I don't know, I think it's not as good as it always was. [tape recorder turned off] Shortly after we moved into the kaleidoscope factory-- It gave us so much space. It was a great big building. We had twenty-five hundred square feet, and we had a whole bunch of worktables which could be pushed back and forth. We would always push these back and forth and either have a great big space in the middle to make signs in, or somewhere or other. But we had enough chairs and things to sit on, that we pulled around, that could handle between, say, eighty-five and a hundred people. Our meetings by this time had begun to spread. We'd begun to get guys from UCLA and USC [University of Southern California], So, we had meetings. Oh, fifty, seventy-five, eighty-five people were not uncommon.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the address of the factory? Where was it?

HARRY HAY: It was Eighteenth and Washington and Western, half a block west of Washington and Western. I'll look up and see what the address was. Actually I knew it so well, and I've forgotten it. It was about 3200 Washington Boulevard.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I'm sorry I interrupted. You were talking about the size of the meetings and the space.

HARRY HAY: When I was moderator, one of the things I always liked to do, I liked to have everybody hold hands. We would all hold hands. We'd either sit in a circle so that we could all hold hands together, and we would talk about the fact that we were a family and that we needed to relate to each other and support each other, which was for the gay movement a new departure. It was something that people hadn't done before, and it always made people feel very good, and they liked that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was this exclusively male, or was it male and female?

HARRY HAY: It was male and female. There weren't too many women, but there were some who came. We were invited that year--this would be early in February of 1970--we had been invited-- By this time, I had been active in the [Peace and Freedom] Party for quite some time. I had been first active in the [Peace and Freedom] Party in relationship to the traditional Indian affairs. We had gotten the [Peace and Freedom] Party-- The Peace and Freedom Party had put through a number of resolutions that had to do with traditional Indians having the right to conduct their own affairs in their own ways. The first time we had put through a petition like that would have been in '68, and then in '69 again. So, in 1970, Gay Liberation Front was being invited to participate in the state convention, which was going to be held in Long Beach in February 1970. So, I led a delegation down from our group, a delegation of about twelve people, which included, among other people, James Kepner, to the Peace and Freedom Party in Long Beach. We called for a gay caucus from the floor. A couple of people answered. Pat Brown and somebody else came down from San Francisco, and another guy came down from Berkeley. We had sort of a gay caucus. We had a workshop on gay problems and gay life-style. This was a two-day meeting: Friday night, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday. Saturday night we had a gay workshop on gay problems and gay life-style for the whole of the party to be involved with if they wished, and we would discuss our problems and talk about our oppressions and what our things were. Because of the fact that we had about twelve to fourteen people there, we divided up into teams, and we sent a man and a woman wherever possible or at least two men to different workshops to participate as gay people in different workshops. We found, among other things, that we were able to participate in women's workshops because, as gay people, we could see certain oppressions which they themselves were so accustomed to internalizing that they didn't realize what they were doing. So, we made a number of contributions. We made a contribution to the women's liberation group and to the abortion group and to a number of other groups that were meeting that night. We made our own gay contribution. When we got together to put our own plank together, and we presented our own plank on Sunday-- Incidentally, we had a woman by the name of Melinda give a report from the gay workshop and present the gay plank, which had seven points on it, as I remember. It was accepted by acclaim. There was no debate; they accepted the whole thing by acclaim, which was wonderful because it was something that the gay people had never had before in any political party at all. So, it was not the Democratic Party who accepted the gay movement first. It was the Peace and Freedom Party who accepted the gay movement first, in February of 1970 in Long Beach. I always think this is something that should have been mentioned because it never has been. James Kepner did mention it, but the Advocate, which was mad at him because he went to the conference instead of writing his column that weekend, refused to publish the story, so that it didn't go out in the way it should have. You know the petty, little things that can happen in all these things. (I'm sure that the L.A. Advocate of that period never thought that the Peace and Freedom Party was going to amount to anything anyway. So, why bother with it?) Let's see. What else? That was a very exciting period to be working and putting things out. The Western Homophile Conference held its meeting down here in the Unitarian church also in February of that year, I think it was. I was asked to do one of the keynote speeches in that. It was in that speech that I unveiled the concept of the gay window. This speech was published by the Ladder, the women's paper in June of 1970.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was that concept?

HARRY HAY: The concept was, roughly speaking, I mean, just to review it, that, as the way I put it, no self-respecting-- All self-respecting women realize that no man, no hetero man, is ever going to understand what it means to be a self-respecting, loving woman. And every black man knows that there isn't a white person who could ever understand what it means to be a person of integrity, a self-respecting black. And every gay person knows that no hetero will ever understand what it means to be a self-respecting, self-loving gay. Each one of us has his own particular window on the world. He has his own particular way of seeing. Gay people have had to learn how straight people see. You had to learn this in school. We had to learn that in order to be able to communicate with them and talk to them and communicate in terms of their values and life-styles, but [we also had to learn] that we have our own way of seeing, which is quite different from the way heteros see.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And did this have a marked effect in the dialogue within the gay movement?

HARRY HAY: The day that I gave this particular speech, right in front of me a whole bunch of young people were sitting; I would say people from some eighteen to twenty-four. As I started talking about the gay window, the things we see out of the gay window that others do not see and our veils that we begin to see, their eyes started to brighten as though all of a sudden, somebody had opened a window on their faces. It was absolutely wonderful to watch, and they were so bursting with all of a sudden wanting to talk. Then the moment that I stopped, they started talking about what they had seen out of their gay windows all their lives but had never been able to talk about until now because all of a sudden they have a frame of reference in which to put all of this. It was absolutely wonderful because the rest of the meeting, as far as the young people were concerned and as far as the workshops-- There were three workshops on the gay window that were held within ten minutes of that speech. People started talking all over the place, sharing with each other the things they had felt and they had thought about but had not been able to talk about, and realized that maybe it was different. This is the beginning of the discovery that practically all little sissy boys played right field. Up until this time, this had not been shared. It had not occurred to people to share. We had always assumed that we were all entirely different people, but we had forgotten to remember who we were and where we'd come from. This whole business of little boys remembering what it was like to be the one kid-- When the boys were out choosing sides for the baseball team, and you know that they are going to do anything they possibly can to keep from having to pick you. But you want to be wanted, and you want to be picked, and you know they're not going to pick you. Maybe they'll get by, and they won't have to pick you at all. They'll have enough for the team. Enough people showed up, and they don't have to have you at all. You stand in that humiliation day after day after day, wanting to be picked and knowing that they don't want to, that they'll do anything they can to get rid of you. This is something we all go through alone, and we've all shared it, and we've all been in that same space. Always. Whether you're sixty years old or whether you're twenty, you've gone through that experience. When you did get picked, you probably got put in right field where the ball never goes, because they're not going to lose anything from it. They all hope, as a matter of fact, that the inning will come to an end and they'll be out before you have to come to bat because you'll miss the ball. These are the things that all of a sudden begin to come out of the window because these are the things we remember--where we were and we saw and how we couldn't understand when they wanted us to fight the other boys because we didn't want to fight them, we wanted to caress them--things that we know. These are the beginnings of what we would call, eventually we are going to call two years later in a letter that I will write to Don Kilhefner, that I will call gay consciousness. But we didn't have a word for that yet because we hadn't begun to realize that we had seen differently from others. This is all new thinking that is going to come out of what amounts to gay liberation.* [One thing that is going to come out of gay liberation, which G/LCSC has always thought originated with them, the consciousness-raising rap session, didn't originate with them. Consciousness-raising rap sessions were what the first Mattachine used as their organizing tool. Only back in 1950, '51', '52, '53, we simply called them discussion groups. The semipublic discussion groups, which presumably the Mattachine Foundation sponsored in the --------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. community, were fairly low-key affairs, what you might have called consciousness-awakening sessions. But in our closed, members-only Mattachine guild meetings, we oftentimes went at ourselves and each other pretty hot and heavy at times. Sometimes a couple who were having difficulties with their relationship would invite some group examinations; a couple of these sessions were very soul searching for us all. You must remember, this is the summer and fall of 1952, and gay counseling on gayness as a joyous positive life-style isn't an acceptable psychological concept yet. And peer counseling won't be thought of for twenty years yet.] For instance, one of the very first things that begins out of the seventies, the rage that Stonewall expresses, that type of rage is the type of rage that young people are going to feel everywhere, feel that they are caged in. With the concept of the window, they realize that it's not only a closet they've been into but they have been strapped down so that they were not able to express how they actually felt. One of the early results of talking about the gay window is the expression and the venting of the gay rage. The gay rage is going to express itself in exactly-- This is going to turn out to be, I would say, an exact hetero imitation: We are going to rage against them as they have raged against us. It's a business of turning the hourglass upside down. You've had it all long enough, now it's my turn. It's not at this moment an idea of a leap forward. It's simply a sashay back and forth, from right to left and from left to right, which is what turning the hourglass upside down actually amounts to. But I have since that time characterized the fact that I would say that the faggot position is the young gay men who in rage imitate the heteros exactly in venting their rage against them. It's like what happens when all of a sudden we form a trade union and we beat up on the goons who've been beating up on us. Nothing changes. We're simply using their tactics to get back at them, to pay back what we feel are our wrongs. This, I think, was the faggot consciousness. It's different from the faerie consciousness, which will be a thing that our consciousness is different from theirs and can no longer use their definitions of us. We must define ourselves as we wish to be seen, and heard as we wish to be heard. This is the difference between the faerie position and the faggot position.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How about the distinction you made between gay and homosexual?

