June was International Gay Pride month a concept in itself which would have been unthinkable a half century ago.\u00a0 In looking at the history of what we today call Gay Rights\/Gay Liberation, the Communist and Socialist contributions to the struggle for what today we call Gay Rights deserves to be both recognized and analyzed. The role of militancy itself deserves to be remembered, both by gay and straight people if the gains of recent decades are not to be reversed<\/p>\n
.\u00a0\u00a0 In part one of this essay posted on the PA blog<\/span>, ( see Norman Markowitz\u00a0“A Second Draft, With Corrections, on the Communist Movement and Gay RightsPar One”, PA Blog,<\/span> March 31, 2013) I dealt broadly with the struggles of the Communist movement against the exploitation of the working class and the oppression of colonized peoples and national minorities.\u00a0 I also dealt with Gay Rights as first and foremost a civil rights issue.<\/p>\n Here in part two, I will look more specifically at socialist and communist responses to homophobia and gay rights, looking\u00a0 at the most important U.S. figure in the struggle for Gay Liberation, Harry Hay.<\/p>\n In 2004, I published an article in the Political Affairs on Harry Hay and his importance at a time that the homophobic politics of the \u201creligious right\u201d were in full gear in the Bush administration. As part of this article I have used, reformulated\u00a0\u00a0 and expanded on that post.<\/p>\n Today, the Obama administration has clearly committed itself to Gay Civil Rights and the purveyors of homophobic politics are on the defensive, fighting rear guard battles, even though homophobic violence by street thugs, police brutality, and of course multi-faceted forms of social stigmatization remain part of life for gay men and lesbians in areas of the country where political and social \u201cconservatives\u201d wield power.\u00a0 Even with the substantial gains, \u00a0the struggle to make homophobia as unacceptable in civilized society as all forms of racism and sexism are still has a long way to go.<\/p>\n The Communist Movement and Gay Rights<\/span><\/p>\n Gays have been involved in the struggles for the emancipation of the working class\u00a0 as revolutionary agitators, labor organizers, partisans of socialist, communist and anarchist movements since at\u00a0least \u00a0the days of the Paris Commune and the First International, when for many those three categories were interchangeable.<\/p>\n Scholars of Gay History have pointed to appeals made to both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to bring the oppression of Homosexuals into the larger struggle for the emancipation of the Working Class.\u00a0 Here, to be frank, one finds from Marx a refusal to entertain the subject and from Engels open hostility to the individuals involved.<\/p>\n Gays involved in organizing trade unions and in other actions for the socialist movement in Germany and other countries did find themselves targeted by the police and often \u00a0abandoned by their unions and parties.<\/p>\n This is certainly no record to be proud of on any level, but it must be understood in context.\u00a0 The socialist movement, struggling to achieve elemental political democracy in a world where the working class did not have even the right to vote outside of a few countries, found itself divided on many questions, including how to respond to colonialism, the question of women\u2019s rights, and \u00a0the rights of oppressed national minorities.<\/p>\n On the postive side, the first significant support\u00a0 from a political party in the form of proposed state policiy that Gay Civil\/Human\u00a0 Rights received in world history came at the end of the 1890s from the flagship Marxist Socialist Party of the Second International and the world at that time, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD)<\/p>\n Conservative socialists, including those invoking Marx\u2019s ideas, often contended, as they did extensively \u00a0on women\u2019s rights and even the question of oppressed minorities, that these were not \u201cclass issues,\u201d that they would detract from the organization of the working class and retard the movement for socialism.<\/p>\n The Communist movement after the Soviet revolution broke with these narrow approaches on the question of\u00a0\u00a0 all forms of racism, oppressed\u00a0 nationalities, women\u2019s rights, etc.\u00a0 But<\/span>, on these other questions, there was a long history of anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism on which to build in fighting both rightwing opportunists and left doctrinaires in the socialist movement<\/p>\n The arguments made by conservative socialists and some\u00a0 left doctrinaires against active participation in the struggles against racism and sexism in the socialist movement were always tactical ones.