Reconstructing Harry

This presentation was delivered to Frontiers (a Madison, Wisconsin men’s social organization) as part of their annual meeting on Sunday, February 20, 2005, at the West Side Club.

As with any creative endeavor a playwright starts with nothing. In the old days it was a blank page that took shape as one put words onto it. Now it is a computer screen, but the idea is the same—there is a blank white empty space in front of you that has to be filled. Out of this chaos of nothingness something must come. Many of my plays have religious or spiritual themes—it’s just the way I am—the Catholic boy in me still trying to explain his existence long after the Catholicism is gone. It permeates much of what I am. I am a philosopher at heart. And it seems to me that the process of writing is as good an explanation of God and the idea of eternity and infinity as there is.

Think about it. You have the vast empty page in front of you and a world is created on it, even though there was nothing before it. Yet there was in fact something before the creation. It always was. There was an idea long before a single word was put onto the page, and on the other end time will continue long after the stage has darkened on the last performance and the characters have all died. Writing is a spiritual act and it is also an act of hope.

So the play has always been. It was within me before I knew it existed and it was a matter of time and circumstance before it could be realized. More than four years before I started writing Radical Harry the play had its germination in a conversation I had with Joel Gersmann, my mentor and the Artistic Director of Broom Street Theater. But the conversation that inspired the play would never have happened if not for my own life experiences that went as far back as 20 years before that. Every event in life can trace its roots back to moments that may not have felt significant at the time, but which help to shape one’s own future.

As background, I came out in 1979 while living in the city of Platteville, Wisconsin. This was the same year that Harry Hay and a few other men first created a group called the Radical Faeries. Of course I didn’t know who Harry Hay was at the time. I barely knew who I was at the time. But as I came to know myself I felt a need to explore the history of my community and I soon learned about Harry, a man who had co-founded the Mattachine Society, America’s first real gay organization, in 1950.

Harry was considered the father of the modern gay rights movement. He had been actively organizing 20 years before Stonewall, considered to be the watershed event of early gay liberation. He had been actively organizing for workers’ rights and other things 20 years before that. By the time I came out in 1979, ten years after Stonewall, he was already a 67-year-old man who was still actively helping gay men celebrate themselves. He was a man who soon became one of my heroes.

I had the good fortune of meeting Harry Hay twice in my life. The first time was when I was living in Denver, Colorado in the late 1980’s. I had noticed a small item in the newspaper that he was to be in town and that he would be speaking at a church not too far from where I lived. So I talked to my friend Mark and he and his lover, Steve, and I, all went to see him.

The event turned out to be in the basement of the church, which was almost entirely dark, and when we stepped through the door at the bottom of the stairs we saw a small circle of chairs where we found seats. Harry Hay and his long-time partner, John Burnside, spent a couple hours in that circle of chairs happily talking about their experiences as gay men in the world—some of it activism, some of it quiet interactions with friends, some of it founding and developing the Radical Faeries—and all of it fascinating, years of personal and community history. I could hardly believe that I was sitting in the midst of a small group of men listening to one of my heroes speak and when it was over I almost crushed him with a hug I was so enthusiastic. By then he was well into his 70’s. The other thing I remember vividly is that I felt ashamed that so few of Denver’s large gay community bothered to show up for the talk. There couldn’t have been more than 20 or so people in attendance. I couldn’t imagine so few showing up to hear such an important and historical social liberator. I was embarrassed and ashamed for my own community.

That turned out to be a theme that repeated itself often over the next several years. While Harry’s life had been documented in books and magazines, while he had been filmed for documentaries, while the movement had reclaimed some of its heritage and identified its early pioneers, much of the gay community still did not know anything about that history or the people who created it. Much of the community didn’t care.

By the 1990’s I was back in Madison. By the turn of the millennium I was working at OutReach, Madison’s LGBT community center. One day, while stuffing envelopes with one of the volunteers, Lance, we started talking politics and history. In the middle of the conversation the Executive Director of the organization came by and listened in for a bit. When Harry Hay came up in our conversation she asked who that was. Lance and I were both flabbergasted. The idea of the Director of an LGBT community center not knowing Harry Hay was appalling. Somewhat in shock I explained to her the significance of Harry and his contribution to our culture.