HARRY HAY: Well, there are a great many people who perform, let's say, consenting acts between adults of the same sex; these are simply acts. As Lawrence Lipton showed us--I think I mentioned this to you last time--in his book The Erotic Revolution, he simply showed that heterosexuals can perform the same acts that we can, and they do. So that homosexuality is simply the performing of acts. The whole idea of the relationship of a person with another person of the same sex on an emotional, spiritual basis, not only a supplementing but a coming together of two different things to form a third, or to form a couple which is an entity which is greater than [inaudible] separately or even put together, is simply not part of the picture. The picture is simply that we perform the acts, and that's as far as it goes. I say that this is something--now, at least, this is my consciousness of the last year--I would say that heterosexuals are quite capable of performing homosexual acts and being homoerotically related to one another. This is something that is within their purview to do. To perceive each other as anything else but objects, as sexual objects, is probably not something that they can do. Their way of perceiving is to perceive objects. We don't. We perceive each other as the same as ourselves. And this is a very different point of view. I had noticed long ago, I had noticed in the sixties, for instance, when we were beginning to form the CRH [Council on Religion and the Homophile], there were quite a number of people who began to come into our experience who would say, "Well, every time I come into a room and there are any women there, the women just disappear. As far as I'm concerned, I just never see them." We began to be aware of the fact that we were dealing with quite a number of men who hated women, gay or straight, either hated them or had nothing to do with them, couldn't relate to them, and were, let's say, alienated. Then we became more and more acquainted with these people, and we discovered that they were alien to us too, and that we really couldn't work with them very well. They were always giving us trouble. They were always people who, whatever position we tried to take or maintain within our groups, these particular types of people were the ones who would always take exception.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you find divisions growing within Gay Liberation from very early on?

HARRY HAY: We began to notice these people also in Gay Liberation, the ones who were turned off by women. We began to think, you know, these gays are different from us. Eventually, we began to recognize that these guys were also lousy lovers. John and I early on coined the idea that these were homosexuals, but they were not gay. Because of their strange attitude toward women, which is so different from what gay men's attitude toward women-- Most of the gay men that we knew not only were very fond of their lesbian sisters but had many friends in the straight world among women and liked women very much and could see them, could understand. But these others who didn't-- I thought to myself, these are probably men who have been really alienated to women or by women very early on in their lives and that they're probably sick heteros and that what should really happen is that creeps like [Charles] Socarides and these men in New York--I can't remember the other names--

MITCH TUCHMAN: What was the one name you said?

HARRY HAY: Socarides. Charles Socarides has always claimed that gays are sick and should be cured. Oh, Bergler. [Edmund] Bergler was another man. Bergler and Socarides and there was another famous name. These guys were always busy telling you about their cures. Socarides every so often, even today, is on the air now and will simply say, "This is absolutely ridiculous: There's no such thing as a gay person. These are just sick heteros. They can be cured." We've been saying this is whom Socarides should be curing are these homosexuals who are alienated to women. They should be taken out of our lives, cleaned up, and sent home where they belong.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I need, I guess, a time frame to see-- We're in early '70—and then you stay here till what period, and what occurs?

HARRY HAY: I'll backtrack on this. When we started work with the Traditional Indian Land and Life movement, by this time I had decided that maybe we should go to New Mexico and visit New Mexico and find out what the Indian tradition was there and sort of follow up on that because this has been a great interest in my life anyway. So, I had friends there. We had friends in San Juan pueblo, in the pueblo itself, gay men that we knew. So, I thought that, since we used to like to buy things from the Indian people and then sell them and raise money and sort of generally spread the traditional Indian movement as wide as we possibly could, we went to San Juan, I think in the winter of '66 and got a whole bunch of artifacts to bring back to sell for ourselves to raise money for the Indian committee; we had a shop. We started going there, and we started liking it very much. So, we went in '66. Then, that summer of '67 we went back for the first North American Indian Unity Conference and participated as the token whites in this-- We were the only whites among all the Indians. I can remember Clifton Hill* [the dynamic, young Muskogee traditional activist] would get up in war paint, and he would talk about the problems of the Indian people and how the white man had robbed them and had taken their land from them and would make treaties with them and then break them the next day and bring diseased blankets, trading just anything to wipe the Indians out. Then he would get all worked up in this high* [pitch of -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. emotional rhetoric. The more impassioned he got, the taller and wider the eagle feathers of his war bonnet became, the darker his face got, and the more lightning-like his eyes became. Suddenly] he would turn around and look at John and me* [the token white-man captives in this holy encampment of traditional Indians, his second and third fingers held apart even as they pointed rivetingly at us as if impersonating forked lightning,] and say, "White man, get off my land!" Here we'd all be cowering away from this guy who's really kind of sending out lightning strokes from the tops of his eagle feathers. All the rest of the Indians were all looking at us balefully, and here we are, the whites, sort of cornered in this circle of baleful people. Well, anyway, this is one of our experiences. In the winter of '67, we went to San Juan pueblo where they didn't corner us. By this time, I was trying to learn more and more about tradition and trying to find out something about how gay men had fit into it. This is something that had always been in the back of my mind. We would take kaleidoscopes with us to give to everybody. It became apparent that maybe we could bring an industry of kaleidoscope making to the Indians. We were dissatisfied with what was happening here. We didn't like -------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. manufacturing here in town any longer; so we began toying with the idea that maybe we'd move to New Mexico. Each year we would go, and each year the Indians and the Chicanos and other people would impress upon us that we really belonged there and they would like to have us very much, and so on. So, in the winter of 1969, we were really thinking rather strongly of doing something and maybe even moving. We even started looking around for a place in the town where we might be able to rent a building when all of a sudden we met a man who was attempting to renovate the old mercantile, which was in the center of the San Juan pueblo's plaza. Now, the mercantile had been built in 1863; it was one of the old trading posts in the area. And this guy said, "Well, if you have to make kaleidoscopes, why don't you make them here?" He showed us a wing where they had kept hides and pelts, which was open to the sky. It had a back wall. So, we left some money, and they put a roof on this building and a front on the building and closed this whole thing in. This was to be the kaleidoscope factory, and we were to move there the following May. So, all of this is happening in the kaleidoscope factory, but we know that we were going to be moving the end of April. So that we're getting Gay Liberation firmly founded and on its feet as of January, February, March, April, and then in May we'll move. Our idea was, by this time, that we were going to carry Gay Liberation to New Mexico and make it possible so that this could be shared in by the Indians and by the Chicanos alike because we could see that there was nothing going on of this nature anywhere in the country. Only in the main urban centers was anything happening as far as Gay Liberation was concerned.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did that occur then? I mean, did you do that?