\u00a0 Women, the people of the colonies, oppressed national minorities were not seen as homosexuals were,\u00a0 \u201cunnatural\u201d and unacceptable, at best\u00a0 a \u201cmedical\u201d or social problem to be tolerated as long as they remained hidden,\u00a0 at worst their very existence condemned by organized religion and laws passed to criminalize them for their erotic orientation.<\/p>\n It is no exaggeration to say that homosexuals faced and in parts of the world still face a level of societal oppression similar to the Hitlerite\u00a0 fascist oppression\u00a0 of people\u00a0 who they\u00a0according to their racist theories defined as \u00a0\u00a0Jewish \u2014that is, these people’s \u00a0very existence threatened society, they were both diseased and the carriers of disease, and must either be quarantined or, in the Hitlerite final \u201csolution\u201d exterminated.<\/p>\n Since homosexuals can\u2019t be \u201cfound\u201d\u00a0 by birth records,\u00a0 circumcisions, etc, the way the Hitler fascists hunted down people whom they defined as Jews, Gays have the \u201cprotection\u201d of wearing masks, leading double lives, either repressing their erotic orientation or living an underground or closeted existence.<\/p>\n It is no accident that the Hitler regime, even though its enemies noted the closeted gay men within its ranks, added the pink triangle to the yellow star as they placed homosexuals in concentration camps along with \u00a0political and \u201cracial\u201d enemies.\u00a0\u00a0 Homosexuals in the fascist ranks were as \u201cvaluable\u201d to the defense of other homosexuals as high profile gay Republicans in the U.S. are today to Gay Rights.<\/p>\n And\u00a0 it is no accident either\u00a0\u00a0 that Magnus Hirschfeld, the leading exponent of\u00a0 ending the oppression of homosexuals under the law, in Weimar Germany was among the Nazis first targets when they seized power in 1933.<\/p>\n While Marxists and Communists have always rejected the \u201cgreat man \u201ctheory of history in principle, there are two individuals whose activism\u00a0 most directly helped to shape the development\u00a0 of the Gay Rights\/ Gay liberation movement globally in the 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 The first, Magnus Hirschfeld, in pre Hitler Germany, was a socialist.\u00a0 The second, Harry Hay, in\u00a0 the U.S. in the post WWII period, was a Communist with both a small and a big C.<\/p>\n Magnus Hirschfeld, liberal, humanist, and socialist<\/span><\/p>\n Magnus Hirschfeld, born in 1868, came from a very different background than Harry Hay.\u00a0 A medical doctor and the son of a prominent physician, Hirschfeld, was well to do,\u00a0 traveled widely, and\u00a0 wrote for prestigious medical journals. In 1897, he founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which sought to repeal a section of the German penal code which criminalized homosexuality.<\/p>\n The Committee was \u201cessentially\u201d at elite group of figures in the arts, sciences and profession, whose endorsement \u00a0would give decriminalization respectability.<\/p>\n Legislation to that effect was put forward in the German Reichstag at the very end of the 19th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 Its support came mostly from\u00a0elected delegates \u00a0of the German Social Democratic Party.(SPD)<\/p>\n Over the years, Hirschfeld, working within the imperial and later Weimar political systems wrote extensively and\u00a0 campaigned relentlessly for the decriminalization of homosexuality, arguing that science and reason called for such policies.<\/p>\n Prominent figures in the Marxist Socialist movement, including Marx\u2019s compatriot August Bebel, the leading Marxist theorist at the time Karl Kautsky, the leading revisionist socialist theorist , Edward Bernstein signed petitions for Hirschfeld\u2019s Committee, as did Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann,\u00a0 Kathe Kollwitz, the philosopher Martin Buber, and other very famous figures in the arts and sciences.\u00a0 The legislation advanced in the Weimar era, but was never enacted<\/p>\n After WWI, Hirschfeld organized international conferences calling for the repeal of anti-homosexual legislation\u00a0 everywhere and\u00a0 established\u00a0 a World League for Sexual Reform.<\/p>\n He also organized and directed in Germany an Institute for Sexual Research and sought to connect the repeal of anti-homosexual legislation with\u00a0 both the scientific study of human sexuality\u00a0 and\u00a0 a broader reform of\u00a0 laws regulating human sexuality.<\/p>\n When the Nazis took power in 1933, they ransacked the headquarters of the Institute and made a public show of burning its books and pamphlets.