Some time later my mentor, Joel, called. I complained to him about it, and he said something along the lines of, “Well, if it’s that important to you then write a play about it. Show people who he is.” I told him that was a great idea and that I would. A short while later he called back to say, “But if you do write it I have to play Harry.” I agreed, and kept my word on both counts.

Thus was the germination of Radical Harry. A writer never knows how his material is going to come to him. Sometimes a phrase comes into your head and you know you have to do something with it. That was the case with my play The Color of Dust, as well as The Legend of Pinkbeard: Pirate of Men. Both of those started simply as phrases that became titles that became plays. My first play, Dream Quest, was adapted from one of my own short stories, which in turn had come from a vivid dream. Judge was inspired by a murder in my home county in which the sitting judge killed a local attorney. The idea of a judge killing someone intrigued me. It seemed that it opened up myriad possibilities of exploring the concept of judgment, who has the right to judge whom, and why. My first note about it as a potential play was in 1989, three years before I actually wrote my first play. It finally hit the stage in 2002, thirteen years later. Muffy the Bitch was inspired by a combination of the culture of school violence in this country and a late-night re-run of The Bad Seed. Gay Like Me was a takeoff on the groundbreaking 1960’s book, Black Like Me, but adapted for the gay subculture. The ideas come from a variety of places.

Obviously the concept of a play is not a play. It still has to be written and it has to be produced. Radical Harry took over four years to get from concept to reality. Part of the reason was that I was being pushed to write a stage biography. Joel has a history of writing really good plays that are stage biographies. And that’s what it seemed I was heading toward with this idea, but I wasn’t sure it was where I wanted to go. Further, I always had the idea that a biography should never be written while the subject is still alive. The life has not been fully lived until it is over. No one could know what Harry might do in his last few years, especially given his feisty first eighty-plus. I was not comfortable with writing a stage biography about him as long as he was still around, but I also wasn’t ready for one of my heroes to leave this realm either.

Harry Hay died in October of 2002 at the age of ninety. By that time the 2003 season at Broom Street Theater had already been set and I already had something in mind for 2004, so I told Joel that a play on Harry would likely be in 2005 and possibly even 2006 by the time I was ready to do it. In the meantime Joel had open-heart surgery and took about two years to fully recover. In my mind he really was the only one who could have played Harry, so the timing all worked out perfectly in the long run.

The way I work is to process intellectually and internally for anywhere from several months to several years before I ever put anything in writing, except perhaps for an occasional note. I engage my imagination and let it wander freely and see where it goes. I think about potential directions and play them out in my head. If necessary I also spend time doing research. For many of my plays, my medieval trilogy of Mystery Play, Miracle Play, and Morality Play, the factually based Judge, The Color of Dust, and others, I have had to do a significant amount of research before starting the play. Research generally goes along with imagining different ways of doing the play and sometimes informs that imagination in helpful ways.

For Radical Harry a great deal of my life had been research on the subject. I already knew a pretty good amount about the subject before I even knew I was going to write a play. I knew, though, that I would need to do more.

When I first started to do the research for this play I came across gem after gem, story after story, that seemed to me ideally suited for a play. The man had led an incredibly interesting life. He was the son of wealthy parents and was born in England, grew up in South Africa, Chile, and finally Los Angeles. At an early age he was introduced to the writings of Edward Carpenter and realized that he was not the only one who felt different from other boys. Also at an early age he was first introduced to union organizing and the ideas of Communism while working on his aunt and uncle’s farm in California.

As a college student he boldly came out and announced his sexuality to his entire circle of friends, naïve enough to think that it would be accepted simply because it just was. He ended up dropping out of college. As a young man in the 30’s he was an aspiring actor in Hollywood, gaining small parts and extra roles in films and on the stage. It was through this work that he met his first real lover, a man who taught him the ways of “sensitive” men and who indoctrinated him into the Communist party. That man was Will Geer, who later gained fame as Grandpa Walton. Both men eventually married, but Harry also eventually divorced, came out, and stayed out.