HARRY HAY: No, we never did that. It failed totally. The reason why it failed totally was because there was such a culture gap; there was no way of bridging it. But this was something that it took us five or six years to find out.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was it the failure of Gay Liberation that brought you back, or were there other exigencies?

HARRY HAY: To some extent. By '77 or '78 we would spend a great deal of time running back and forth between here and there anyway because we had our instrument, called the symmetricon, which we were beginning to show by then. We had a young couple here in Los Angeles who were interested in demonstrating it, and we would come to various events. For instance, in '77 Bill Moritz wrote to me-- Well, I think I've already told you about the film that I made. When he showed that in '77, we came here for that, and we would stay a couple or three weeks. At one point Don Ama-dor and his lover, Tony Karnes, got interested in the symmetricon. So, nothing would do but that we'd stay with them at their house up in Los Feliz for about a month while they tried to exploit it.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Sounds like Tony Karnes.

HARRY HAY: Then, in '78, Don Kilhefner came to Lama, where Baba Ram Das was having a two-week retreat, in [Lama] New Mexico, and we show up to show the symmetricon at Baba Ram Das's request one Sunday night and run into Don Kilhefner there, and he comes back and stays at our house for a couple of days and reads the paper on subject-subject consciousness and immediately begins to think this is the idea that should be brought into the movement. The following year he comes out to New Mexico and brings us back to California. We came back in order to call the Radical Faerie gathering in Arizona in September of '79.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Did you leave the kaleidoscope factory behind you there?

HARRY HAY: No, the kaleidoscope factory burned down when the whole trading post burned down in July of 1973 and wiped us out totally.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, what did you subsist on in the interim?

HARRY HAY: Well, there had been royalties-- The Japanese had been making teleidoscopes by this time for quite a while, and we got in a small royalty, very small royalty, but this is what we subsisted on for a couple of years while we kind of came back into operation again.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Was that just an enormous shock?

HARRY HAY: Terrible shock. It was really a terrible shock. It just wiped us out. The thing burnt to the ground, totally burnt to the ground, and we lost everything: records, I mean, family records and portraits and books.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had you moved everything to New Mexico?

HARRY HAY: Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Had you moved lock, stock, and barrel? You hadn't left--

HARRY HAY: We hadn't left anything here. We moved lock, stock, and barrel, and the warehouse at the pueblo was where we kept all our stuff. Well, that's what got wiped out. So that we really weren't accomplishing a great deal by then. Well, OK, one of the things I did want to say: the last big thing that we did here for Gay Liberation was help plan what we call a gay-in. Everybody had had love-ins and be-ins by this time; so we had a gay-in in Griffith Park in April of 1970, just about the time of my birthday. It was the sixth or the eighth or the ninth or something of that sort. We made a series of perfectly beautiful posters to advertise this thing. There is one still hanging in Morris's house, and I think that somewhere in our files we have a copy of that poster. It was a three-color--three-color?--four-color silk screen, and we made five hundred of these. We made them in the kaleidoscope factory of course. They had to be done in different colors, and then they have to dry. First we put on all the shocking pink, and then we put on the shocking green, and then we put on the something else, and then we put on the black. They were all hanging in their different colors in different places; on clotheslines all across the kaleidoscope factory these things were all hanging out. The workers, not all of whom were gay by any means, or all counterculture people, all longhairs, and half of them were women, were all going in, like sheets underneath, going in under all these pieces of paper to make kaleidoscopes while all this stuff is hanging around. It took us about two weeks, I guess, to make the whole edition, as it were, of these things. So we had the gay-in in Griffith Park. My guess is that about three thousand people showed up, and that was an enormous collection. This was the biggest collection of gay people up until the first Stonewall-Christopher Street march that many people, gay people had shown up anywhere. It was an enormous collection of people to show up. And it was an exciting day. It was a beautiful day. We took over practically the whole of the bandstand area of Griffith Park. It was a beautiful, beautiful experience.

MITCH TUCHMAN: At what point did the historians start knocking on your doors: Katz and D'Emilio? Were you still in New Mexico?

HARRY HAY: Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And Adair? You were in New Mexico?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, we were in New Mexico.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did that come about? How did you become a historical figure?

HARRY HAY: Jonathan Katz wrote to me in 1975, a rather supercilious letter asking a couple of questions. I think he had heard something about the Mattachine and thought, "Well, I might as well find out what that's all about." He wrote me a kind of a nasty letter, on a postcard as far as I remember. I think that's what it was. I wrote back and started to talk about it and made mention of my-- I wrote back and said, "I don't know whether you realize this or not, but that's simply not the way you address anybody who was ever involved with the left," and I started talking about my left background and things that I had done, a little bit about it. I was kind of snippy, I think; I was kind of snippy back. All of a sudden, I get this five-page, single-spaced apology, which I hadn't expected. Oh, I think I said something about the fact that anybody who's had the experience of the HUAC deserves just a little bit more attention than you're giving it--something of that sort. Apparently he looked it up, and immediately then, all of a sudden, I got in an entirely different position. I got telephone conversations and wires and all the rest of it. So, then I started to write to tell him just generally in a way, sort of a jumble, what I'm telling you.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did you feel about, not so much what you told him, but how did you feel when one by one people started putting you into the role of elder statesman or something like that?