\u00a0 Hirschfeld, who fortunately was abroad so as to keep from being thown into an\u00a0early concentration camp or worse, \u00a0went into exile in France, where he died of a heart attack in 1935, still hoping that the Nazis would somehow be driven from power in Germany and the struggle for\u00a0 the elimination of repressive laws against human sexuality\u00a0would \u00a0be revived.1<\/p>\n Harry Hay, Communist Militant, Organizer and Educator for Gay Liberation<\/span><\/p>\n Harry Hay was born in England in 1912, on the day, he liked to remember, that the Titanic sank.\u00a0 Eventually, his family settled in Southern California, where Harry, who became aware of his erotic orientation at a fairly early age,\u00a0 began to work in Los Angeles Theater and movie projects in the early 1930s.\u00a0 As a young man, he was influenced by the writings of Edward Carpenter, a British homosexual and socialist, who saw Gay people as an oppressed group with their own distinct culture and needs.<\/p>\n It was in Los Angeles in the early 1930s that Harry\u00a0 met Will Geer, a\u00a0 gay actor, singer and CPUSA activist, who was to become his lover.\u00a0 After joining Geer in doing support work for\u00a0 the ILWU-led San Francisco General Strike(1934), Hay followed Geer into the CPUSA and used his substantial talents as an organizer and his theatricality and humor to become a\u00a0 very effective CPUSA activist. Never seeking power for himself, Harry Hay was an example of the best kind of Communist cadre.<\/p>\n Hay was always\u00a0 open and philosophical about his erotic orientation, seeing it as both part of himself and a handicap to his larger work—he once told a psychiatrist that he found party meetings very dull because there were no \u201cflower-faced Marxist boys to stand with me in the class struggle against oppression.\u201d\u00a0 In 1938, he did marry Anita Platky, a comrade whom he liked, and their marriage was to last 13 years.\u00a0 They \u00a0were to have two children.<\/p>\n But, as the marriage went on, he came to reject the view of some of his comrades, including his therapist, that he must struggle against his homo erotic feelings, in effect make himself unhappy and repressed in order to live a \u201chappy normal life.\u201d<\/p>\n Harry, one might say, had come to accept his erotic orientation as positive for himself \u00a0and a part of his civil\u00a0 and human rights\u00a0 long before\u00a0 others dared profess those views<\/p>\n Meanwhile Harry was a sort of Jimmy Higgins jack of all trades guy on the California left, teaching at the\u00a0 CPUSA’s California Labor school,\u00a0 and playing a significant role in the election Ed Roybal,the first Latino elected to the Los Angeles City council after WWII.<\/p>\n Hay also organized \u201cBatchelors for Wallace\u201d\u00a0 in California,the first gay political group involving itself in an American or any other election and his actions\u00a0 helped<\/p>\n to carry a precinct with a large Gay population for\u00a0 Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party In the 1948 presidential election.<\/p>\n Furthermore,\u00a0 he in effect raised the issue of the Progressive party supporting a sexual privacy law in exchange for Gay votes–perhaps the first time in U.S. history that anyone had defined Gays as a voting constituency with specific political needs.<\/p>\n Now we come to a poignant and in its own way tragic moment in history. At a time when the CPUSA was facing unprecedented political persecution on all fronts and losing tens of thousands of members,\u00a0 Harry Hay was a dedicated and committed party member, an activist in the best sense.<\/p>\n He had reached a point\u00a0 though where he saw his work as first and foremost the struggle for gay liberation, which he identified as a Communist with the struggles of oppressed people through the world.\u00a0 With the defeat of fascism and the collapse of colonialism, he saw a new opening, a huge increase in possibilities for gay liberation.<\/p>\n The Communist party leadership in California respected his great contributions\u00a0 to people\u2019s struggles.\u00a0 But, because of the dominant ideology across the political spectrum,\u00a0 \\the CPUSA, like all other groups, would not accept open homosexuals as party members and Hay was now committed to being both a Communist activist, as he had been for the greater part of two decades, and an open homosexual activist.<\/p>\n The arguments that party functionaries passively accepted at the time was essentially the argument used to purge homosexual men from the government\u2014that they would\u00a0 be subject to blackmail and could then become a force to \u201cbetray\u201d the party.\u00a0 Faced with this, Hay went to the party leadership and asked to be expelled\u2014which they at first refused!\u00a0 Finally, Hay worked out a \u201ccompromise\u201d with California party leadership in which he was \u201cexpelled \u201cas a\u00a0 \u201csecurity risk\u201d(which at the height of the postwar persecution was\u00a0 in the larger society a plus, rather than as a \u201chomosexual.\u201d 2<\/p>\n .