In Stuart Timmons' 1990 biography, "The Trouble with Harry Hay," the author recounts the life of one of the earliest figures of the gay liberation movement. As the founder of the Mattachine Society, one of the earliest queer groups to hold meetings, Harry Hay is often acknowledged as "the founder" of the gay movement.
The trouble with Harry was first and foremost that he was a communist, believing that economic justice and gay rights were two faces of one movement. It was for the communist allegiance that he was eventually ousted from the Mattachine. It was for this allegiance - as well as his controversial belief that no one should be excluded from Gay Pride - that he emerged as the best-kept secret of the gay rights movement.
Hay expressed his own theory of being gay in his essay, "A Separate People Whose Time Has Come," where he referred to gay people as "a genetic mutation of consciousness whose active fostering is now required for human survival." This view - probably regarded by most contemporary readers as offbeat at best - has an understated nuance to it.
In the "genetic mutation" view, LGBTQ people are both radically different from and radically important to mainstream society. They are not, to borrow a term from conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan, "almost normal," nor should they want to be.
This understanding of gay people as vital in their difference has real value in a time when queer activism is unquestioningly dominated by the issue of same-sex marriage - what has been viewed as the last barrier to that "normalcy."
This is, of course, not a simple question of cultural assimilation; the real economic and legal stakes for the couples involved make marriage an important civil rights issue.
What I question is marriage's status as the most important - or worse, the final - fight for queer people (and words indicating finality tend to surround marriage like a sleeve).
It is imperative that we not view marriage this way. First of all, there are a startling number of more dire issues facing queer people. These include the persistence of AIDS in marginalized communities, consistently higher suicide rates among queer teens and the problems faced by elderly LGBTQ populations - for example, lesbians who spent much of their lives in straight marriages and now have no personal pensions.
For AIDS victims, suicidal teens and elderly people without health insurance, marriage is simply not the fundamental concern. The issue makes its appeal instead to financially secure people for whom homophobia is a sufficiently insignificant concern that they can publicly identify themselves as gay or lesbian (here the exclusionary language is intended).
I believe that Harry Hay would seriously question whether the movement he founded should buy into a system of benefits that excludes so many Americans.
Only people with adequate incomes could consider adoption; only people who had health insurance in the first place could worry about sharing it. (As a member of the increasingly uninsured 18-25 age bracket, I am particularly sensitive to this issue).
In the America in which we live, of course, things like income and insurance are allocated only to a fairly select (which is not to say, "a fairly selected") group of people.
Some would argue that such benefits have always been reserved for a fairly select group of people, and I would not disagree: ours are the most normal of circumstances. If normality is the goal of the queer movement, then the few of us who can are right to devote ourselves full-time to gaining access to that increasingly privatized set of privileges that is marriage.
If we choose to follow Harry Hay's example, however, our goals will need to shift. For Hay, the "genetic mutation of consciousness" that gay people have had to undergo in order to claim their identity is also the most important gift they have to offer mainstream society. And in a society like ours, a genetic mutation of consciousness is just what's needed.
How we should go about effecting that mutation is another, more difficult question, and one that most of us do not have the courage or desire to confront. As it is, 40 years have passed since Hay was thrown out of the Mattachine Society, and the LGBTQ community is still eerily silent about the trouble with Harry.
Sam Alexander '05 is a comparative literature concentrator.