HARRY HAY: Well, kind of annoyed because, after all, that's not how I see myself, and I never had operated in that regard. What I'd like to do is share-- I've always had the feeling that it would be wonderful if someday people could sort of pick up where I leave off and not have to go back through the same experiences again. Because I could see that, generally speaking, this is what's happened in the gay movement over all the centuries: we've seldom learned from anybody else's mistakes, we've seldom learned from anybody else's experiences along the line, and said, "Yes, why, that's been learned. Why don't we learn something else?" We're all going back through being the cute, little sex objects ourselves in an earlier period, and then we grow out of that, and then we become chasers, and from that we do something else, and then we becomes queens, and then we become the queen mother. You know, it doesn't make any difference whether I'm going to be William Beckford or Oscar Wilde or Marcel Proust or me; we're all repeating the same pattern. The costumes change, and the centuries succeed one another, but the experiences go on being more or less the same. I thought it would be kind of nice if we could get done with that and move to another level forward. So that I was willing to share with people just so that you could simply live through certain areas of experience vicariously: what I've been through and what I can tell you about it, and then I'll indicate, "Look, this is the new field that has to be looked into. Why don't you get to it because I never will." So, this is the way I felt about it. I knew that a lot of sort of histories of the movement had been written by 1975, and none of them mentioned the West Coast where it all started. So, I thought it was high time that somebody got around to that point, and this is the reason why I welcomed, first, Jonathan Katz, and then, John D'Emilio, was so that they could take a look at where it all really began and begin to assess it from what I would call a proper historical basis.

MITCH TUCHMAN: When you returned to L.A., how did you view what had become of Gay Liberation? Did you have to get reinvolved, or had you never been uninvolved?

HARRY HAY: I probably had not been uninvolved because I had kept up correspondence with people. As I said, I had been back any number of times, and I had done interviews on KPFK with Kepner or with Bill Moritz or with whoever happened to have a column or space that they wanted to talk about what was happening. A number of times when I would come back here, we would go to Morris's, and whatever was happening in the movement at that moment we'd participate in. I participated in a couple of Gay Academic Union conferences at various times. There had been get-togethers at different universities where there was a gay movement; they would have some kind of a year-end conference, and various people would come to speak on aspects of this and aspects of that. For instance, I got quite involved in '77 and '78 in the struggle against Proposition 6 because I felt that this whole business of guilt by association was something that I had been involved with when we were fighting, first, against anti-Semitism in the thirties and in the early forties, and, then, against Jim Crow in the forties and early fifties here in the city. So, I was participating sort of vicariously back and forth by mail with various people and making suggestions and getting in touch with the different groups, and so on, which I already knew about. So, that hadn't changed that much.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You came back to L.A. though with, in essence, a position paper that you had written in New Mexico, isn't that correct?

HARRY HAY: Yeah, that's right. That's right.

MITCH TUCHMAN: You had been brought back with this. How did that affect your participation, or had that preceded you in the way of these visits? Had that preceded your move back?

HARRY HAY: Well, to some extent it had preceded. Jim Kepner knew about it. I had been talking about the gay window by this time for quite some time. I talked about the gay window in some detail at the gay-in--or gay-think, I think they called it, that they used to hold at Cal State Long Beach--in '66, September of '66 and also in '77. I had talked about the gay window, and during that particular one, Don Amador turned on to the gay window. So, nothing would do but he would get the whole idea of what the gay window was all about, and the he added that to his course that he was teaching at LACC [Los Angeles City College], He had a whole thing on the gay window and what the gay window was and how this actually gave gay people a responsibility, a social responsibility in the world. This excited him very much, and so he elaborated a great deal on the gay window. Well, by this time I had already started to work on subject-subject consciousness. I had written the position paper for that in '76, but I didn't feel that, in talking to him or in talking to Morris, either in '76 or '77, that these guys were ready to think in those terms yet. They were still thinking in what I would call assimilationist terms.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Could you explain briefly--I don't know that you have explicitly--the meaning of subject-subject consciousness?

HARRY HAY: Well, that goes back, again, to the early Mattachine. I think it was in the fall of '52 we had a conference of the various people who were involved with it, and by this time, I guess, we had a sphere of influence of maybe a couple or three thousand people here in Southern California. So, we would have at the conference in October, I guess we had representatives from about nine or ten different discussion groups. At that time I proposed that our direction, that the purposes of the movement should be to discover who we were, where we were coming from, and what we were for-- these three points. I might say that, when the movement split in 1953, that these things were not brought up. As I am going to be [writing] several times in letters and in articles and in speeches that I would make in '77, '78, '79, those three points had been left hanging, and no one had ever bothered to address them from that time forward, and it was high time that we began looking at who we were, where we were coming from, and what we were for. John and I by this time, beginning in the sixties, had become very interested in a discipline of biology known as ethology, which was first formulated by people like Konrad Lorenz and then [Nikolaas] Tinbergen and, to some extent, [Lionel] Tiger (but Tiger is, I feel, rather supercilious and superficial about it). I think the work done by Lorenz is still probably the most definitive. I had been always struck by a principle of [Julian] Huxley's, which was that no species or no negative-- For instance, no negative trait within a species ever appears within that species millenia after millenia after millenia. And, as you know, a negative trait is one that doesn't reproduce itself. So the fact that it keeps reappearing over and over again in itself is significant; it was in Huxley's thinking. He said that no negative trait which doesn't reproduce itself would appear in any species millenia after millenia after millenia unless it in some way serves the survival of the species. I have always been interested to know how we serve the survival of the species because this question had never been answered or even looked at, and I felt it was time that we began to look at this field. So, then I began to-- I was thinking about--"thinking about"? I've been thinking about it all my life--but I began at this point to begin to look at certain aspects of the way we related. I realized that in looking over our own development, our own beginning, our own first sallies into consciousness, into real consciousness, realized that we probably, as individuals, thought more about ourselves and about the fact that we are somehow different or out of step or other, as Thoreau said, listening to a different drummer, than almost any other group of people that I ever knew of, certainly in my own social experience; that we think a lot about ourselves. And I'm thinking about-- I'm going back in my own life, and I'm thinking about myself a lot. I think of myself as being peculiar, and I sometimes think of myself as being sick. And I sometimes think of myself-- I don't know. But I go back and I suddenly realize that I remember when I first read [Edward] Carpenter, and I first read Carpenter because he was in the bookcase behind the librarian's desk, the locked one. (I think I've already told you about how I got into the glass case and found Carpenter.) Well, anyway, I'm thinking of myself all this time as subject. Then when I think about that other, whom I now discover exists because Carpenter tells me it exists--