\u00a0 Harry\u2019s situation then\u00a0 was in many ways more complicated than activists like Paul Robeson who now faced relentless persecution by cold warriors\/racists\u00a0 in the U.S. at the same time \u00a0and earlier Alexandra Kollontai in Czarist Russia, that is, \u00a0those who combined the struggle for socialism with the interdependent but not subservient liberation of\u00a0 people of color and women<\/p>\n In a tragic-comic expression of this whole situation, the CPUSA issued a formal statement praising Harry Hay and gave him in California a farewell testimonial dinner\u00a0 perhaps the only testimonial dinner \u00a0 and in their statement proclaimed him to be \u201cA Lifelong Friend of the People\u00a0 a bizarre acts by \u00a0any party for someone that they had just expelled<\/p>\n Hay\u00a0 in his thinking had built upon his earlier reading of Edward Carpenter to see, in the context of global liberation struggles then sweeping the world, Gay men and Lesbians as an\u00a0 oppressed people whose double lives were barriers to their emancipation.<\/p>\n Gay men and lesbians were compelled to live a closeted\u00a0 existence, facing possible prison sentences, certain blacklisting, and likely isolation.\u00a0 Hay was also influenced by\u00a0 the widely publicized Kinsey report, which contend that homo-erotic sentiments and behavior could be found in large numbers of people, deriving a figure as high as ten percent of the human race, based on his extrapolations from the report.<\/p>\n Hay had come to see what the Kinsey report sought to show but which most people everywhere, with and without power, could not see\u2014that human sexuality was something far more complex and that confronting the complexities instead of fearing them was necessary to the liberation of all people.<\/p>\n Harry \u00a0reluctantly left the CPUSA, whose leadership was not ready to grasp the possibilities and significance of a homosexual liberation movement, for\u00a0 much the same reason that W.E.B Dubois joined the CPUSA at the end of his life\u00a0 after leaving the socialist party before WWI and engaging in debates with the CPUSA for decades.<\/p>\n Dubois saw that the world, with the defeat of fascism and the collapse of colonialism was rapidly changing and the future for the liberation struggles for the \u201cnon white\u201d peoples of the world rested with the Communist movement.\u00a0 Hay saw in the postwar world the possibility of applying what he had learned as a CPUSA activist in the new situation to bring about a gay liberation movement\/<\/p>\n And Harry \u00a0acted in\u00a0 the Autumn of 1950 as the Korean War\u00a0 and Senator Joe McCarthy both\u00a0 raged on in 1950 and the rightists in Congress and the press denounced \u201ccrooks, communists, and queers\u201d in and outside of the government<\/p>\n With Gay friends and comrades he formed the Mattachine Society.\u00a0 The name itself had an interesting history–one deeply connected with those who had to hide their identity.\u00a0 First, Harry\u00a0 took it from a medieval French secret society of unmarried men who wore masks as part of their secret society rituals.<\/p>\n The French took the name Mattachine from the Italian mattachino, court jesters who could speak the truth to Kings only when they wore masks–much like Gays and other minorities compelled to disguise themselves and deprecate themselves when addressing those who refused to see them as they were.<\/p>\n Although Harry\u2019s commitment to gay organizing had\u00a0 led him to leave the CPUSA by a kind of mutual consent, in\u00a0 reality he and his comrades used CPUSA organizing and educational techniques to develop the Mattachine society as a representative of Gay people and a vehicle for Gay Liberation<\/p>\n However, Harry and\u00a0 Mattachine\u2019s\u00a0 Communist and left leadership found themselves by the mid 1950s the victims of the kind of internal\u00a0 divisions that had devastated trade unions and left mass organizations of all kinds during the cold war period.<\/p>\n Gays who sought acceptance within the existing system, the opposite of everything Harry and his comrades stood for, took over Mattachine and turned it into an organization of proper men in suits and ties having forums with homophobes and centrists and engaging in very tame actions to seek\u00a0 greater \u201ctoleration\u201d for Gays.<\/p>\n When the mass Gay Liberation movement took shape after the Stonewall Gay Ghetto Riot of 1969, the Mattachine Society was considered by many\u00a0 Gay activists to be an artifact with establishment pretensions, something like a conservative AFL business union to labor militants or the National Urban League to Black militants.\u00a0 Its early crucial history was largely unknown<\/p>\n Harry, though\u00a0 never stopped\u00a0\u00a0 fighting for Gay Liberation,\u00a0 using the Leninist tactics and strategies that he had first learned in the 1930s–the building of organization and of broad inclusive Peoples Fronts to advance struggle.