Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Full Version: Harry Hay, and David Thorstad along the way (it rhymes)
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
In a trivia game context, one of Harry Hay's partners back in the 1930s was Will Geer, who played Grandpa on The Waltons. (According to Hay's wikipedia entry.)

Ranch hands first got Harry interested in communism, a potential oddity of choice in itself. Since the history of Marxism and issues related to LGBT is very inconsistent across time and different countries, starting with the founders: "The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality volume two is unequivocal on Marx and Engels view of homosexuality, stating that, "There can be little doubt that, as far as they thought of the matter at all, Marx and Engels were personally homo-phobic..."

It was Geer who introduced Hay specifically to the Communist Party USA, which eventually came to support gay rights in 2005 (if not before). But for decades that certainly wasn't the case: "Most party members saw homosexuality as something done by those with fascist tendencies (following the lead of the Soviet Union in criminalizing the practice for that reason). [Harry] Hay was expelled from the party as an ideological risk." (Even Putin's policies are probably still leftovers indebted to his KGB past and late Soviet roots.)

Associations of Marxist organizations (in the US) with radical sexual experimentation was arguably confined to divergent or rogue individual supporters like Hay and David Thorstad. The latter a bisexual pedarast who was one of the founders of NAMBLA. Needless to say, these dissenting socialist "intellectuals" were among those holding the gun of trying to get the mainstream non-straight and transgender movement to shoot its own foot, via advocating it should return to being inclusive of controversial fringe groups like NAMBLA.

"Thorstad claims that pederasty is the main way in which homosexuality has been expressed in modern culture, and that "child abuse hysteria is an industry of insanity aimed at homosexuals [which] ... plays on the impression people have always had of homosexuals as being child molesters", and describes opposition to NAMBLA as "... [similar] to one waged by 'lesbian feminists who jumped right on the bandwagon' of what he calls the anti-gay male/child pornography scare", according to The Advocate.

He has also likened being a pederast in the United States as the equivalent of being "a Jew in Nazi Germany" and has criticized the mainstream LGBT community for its assimilationist approach towards capitalist and heterocentric society. He has also said that the label LGBT is "the most absurd one of all" and is "far too fixed an identity, eliding the fluidity of sexuality and sexual behavior ... in that sense, Kinsey's scale is valid." He also believes that "assimilationist homosexual groups ... the psychiatric profession and the bourgeois media, such as the New York Times ... all nowadays blur distinctions by lumping everything under the rubric 'pedophilia,' an absurdity apparently intended to criminalize love and force very different behaviors into one negative pigeonhole."
"

Using a quote apparently from this retaliatory smear article back in 2006, there's supposedly a viral circulating around that also features the photo at bottom (if it's still appearing at this time). Claiming that Harry Hay was marching three spots from Nancy Pelosi in a Pride Parade in San Francisco in 2001, the year before he died. (Note that the aforementioned article did not exhibit the added photo of the viral.) But as can obviously be seen by the "1987" on the sign, that spurious image is from an earlier event and possibly other location ["Washington"]. In addition to Hay being absent in the scene. The non-spectacled balding guy certainly isn't the then circa 75-year old NAMBLA supporter, if 1987.

(Checking again: The viral hit-job and its excerpt may have omitted any specific date at all for the parade/march, so as to enhance the suggestion that the photo did pertain to what the quote addressed. "Marching a mere three spots away from the famous Harry Hay, no doubt waving and smiling to the crowd, was, as the Chronicle logged her in the Official Guide and Program Parade Lineup: 'U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi.'")

Harry Hay: . . . he subsequently became a professional actor in Los Angeles, where he joined the Communist Party USA. After confiding with fellow Party members that he was homosexual, they too urged Hay to marry a woman, adhering to the party line that same-sex attraction was a symptom of bourgeoise decadence.

. . . Hay came to be viewed as an elder statesman within the gay community, and was regularly invited to give speeches to LGBT activist and student groups. He was the featured speaker at the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade in 1982, and Grand Marshal of the Long Beach Gay Pride Parade in 1986. [...] He nevertheless remained highly critical of the mainstream gay rights movement.

Hay joined several other early gay rights activists in protesting the exclusion of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) from participation in LGBT social movements, most noticeably pride parades on the grounds that such exclusions pandered to heterosexual-dominated society. When questioned on his support for NAMBLA in a 1983 New York University forum, he remarked "If the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world", highlighting his own relationship with an adult man when he was 14.

At the 1986 Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade he courted controversy by carrying a banner with "NAMBLA Walks With Me" written on it, after organizers banned the group from joining the march; the organisers complained to police and he narrowly avoided arrest.


[Image: D1I9Y2HXcAAVtag.jpg]