1.23. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE ONE JANUARY 26, 1982

HARRY HAY: Well, I'm thinking about him, and I begin to dream about him, and he's another me. He's just like me. I think of him also as subject, the same way I think of myself as subject, somebody who is like an extension of me; he's another arm. So, he's going to understand all the things that I've understood. He will have cried about all the things I will have cried about. He will have all the same pains. He will have gone through all the frustrations, and he will also know these wonderful dreams that I have that I don't really have words for and I can't explain, but I can sort of wave my hands and move my face, and he will understand too. And we'll catch each other's hands, and we'll run away to the top of the hill and we'll see the sunrise and we'll never come home. We don't need to because we have each other, and we'll understand each other. I'm thinking of him as I think of myself as subject. I think, "My God!" Now, I'm doing this thinking, not in 1912, I'm doing the thinking now, in 1976. I think of myself as subject. All the other kids around me at this point are beginning to think of girls and writing to girls, and they're thinking of girls as objects of course; they're sex objects. They're objects, and we use them, and we control them, and we kid them, and we give them a line and persuade them to do things they don't want to do, and of course, they're all objects to us. I keep thinking, "Wait a minute. You know, I can remember when I used to, when I decided-- I was fifteen or sixteen, and I decided that I wanted to run with the mob. I wanted to run with the pack. I belonged to a gang of guys, and we were all very good friends, and we were all in the ROTC. We're all officers in our classes, and we're all presidents of this group and presidents of that group, and you know, and Ephebians and valedictorians and speakers in our graduating class and all that stuff, and we're part of a group. I go with a girl. The girls are all friends with all the other girls, who are all friends with all the guys; they all had a little group here together. I'm aware of the fact that in that period of my life, when I was fifteen and sixteen, that I was playing a game, that I was watching very carefully how all the other guys related to their girls. I saw to it that I related to the girl I went with in the same way that the other guys related to their girls so that nobody's going to see that there's anything different in the way I do it because I don't feel anything. I really don't feel anything. I know that I'm supposed to go through with all these things. I can see that they're really in love with each other, and I know I'm supposed to be in love with Betsy, but I don't think I am really because the things that happen to them are not happening to me. I know they're not happening to me, but I have to-- Maybe they will in time if I learn. Maybe there's something-- Maybe the difference about me is just that I'm slow at it. Maybe I've got to find out these things. If I pretend, maybe it will really happen. So, I not only have to watch how Bill relates to Betsy, but I have to watch how Betsy relates to Bill and what his reaction to that is so that when she does this to me, I have the same reaction. So, I've got to see how they relate to each other, and I've got to see how Betsy and Esther relate to each other and how they talk because Esther will then respond to Bill on the basis of what Betsy says, and I've got to respond the same way he does, or she's going to think there's something wrong. So that I've got to be concerned with how he sees me, how his girlfriend sees me, and how my girlfriend sees me, and how my girlfriend sees what's going on between those two so that she doesn't think there's something wrong with me because the same thing doesn't happen to her that happens to Esther. So, I'm watching all these things, and I'm learning a great deal about how they operate. But now I'm thinking about it, and I think, "My God, these people were making objects of each other, of course, because this is the way the world runs. Your language is subjects and predicates, subject-object. We talk about objects. We talk about manipulating people. We talk about persuading, and when you persuade somebody, they are an object to you. But I'm not thinking of my lover as object; I'm thinking of him as subject. All of a sudden it occurs to me that that's who I am: that I am a person who all of his life has thought in terms of subjects. I've always talked to trees. I've talked to bushes. I've talked to rocks. I talked to my teddy bear. Little kids all do that, but I went on talking to my teddy bear. In my daydreams, all kinds of things talked to me in the same consciousness that I talked to them. I'm not perceiving them; I'm listening to what they say. I'm sharing. I'm not complementing. I'm not supplementing. I'm sharing. There's something else happening here. I suddenly think, "Wait. If what I'm trying to do is add my consciousness to yours, as I hope (but I don't know) that you'll add your consciousness to mine, we'll come to a consensus." This is what consensus really means: there has to be that sharing or the consensus doesn't work. Then I suddenly think, "Wait. This is what women want with men. This is what women's liberation is all about. They don't want to be objects anymore. They want to be in a subject-subject relationship with their men. This is what they're asking for. Then I suddenly think to myself, "This is who we've been. This is who we've always been. We have always been in a subject-subject relationship. This is what Jesus means when he says, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' This is the whole of the law. We have always read stuff in the Bible and thought, 'Why don't those heteros get the point? It's so simple. You love your neighbor as you love your lover, as you love yourself.'" And I think, "Wait. Of course. Because we love our lover as another me, as another subject. And if you love yourself as subject, you must love your neighbor as subject too. This is what Jesus is saying, which is when I all of a sudden tell John about this, and we start talking about "little faerie [brother] Jesus," and we've been talking about faerie [brother] Jesus ever since. But then I thought, "Wait a minute. Plato. Plato is teaching gay things as a gay man in the Academy. He teaches Dion of Syracuse and other people, and then he goes to be Dion of Syracuse's prime minister. He spends forty years in Syracuse, and everything that he teaches comes wrong. Everything he had taught Dion of Syracuse doesn't come out correctly. And he comes home to Athens at the end of his life, and he writes [the dialogue, Laws] and he repudiates everything he said. But what went wrong? Because he was seeing subject-subject out of a gay window, and he didn't have any way of knowing in that time that his students didn't see through the same window with the same consciousness, which they did not do. So that he was teaching subject-subject in a subject-object world, and of course, it all came out wrong. Then I began to realize all of a sudden this is what we're for. We have always been capable of a subject-subject consciousness, and we have been hanging fire like a tick hangs under a tree. It can hang inert for 180 to 200 years until, all of a sudden, the moment comes when something warm and furry and smelling of blood rubs against them whereupon they drop into that rough and immediately go to work sucking blood. Though they have not been alive for 200 years, all of a sudden they know exactly what to do; it's a triggering mechanism. This is [what] we're for. We have been waiting all this time for consciousness, for society to suddenly need to see in a subject-subject fashion, and all of a sudden we come alive and begin to operate. This is what we must now do. First of all, in order to do this, I begin to say, we have to then begin to discover who we are. We have to begin to define ourselves as we see ourselves. And we've got to start speaking as we wish to be heard and not by the hetero definition of us because, in the first place, they have no way of knowing that we were ever other than a sick them; they have no way of knowing that we had a window on the world that they didn't have or that we related to things in a way that they couldn't possibly correspond. Then I began to realize that we are dealing with a subject-object world, a subject-object history, a subject-object culture, a subject-object language, and a hundred thousand years of subject-object experience. We are the people of a subject-subject consciousness. Well, then this consciousness really means that in a way we are the swans in the duck nest, we are the cuckoos in the robin's nest. We are, not alien people, not alien in the sense of being estranged, but an alien people in the sense that we are separate, possibly even as much as psychologically and spiritually a subspecies all our own. Our subject-subject way of seeing is a very different experience than a subject-object one. Now we must begin to not only find a poetry for this, a language for this, a mathematics for this, which becomes experientially a language and a way of communicating. Up until now, we talk about these things, and we can wave our hands and smile at each other and through "eye-lock" and other things that we do we sort of intimate to each other what we're saying. But this is not enough. We now must get to the place where we really can communicate so that we can begin to communicate to the heteros what it is we see and what it is we understand. Consequently, one of the things I'll begin this summer: I'm going to a men's conference, what they call a men's masculinity conference in Des Moines, Iowa. I'm going to be leading a workshop for heteros on subject-subject consciousness. This is going to be a real challenge because I've shown that paper to quite a number of heteros, and they love it. They're crazy about it. They keep saying, "Oh, we've got to find out how to do this for us because this is something we need. We recognize this. We must move in this direction." But I keep thinking to myself, "Yeah, I can understand that, but I'm not quite sure how you're going to know when you're doing it." We know when we're doing it because all of a sudden in our own relationships, we feel right when we're sharing on a consensus basis, subject-subject, between gay people. But how is a straight person going to do this? Sexually, how are they going to arrange it? After all, sexually is the way we can do it. But how are they going to do it? I think I've begun to figure out how this is going to be done. It's going to have to be far more sort of vicarious than it is with us. But there will be a way by which it can be done. For instance, right in our own field, to talk about it is one thing; to begin to make it manifest is something else. But people have said to me, for example, "How do gay men have sex?" "Subject-subject." Off the top of my head, I'm in the middle of a hot springs, and we were all kind of relating to each other in a variety of ways in the hot springs, and I said, "Well, we enjoy each other's enjoyment." Well, the moment you have moved it to this level, you have moved it away entirely from the object relationship to a subject-subject relationship, and a lot of people have begun to catch on to this point: that this is actually what we could very well do. You begin to realize that in the ghetto, in the gay ghetto, which is, after all, set up in exact imitation of heterosexual ways of sexual enjoyment, as it were, that we have made objects of each other. We have made fetishes of each other in exact slavish imitation of the hetero way by which they look at each other. And it is the thing that was killing us. It's killing us dead spiritually and every other way.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What kind of reception did these ideas get when you came to L.A.? Were you immediately thrust into the position of promulgating this notion, or is that not what occurred?