Harry had another famous lover, one who supported him behind-the-scenes when he first wanted to form his gay group and who was ultimately one of the founding members of the Mattachine Society, though no one knew it until after his death decades later. That man was Rudi Gernreich, who gained fame as a fashion designer (so much so that he made the cover of Time magazine) and who was the designer behind the idea of the topless bikini. Leave it to a gay man to come up with something that straight men could only dream of but never dare to bring to fruition.

There were many great stories throughout Harry’s life. He was called before the House Un-American Activities Commission. He founded at least three important gay organizations. He had a turbulent relationship with his father. He was a lifelong Communist. And for the last 39 years of his life he found love with his lifetime partner, John Burnside. They became a model of the possibilities not only of sex in the gay community, but of love.

All of this was ripe for biography. It was all great stuff. So of course I threw it all away and wrote something else, a fictional story loosely based on only the last few years of Harry’s life, a story that did not center solely around Harry, but around Harry and other characters who were all equally important. I’d like to think he would have appreciated the egalitarianism of the effort.

The reason was this. While the details of Harry’s life were fascinating those details did not constitute his legacy. His legacy was not how he lived, but how his living affected others, particularly the lives of gay men. I decided that it would be more important to show how his life impacted others and I thought the best way to do that would be to make a story about a young man struggling with his own sexuality whose life intersects with Harry’s and who comes to comfortable terms with himself as a result. The play evolved beyond even that.

Creative writing does tend to evolve. Sometimes your characters make your writing go in directions you had never anticipated. My biggest shock ever in this way was The Legend of Pinkbeard. I didn’t have a grand plan for the play. I only knew it was going to be about a gay pirate ship captain searching for love, and I had several basic characters in mind. What I decided to do with it was to just take the characters that were in my mind, set them on a ship, and let them go. I would simply sit back and see where they went. What happened was that within a few pages I found myself in the midst of creating a musical, a theatrical form of which I have never been a fan—dangerous thing to say in a gay crowd, I know—sometimes I’m accused of being a closet heterosexual. A musical was something I never intended when I started. But the characters and the play demanded it and I had no choice. So with my life partner, Brian, composing some incredible music, I ended up writing the one kind of play I never thought I would write.

Likewise with Radical Harry. I set out to write a stage biography but the material, fascinating as it was, didn’t allow it. Aside from changing the story line from Harry to an ensemble piece another revelation during my research also sent the play in another direction. I was plodding through some of Harry’s early writings, which can be nearly unintelligible at times when lightning struck me. I closed the book for a moment and turned to Brian and said, “I just had a revelation. I’ve been reading all this material and learning about all these facts so that I can throw them away and get at the myth. Harry’s myth is what’s important.” He laughed at me, which told me that he understood and that I was on the right track, and I went back to reading.

Harry was not a perfect man. He had a terrible temper. He embarrassed much of the community by standing up for the members of NAMBLA when they were originally removed from New York’s pride parade. He could be intractable and confrontational. But when he died and the eulogies started pouring in it was as if he were the most perfect gay man who had ever lived. The mythologizing had begun. This is how legends are made. My purpose became to make a myth out of Harry, to make him larger-than-life, to tell a story that mixed in historical fact with my own fiction and to blur the distinctions between the two, sort of like a cut-down cherry tree story for the Father of our Gay Country.

But I also wanted to explore his ideas about gay people being different than the rest of society, how he wanted to celebrate our differences from the rest rather than acquiesce to assimilation like most of our own leaders. I realized that aside from mythologizing Harry I also wanted to create a myth, a spiritual myth, based on stories from cultures all over the world and societies from all parts of history and based on Harry’s teachings about how gays have always been part of our culture and how we have a gift to offer the world.

This, I felt, would be my gift to Harry.

To achieve my ends the play took on an entirely different form than what first crossed my mind. I decided to start it with a rally where Harry was the guest speaker, but I also wanted to show the reasons that I first decided to write the play, I wanted to show how nobody knew who he was or cared about what he had to offer.