<\/p>\n Called before HUAC in 1955(one should\u00a0 remember that homophobia was cultivated by McCarthyites as a companion to their generic red-baiting) he stood up to the committee, treating them with the contempt they richly deserved, although he felt\u00a0 bitter that it was difficult to get Left attorneys to represent him because of his open homosexuality.<\/p>\n Fearful, perhaps, of making him into a martyr(McCarthy had been censured the previous year and McCarthyism in its crudest forms was in decline) HUAC declined to cite him for contempt and send him to prison, which it had previously done with the Hollywood Ten and others.<\/p>\n In the 1960s, Harry joined Women\u2019s Strike For Peace, a left peace activist group including both former and ongoing CPUSA members, and sought to develop coalitions of the emerging Gay movement with antiwar and women\u2019s rights movements.<\/p>\n He also became an activist and supporter of\u00a0 Native Americans in their struggle to\u00a0 reclaim their cultural heritage. Harry also began to share his life with John Burnside in 1963, developing with John a family life that would last for the rest of his life.\u00a0 In an age when the word \u201crole model\u201d became a national clich\u00e9, Harry and John became for many an example of the kind of committed and happy relationships that Gay people could forge even in a homophobic environment.<\/p>\n At the same time,\u00a0 Harry became an active critic of the mass Gay Rights movement which emerged in the 1970s, particularly its penchant for involving itself in narrow interest group politics and supporting traditional Democratic party politicians in what was a sort of political protection racket.<\/p>\n In that sense, he continued to be the militant left Communist that he had been since the early 1930s, seeking to broaden the horizons of people\u2019s struggles\u00a0 In 1979, Harry became the organizer\u00a0 of Radical Faeries, which sought to revive the broad humanism of the original Mattachine Society with a commitment to complete sexual freedom and diversity as inseparable<\/p>\n Harry continued to be politically active in the last decades of his long life,\u00a0 serving as a leading figure in California of\u00a0 the Lavender Caucus of Jesse Jackson\u2019s Rainbow coalition in the 1980s and\u00a0 practicing the pluralism that liberals in the larger society\u00a0 now preached in what was still its most tabooed area–erotic expression.<\/p>\n To his last day, Harry , who passed away in 2002, rejected the hatred that ruling circles fomented against Gay men and Lesbians, as they do against all other oppressed minority groups as a way to divide and conquer, and the self-hatred,\u00a0 which for Gays is perhaps more intense than for any other oppressed group.\u00a0 He would fight in an underground but never live in a closet.\u00a0 3<\/p>\n Harry Hay is\u00a0 today rightly\u00a0 praised today by a wide variety of Gay Rights organizations as leading\u00a0 pioneer in the struggle for Gay Liberation.\u00a0 It is important\u00a0 to remember him as a Communist who both preached and practiced the ideological militancy and tactical flexibility that produced great victories for the working class and oppressed minorities on many fronts in the past and can and will do so in the future.<\/p>\n It is also important to understand that the CPUSA, his party,\u00a0 caught up to him in its commitment to Gay Rights and its\u00a0 complete rejection of the backward conceptions of Gays in politics and society.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, claiming to be the \u201csuccessor\u201d of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has, if press reports are correct, gone back in time in supporting the homophobic policies of the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet Putin government, which it claims to opposed<\/p>\n It\u00a0was \u00a0forty four years\u00a0 last week,\u00a0\u00a0 June 28 that the Stonewall Riot, in essence a Gay \u201cghetto riot\u201d at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village started.\u00a0\u00a0 In its aftermath an open Gay Righss\/\/Gay Liberation movement\u00a0 came into existence and has been a significant force in the larger peoples movements over the last thirty-five years. Both the theories and practice of Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Hay live the movements today for Gay Civil Rights in all of its manifestations.\u00a0 Hirschfeld has received many posthumous honors in European countries for his contribution.\u00a0 Harry Hay deserves a few here.<\/p>\n While most people identify Gay liberation with the \u201cNew Left\u201d of the 1960s, it, like the civil rights, women\u2019s rights, and anti-war movements of the time, cannot be separated from the Communist Party, USA, and broad labor left organizations which it had helped to bring about.\u00a0 In the 1950s and 1960s, CPUSA activists in civil rights, women\u2019s rights, and peace movements often found themselves \u201cworking in the closet,\u201d hiding their identities because of the dangers of external and internal repression.