HARRY HAY: No. A number of people who heard the thing turned off. Most of the people who heard it and listened to it thought, "Well, I don't understand what he's talking about," or "it's gobbledygook." Most of the men thought it was gobbledygook. Most of the women think it's wonderful. But what I would say is this: we did send out material something like this in the-- Some of the material was sort of aired in the call for the original gathering, spiritual gathering, for Radical Faeries that was sent out in April, May, and June of 1979 for a meeting in Arizona. We had expected that maybe we'd hear from about 25 to 50 people, but 180 men showed up, which was about three times as many as the place could handle.

MITCH TUCHMAN: By distinguishing the people as the Radical Faerie group, it suggests that-- Just that the notion that one group is radical suggests a certain perception of the vast remainder of what had gone on in gay liberation.

HARRY HAY: Uh-huh.

MITCH TUCHMAN: After all, in 1979 there is the [Gay and Lesbian Services] Center, and there are these great dinners where Jerry Brown shows up--

HARRY HAY: Jerry Brown shows up, sure.

MITCH TUCHMAN: --and pats--no pun intended--someone else on the back.

HARRY HAY: And we have gay pride parades where Ed [Edmund] Edel- man, the [county] supervisor, is the master of ceremonies.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, the term Radical Faerie emerges in that atmosphere.

HARRY HAY: Within that context, exactly.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Can you sort of put that together for me and describe that?

HARRY HAY: Yes, I can. It's been recognized with great dismay by most of the people by 1978 and certainly early '79 that the gay liberation is dead. Gay liberation has lost its steam. It's lost its way, and it's simply foundering. By this time, Stonewall Democratic Club, which, for instance, in its heyday in '75 and '76 would have five hundred to a thousand members, is now down to about twenty-two members. There is no more steam left. There is no more interest. What has actually happened is that the womb, which captures us all in time, had pulled everybody back into imitating the heteros. We have gay business clubs. We have the Lions Club mentality operating in the gay movement. In this respect, the gay businessman is no different from the straight businessman except, apparently, for what they do in bed or whom they hold hands with when they go to the movies. Otherwise, there is no difference at all. The business of accepting the hetero way of defining us, the hetero way of seeing us, which comes at the place where our-- We look no different. We see no different. We act no different. We eat together in restaurants, but we do the same things in restaurants that the straights do. We have fallen back into a sort of commercialism. To all intents and purposes, we are imitating the heteros totally, and as we imitate them, we also buy their definitions of who we are and how we operate and what we should think and what we should do. This simply has turned everybody off completely.

MITCH TUCHMAN: And was it that perception that was the impetus to the Radical Faerie movement?

HARRY HAY: No, it's not that perception. It's the fact that my thinking is moving in a certain direction, and all of a sudden people who are very dissatisfied with this way because they know that this does not speak to them, all of a sudden [they] begin to hear what we are saying.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How did you happen to go to Benson, Arizona, and who were the people who showed up there?

HARRY HAY: I had heard of a place just out of Benson. There was a little ranch which had-- At one time these gay men had operated a sort of a school for boys who had trouble with the law. It was a sort of an honor farm, and they had operated this for the state of Arizona for about ten years. They got tired of this and decided, because they were all interested in meditation and Eastern studies and so on, that they would set up an ashram. So they set it up as an ashram, painted the place, built it, had little meditation centers, and so on, and they began to try to interest the people in Arizona in utilizing this ashram. This didn't do very well; so they decided that maybe they would like to invite some of the gay men to come, because they were gay (although they had been in the closet). The Circle of Loving Companions had had the only open gay address in the Gay Yellow Pages in the country for New Mexico. We had been the only open address for many years. We were starting to talk about setting up a gay collective which would be devoted to research into the gay way of seeing, getting into gay consciousness, and exploring various methods of this. So, consequently, the ashram had written to me thinking that possibly we might be able to join forces in some way or another and sort of combine our efforts and move in a direction. [They] invited me to come down to see the place. We at this time were looking for some place to put on the spiritual gathering for Radical Faeries somewhere in the summer of '79. We didn't know where we wanted to go. Don had been checking out and I had been checking out national parks and finding out that there were good points and bad points, but one of the things we couldn't count on was weather. The ground appeared, and we thought we could do it either on May Day or around Labor Day. At one point, we thought, well, what about this ashram in Arizona? What possibilities have they got? So, I wrote and asked them whether or not they would be interested in a possibility of a conference over two or three days, and did they think it was possible? And they said yes, they thought maybe they could handle up to thirty-five to forty people. They were interested in getting us to do this because they figured this was a good way to advertise their ashram--you know, PR thing. So they offered to fly Don out from L.A., and John and I were going away to L.A. at this time anyway; so we decided that we would simply drive by way of Benson, and we would all case the joint together, and we'd look it over and see what it was like. So, we met down there in April, late March, I guess it was--last [week] in March or first [week] in April, I've forgotten--of 1979. (We were also going to do a kaleidoscope show with some friends in Tucson. We were going to stay with this friend in Tucson; we were going to get some crash space. Straight people, by the way: a young straight woman who had turned on to subject-subject several years before and who wanted to know the latest developments in this field.) So, we went to the ashram, and as it turned out our first interview, in first talking with him, we decided that we didn't like it at all and it just wouldn't do. It just wouldn't do. Clearly what they wanted to do and what we wanted to do were really two very different things entirely. So, we went back to Tucson, and we did our show. We talked about it a little bit, and then we thought, well, maybe we should go out there tomorrow morning and give it another try and see whether or not we can come to it. I think that people at the ashram also decided-- They obviously realized that we were not-- They were willing to make some concessions that they hadn't made before. We made a few other concessions, and the first thing you know, the next day we hit it off very well. So, we worked it out. They had a big kitchen there. They had a dining room and a kitchen, and they had some very good equipment there in the kitchen for making food in advance. So, we figured that what we would do, we would go there about a week in advance, and we'd cook the stuff and make bread and stuff like that and put it in their icebox so that we'd have the food ready to serve. We were figuring at that time on between fifty and seventy-five people. The call that we sent out gave my definition for spiritual. My definition for spiritual is the total inheritance of all consciousness from the first apparent consciousness displayed in the division of the first cell into two parts in the primeval slime down through all evolution, all forms of all evolution to yours and my thinking just a moment ago. As I always say, "What else are you going to call this magnificent inheritance other than 'spiritual'?" So, that appeared in the original call. Then we used the word radical in its original meaning, which means "to go to the root." What we were interested in was to explore the special dimensions of a spiritual life which comes out of gay consciousness. We gave a couple of paragraphs, which I had worked out together with Mitch Walker on the basis of subject-subject consciousness.* [One night on a weekend in about the middle of April 1979, after Mitch and Don and I had been putting together a lot of paragraphs for the call, Mitch calls me long distance from Berkeley and says, "Harry, caring ideas and challenging paragraphs are all very well, but we've got to call this conference something." So I brushed off the top of my head, sort of smart-ass fashion, and said flippantly, "How about calling it a Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries." No sooner were these words out of my mouth than we both knew this was ------------ * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. it. It was then we developed a couple of paragraphs I had previously sketched out with Mitch for a criticism he was doing for Winston Leyland's Gay Sunshine on the basis of subject-subject consciousness.] We had also proposed the whole idea that what we would do at that conference is to recognize that the little sissy kids we had all been, the mere fact that that little sissy kid had heard the same calls to make the changes that the rest of our peer groups hear at eight and nine and ten, but there was that feeling, that dream within ourselves that was stronger than any voice we heard from the outside so that we persisted in being that little sissy kid. When we come out of the wind tunnel at the other end of high school, seven or eight, nine, ten years later, we're still that little sissy kid. The point that I always made in that regard was that that little sissy kid might very well be the strongest person you have ever met because he endured. Actually at this particular gathering we were saying, "Now make room for him in your heart. Tell him, 'Honey, come home. You're understood, and you're loved, and we're proud.'" Then I said, "One other thing we also have to begin to recognize, and that is that we know from our own experience, from our own culture from the time we were very little, we all know that we love to see each other and be seen by each other. We love to touch each other and be touched by each other. We can either follow the ghetto and call seeing peeking, or we can give it honor and call it sharing. We can look at the touching and denigrate it, as it is done, again, in the ghetto, and call it groping, or we can give it the positive, upbeat value and call it caressing. But if we can come together with who we really are, recognize the fact that we are our erotic viscera, that this is who we have always been, that there is a message here, and if we begin to explore it, to find out what that message really is in our terms, beginning to strip off the ugly green frog skin of conformity that we've all wrapped ourselves in in order to find the fairy prince underneath, this is what the gathering should be about." Well, people told us that they opened up this package that had these various things in it that I'm saying and read this and then saw these "Radical Faeries" and then said, "My God, that's me!" And those are the ones that came. We probably put out some five or six thousand pieces of literature. We put it out all over the country in bookstores--mostly in bookstores--and we did it in such a way-- it was a long leaflet--[that] when you picked up the leaflet, it read from the bottom to the top, so that you can pick it up and read it without having to turn it over on the other side. It had a beautiful picture, a very nice picture that was drawn by the same man who made the original design for the gay-in; we had it for Gay Liberation back in April of 1970.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Who was that?

HARRY HAY: A guy named Bruce Reifle. Anyway, he made the design for us. It was a very nice design, and we sent these things all over the country, and people just responded to them. The ones who responded to this came with open joyousness. The first night I gave some remarks on subject-subject consciousness, how I'd come to it, in pretty much the same way that I've given it to you.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I know, I feel so privileged, like I've had a one-person institute today. It's like I didn't have to go to Benson; it's absolutely remarkable.

HARRY HAY: Well, so that this is the way it came out. It came out more or less in literature, and then we went to Benson, and as I said, we had this first night, and we talked about these various things. We suggested that we come together in a circle the next morning, and we would set our own workshops. No Faerie gathering ever sets up a program in advance. We come together, and we talk about where we are, share something on the latest findings and thinkings in subject-subject consciousness, and then the next morning we come together in a big circle. Then people begin to share where they've been, what's happened, how they've been invaded, how they feel. Little by little we move into our own Faerie space and away from the hetero, three-dimensional world. Then all of a sudden if there are fifty people, there are fifty workshops. Everybody who comes has something really quite important for gay people to share and the expertise to do it with. But, then, not everybody goes to all the workshops. Some people go to one, and others are not heard from; so we would always make big lists of all the workshops that are available.

MITCH TUCHMAN: So, there have been gatherings other than this one?

HARRY HAY: The one in Benson; the second one was in the Rocky Mountains, outside of Denver, in the summer of 1980, to which about nearly three hundred people came; and this last summer [1981], we had one in the Pecos National Forest, which is nine thousand feet above Santa Fe, and about three hundred people showed up again. Then as a result of that, the feeling of so much of what this is all about is in a play that's been playing now called Without Reservations. Have you been to see that?

MITCH TUCHMAN: No, I haven't.

HARRY HAY: Well, it's high time you went. It's high time you went. As a matter of fact, it won't last much more than the end of January; so you'd better go this weekend. It plays Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 3709 Sunset Boulevard; there are two shows on Saturday, eight and twelve. These are all people who have been to at least one gathering; some of them have been to two. Many of the lines that I have given you appear in the play. It is a story about growing up gay. There are two sections that are on "I remember" and remembering the different things, and it's beautifully done.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is this a theater where this is done?

HARRY HAY: It's a little place that's been turned into a theater. It seats about seventy people. It's very intimate. It's very powerful. Nobody gets out of there without having wept copiously at least twice. Many, many times that I've been there, the audience gives a standing ovation; they just go out of their minds. Women like it just as much as men do. Women have been wonderful at this. So you really have to see that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, have women been attending any of the Radical Faerie--

HARRY HAY: No. Here you're dealing with things which are erotic, bordering way into the sensual and sexual, and in this respect, the women would find this-- This is simply not a place where the women are. But then the women's gatherings have been doing the same thing too, as you know.

MITCH TUCHMAN: I was going to ask you: Is there something similar?

HARRY HAY: Oh, yes. Women have been coming together at the summer solstices and things like that since '74, I guess, and there has been a whole separatist women's movement, and a fierce one at that.

MITCH TUCHMAN: How many people were at the most recent, the Pecos [gathering]?

HARRY HAY: About three hundred, about the same number that there were in Colorado, I guess. But people come from all over the place. At the Colorado gathering, there were two men there from Germany, two from France, one from Norway, as well as from the East Coast and Canada. Last summer the guys from Germany didn't come because there was a Faerie gathering outside of Munich in the Alps. I haven't heard what happened at it yet.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Now, do you find that the bulk of your time or much of your time in between these gatherings is taken up with either consolidating what occurred at them or planning the following one? I mean, is that the main thrust of your activity with regard to--

HARRY HAY: No. No, it hasn't been. A lot of thinking goes into this, a lot of correspondence. We've attempted to form Faerie circles out of people who come from these gatherings, but this has not been successful until now. We have a Faerie circle going now that I think is going to begin to do the things that I wanted them to do.

MITCH TUCHMAN: This means a group that would go on the rest of the year somewhere?

HARRY HAY: Yes, yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: A smaller group in a locality or something like that?

HARRY HAY: After the first gathering, we had-- I knew that people had to have a reason to come together, because without a reason they don't come together or they don't begin to think very well together. I felt that what was necessary was that they had to begin doing things together. They had to begin to continue sharing each other's lives, which is what they had done at the gatherings.

MITCH TUCHMAN: Is this the thrust, then, of your activity into the future, in other words?

HARRY HAY: Yes. Yes.

MITCH TUCHMAN: What sorts of things?