<\/p>\n In the case of the postwar U.S. Gay Liberation movement, Harry Hay, a militant Communist, in effect organized and led that movement at the height of cold war reaction, interpreting it as a part of a larger global struggle for the liberation of oppressed people.<\/p>\n At the risk of sounding repetitious, it is important\u00a0 to both repeat and\u00a0 remember Harry Hay as a Communist who both preached and practiced the ideological militancy and tactical flexibility that produced great victories for the working class and oppressed minorities on many fronts in the past and can and will do so in the future.<\/p>\n He\u00a0did \u00a0fight wearing a mask, but hee never hid in\u00a0\u00a0a \u00a0closet, engaging in the self-segregation that oppressors offer oppressed groups for \u201ctheir own protection.\u201d .\u00a0 And like the Communist movement through the world, he saw group pride in terms of a larger social solidarity which was the only way both institute and consolidate progressive social change<\/p>\n NOTES:<\/b><\/p>\n [1][1] Unfortunately, the most comprehensive major studies of Hirschfeld are not in English.\u00a0 However I would recommend a number of works.\u00a0 In Blasius and Phelan, eds.,We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics<\/span>(New York, 1997) the chapter on \u201cThe Emergence of a Gay and Lesbian Political Culture in Germany\u201d is valuable, as is James Steakley\u2019s early work,The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany<\/span>(New York, 1975).\u00a0 There is also an excellent work which helps to understand the broader Weimar\u00a0 cpntext concerning sexuality\u00a0 in which Hirschfeld struggled, Atina Grossman,The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950<\/span>(Oxford, 1995) On Hitlerite oppression of Gay men and Lesbians, see especially,see Gunther Grau, ed.,Hidden Holocaust:Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933-1945<\/span>(New York, 1995)\u00a0 On Hirschfeld himself see Charlotte Wolf, Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology<\/span>(London, 1986)<\/p>\n 2 There is an abundant, multi-faceted scholarship connecting cold war anti-Communistt ideology and policy with cold war homophobia, as they two both mirrored each other and merged. For example, Barbara Epstein, \u201cAnti-Communism, Homophobia, and the Construction of Masculinity in the Post War U.S.\u201d in Lori Lyn Boyle, ed The Cold War:Cold War Culture and Society<\/span>( 2001) uses concepts derived from contemporary feminist and gender studies to analyze the relationship between the two.\u00a0\u00a0 Elizabeth Collins dissertation, \u201cRed Baiting Public Women:Gender, Loyalty and Red Scare Politics\u201d connects\u00a0 the two\u00a0 to\u00a0 sexism and is available on the Internet\u00a0\u00a0 There is also a fine academic\u00a0 study of the issue and the development of U.S.foreign\u00a0 Vietnam War policy, Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy<\/span>(Amherst, 2001) Dean, after examining the \u201cmale bonding\u201d rituals of the graduates of prep schools, ivy league colleges, and exclusive fraternities and clubs from whom foreign policy makers from both parties came, looks at the anti-Communist and anti-Gay purges in the state department and foreign service and their effects on all policy makers, both the purge victims and those who continued in their positions. What he shows is the development of a culture of fear, in which all peace policies were not only compared to the Munich appeasement policy and internal Communist subversion, but all weakeness, to \u201ctendermindness”, effeminacy and homosexuality. For many policy makers\u00a0 in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, these fears muted criticisms of the disastrous Vietnam escalation even as evidence grew that it was disastrous.<\/p>\n 3\u00a0 On Harry himself, I would look at a collection of his writings before his death at the age of ninety, Harry Hay and Will Roscoe,eds, Radically Gay:Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder<\/span>(Boston, 1996)\u00a0 Stuart Timmons,The Trouble With Harry (<\/span>1990)\u00a0 is the major biography a very valuable detaied studyl which, even though much more could have been done with Harry\u2019s\u00a0 thought, deals forthrightly with his CPUSA background, unlike earlier works which lapsed into anti-Communism even when they sought to portray Harry positively.\u00a0 There is also\u00a0 Jack Walsh\u2019s award winning documentary film,\u00a0 \u201cHope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay\u201d(2002) Finally, as a general work, I would recommend that readers consult John D\u2019Emilio,Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities:\u00a0 The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970<\/span>(Chicago, 1993)<\/p>\n