HARRY HAY: Well, for example, out of the first gathering, out of the meeting at Benson we had a square dance group. We got together on Friday nights, and we danced up on top of Barnsdall Park, up on top of the hill up there, and we just did square dances. We had a little cassette recorder, and we had one of those things that gave instructions on how to do a square dance. They were loads of fun, because in a square dance you have eight dancers. So, fourteen would show up, or nineteen would show up, and what are you going to do? Well, the only thing I figured to do was just square dance in the round. We did it in the round. To hell with that. That's the heteros doing it in a square. We did it in the round. For instance, the gentlemen bow to their ladies, the ladies curtsy to their gents. We all curtsied to everybody. When they used to sashay round, we skipped. You know, there were a few things that we did that were different. We would do the Texas star, and the Texas star would have nineteen arms in it instead of four. But who cares? It was wonderful. We had a very good time. We galloped all over the greensward there at Barnsdall Park for an hour or so and got thoroughly tired. Then we would sit down and have a circle for the rest of the time and share. What was happening was that people were attempting to recreate the ambience of the gathering. The ambience of the gathering was such that people didn't want to go. They didn't want to leave. It was a little bit like a shipboard romance in a way: they just didn't want to go. When we got back here, there were twenty people on our lawn waiting for us to get here. They couldn't give it up, and they didn't want to go back to their own lives. It was a little bit like stepping back through the looking glass; nobody wanted to do that. They wanted to go on being together and sharing. This would have been a wonderful thing in a way. So, there were about thirty people sitting here at the house the first night; they didn't want to go back to Berkeley or wherever they had to go to. So, the circles were attempting to recreate that ambience. Well, you can't do that: distance simply diminishes and diminishes and diminishes, and it gets less and less. But to have carried it forward, to have moved forward from that really meant that you had to begin to dig into your life and, if necessary, even possibly change our life, certainly your point of view. And this was too difficult; this was work. And our gay people were not willing to do this. Even the Faeries weren't willing to do this. So that it was easier to sort of come together and huddle than it was to think about digging into your lives. What I have been saying, and I said at that first gathering, and I have said it at every gathering since, [is] that what we must do as gay people, what we must do as Faeries is to begin to maximize the differences between ourselves and the rest of the world, to maximize the differences certainly between ourselves and the heteros, to understand how we are invaded and intruded upon our own consciousness every day of our lives. There are aggressive, competitive things that the heteros do which are not part of us. We are not competitive by nature, and we're not usually aggressive, and we don't rather like this. If we began to recognize the differences between ourselves and them, differences in the way we think and the way they think, we would finally begin to recognize the cracks in their sidewalk. The contributions that we have been making all along: we should begin to really be conscious of what our contributions are, which complement the way they see. As a matter of fact, we, as gay people, through gay consciousness have been making contributions to the well-being of the hetero community for thousands of years, but we don't know it, and therefore we don't appreciate what we've been doing, and they don't know it, and therefore they have no way of knowing how we contribute to them. My point is that once we finally begin to realize the enormous contribution we have made and make it clear that further contributions from us are impeded by their custom and their law to their advantage, and that is our only security. But they are not going to change the law in any significant way until it is to their advantage, and they can't do that until we begin to tell them who we are. We can't begin to tell them who we are until we begin to study who we are and begin to recognize the differences, and we haven't done that.* [For instance, heterosexuals search for complementarities when seeking mates. She has strengths to match his weaknesses. He has great fortitude to match her timidity. She has a streak of audacity to match his caution. Between the ways they complement each other, the traditional hetero ideal goes, they make between them the perfect match of the nuclear family nest. But when gay people in general and faeries in particular seek mates and lovers they don't seek out opposites. I don't seek a clinging vine to complement my derring-do. I want a companion who is as independent and as self-reliant as I am. I seek a comrade who moves forward as eagerly as I, shoulder to my shoulder, sharing and passionately adding his consciousness to mine as I to his, so that we both share the same eyes. We don't complement; we supplement each other. We are 180 degrees different from the heteros in this subject-subject experience. There are an infinity of such discoveries to be searched for and experienced. We haven't begun to make these explorations.] We haven't appreciated and loved what we've found either. We have to begin to respect that. This is what we must begin to do. I'm now suggesting that we use a subject-subject measure to begin to discover what these contributions are and how they ------------- * Mr. Hay added the following bracketed section during his review of the transcript. significantly differ from the way they see, because the way they see has to do with the continuation of the race. The equipment that we have that's like theirs does not contribute to the continuation of the race, therefore it obviously has other uses. It does have other uses: they're toys, they are things of joy, they are things of discovery. We haven't even begun to use them because we have always been imitating them in our habits as well as in our sexuality. We really have no need to do that. We have to begin to discover who we are. My point is that this is what the ten years of gay liberation should have been about, and instead they were so busy clanking their votes and saying, "We're the same as you. We've got rights," and all the rest of that, which was simply an imitation of the heteros, that we've wasted that time. And it may be that we've wasted our lives because maybe there isn't that much time left. So, I think at that moment we might cut off. [tape recorder turned off] The whole idea of maximizing the differences, beginning with the discovery of who we are, beginning to exercise who we are, and then beginning to use these things politically has been my call at each one of the gatherings for each of the three years. Up to now it has not been acted upon. People say, "Oh, yes, this is very important. We recognize that it's important," but it becomes a lip service. It becomes also something that is work, and not too many people have been-- Gay men in general have been too affluent, too comfortable to think about having to do work, because after all that work, that beginning to live together in space--or let's say, at the gatherings you live together in space; in between we live together in a time, like on a Friday night or on a Tuesday or something of that nature. This might very well be, these types of explorations might be that we might even have to change our lives, and this nobody is willing to do as yet. Now, after this last gathering, I decided, "Well, if nobody's going to do anything about it, I'll do something about it." So, I have started a Faerie circle here. I might say that one we have going at the present time, over half the people have never been to a gathering. They've read my material; they have read the different calls I've put out and the discussions I've put out, but they haven't been to a gathering per se. But we are beginning to form ourselves into a political action group at the present time. We are going to see to it that demonstrations against war, against imperialism, and against Reaganomics, for example, by which most of the country is going to have to hit the streets-- We are aware of the fact that most of these gatherings that happen now, these demonstrations and rallies are dull. They are worn out. They're using slogans of ten years ago, which at one time had enormous significance but now have very little. We are going to add a Faerie presence to these gatherings, and we hope to turn them around. Based upon the very successful demonstration that we put on in a day and a half for Jerry Falwell in the middle of November, we are going to be doing an entirely different type of thing, which would be, I think, our own contribution to it. And at this moment, we are hoping that what we do is so much fun and so much excitement that maybe many gay people will come to join us. We hope that different cities will hear what we're doing and begin to practice it on their behalf.

Contents

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Table of Contents

1. Transcript

1.1. Tape Number: I, Side One October 28, 1981

1.2. Tape Number: I, SIDE TWO October 28, 1981

1.3. Tape Number: II, Side One October 28, 1981

1.4. Tape Number: II, Side Two October 28, 1981

1.5. Tape Number: III, Side One November 3, 1981

1.6. Tape Number: III, Side Two November 3, 1981

1.7. Tape Number: IV, Side One November 17, 1981

1.8. Tape Number: IV, Side Two November 17, 1981

1.9. Tape Number: V, Side One November 17, 1981

1.10. Tape Number: V, Side Two November 17, 1981

1.11. Tape Number: VI, Side One December 1, 1981

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 1, 1981

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 18, 1981

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 18, 1981

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 29, 1981

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 29, 1981

1.17. TAPE NUMBER IX: SIDE ONE DECEMBER 29, 1981

1.18. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 29, 1981

1.19. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE [VIDEO SESSION] JANUARY 22, 1982

1.20. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE TWO JANUARY 22, 1982

1.21. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE JANUARY 26, 1982

1.22. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO JANUARY 26, 1982

1.23. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE ONE JANUARY 26, 1982

INDEX