So the play starts with a man introducing Harry to the rally by using nonsense words combined with the sound blah—“blie blon’t bliv blah blit”—to show how little interest even the person doing the introduction of Harry has in the speaker. As he’s introduced—“. . . Blarry Blay . . . ”—someone in the crowd asks who he is. Someone else complains about there being no real entertainment. Then Harry takes the stage and starts a speech which is almost as unintelligible as his early writings—long multisyllabic phrases like “hetero post-Mesolithic leap” and “matrilineal Minoan Aegean and its faint echoes in Homer, in Antediluvian (circa 3300 B. C.) Sumerian Temple accounts of the City Goddesses, and in the Canaanite myths of Hither Asia.” These represent Harry’s research into the origins of our sexuality and our very existence. By the end of the speech he is down to single syllable words like “be” and short phrases like “We all deserve to be”.

The scene introduces Harry and shows how his community treated him over his final years, as an elder gay statesmen toward whom they showed some minimal respect. He complains after the speech that “some of the queens didn’t like it. And of course the damned assimilationists don’t even know what I’m talking about half the time. And the hetero folks—my words echo back to me off of their skulls. And the younger ones, they have no sense of history.”

An underlying theme of the scene is the passing of the torch from one generation to another. When Harry was 13 he was invited up to a mountain to take part in a Native American celebration. When he arrived he saw an old blind Indian man on a platform. At one point Harry was called over and introduced to the man, who touched him to see what he looked like, but also moved his fingers in very peculiar ways all over Harry’s face. Years later, in describing the event to a Native American friend at a conference in upstate New York Harry learned that the old man was Wovoka, the man who had introduced the ghost dance to the Indians of the plains states in the late 1800’s, and he also learned that the touching could have been the way in which a shaman passed powers on to the young. In the scene in the play Harry is on a platform to give his speech and demands to be introduced to the young man, Ian, whom he touches, particularly on the face, symbolically representing the passing of the torch to the next generation.

From that point on the play becomes more spiritual and more serious. While there are many funny moments throughout it is primarily a drama that relates several stories and several themes. Among them are the reclamation of our history, the exploration of our spirituality, the idea of accepting ourselves not only as gay men but as whoever else we are as well, the idea of community, the creation of myth and, of course, every work of writing has a great deal of the writer in it. Pretty much all of the characters have some parts of me in them. My partner, Brian and I, were going through some rough times while I was writing this play and there are things in the play which are me directly speaking to him or me examining our relationship. In many ways the play was a gift to both him and me. It is very personal and very spiritual, yet I believe it also very universal. The themes that are examined are themes that apply to any race, any culture, any group of people, or even any individuals.

Radical Harry has been a magical journey for those of us involved. Virtually everyone in the cast now wants to go to a faerie gathering, though none of us had ever been to one prior to this experience. No one is ready for it to end. It was one of those productions that from the beginning had little signs showing us that it was going to be special. This happens once in a rare while in theater and when it does it becomes one of those plays that you don’t want to let go and that you never forget.

Throughout the rehearsal process there were wonderful gifts that were given to us. For the second scene, Ian’s vision quest, we needed masks in order for the scene to work the way I had envisioned it, but the professional mask maker I called, who had gotten his start at Broom Street Theater, wanted three to four hundred dollars a mask, which I couldn’t afford. Out of the blue someone mentioned a person they knew who made masks, whose work I had actually seen and liked. We contacted him and he only charged us a couple hundred dollars total.

Another one of the actors knew some local Radical Faeries who were kind enough to come in and talk to us about their experiences, present a slide show, and answer our questions. They watched a run-through of the play so that we could make sure the heart circle and other representations of faerie gatherings were accurate. They had only one or two minor suggestions and we took that as a sign that we were heading in the right direction with the production.

Another day during the rehearsal process I was looking for some old notes and stumbled across a poem I had written about meeting Harry in San Francisco, a poem I had forgotten I wrote and didn’t even know I had a copy of. I brought the poem in and read it to the cast and we took it as another sign that we were going in the right direction. It’s called My picture with Harry Hay:

Behind us rows of books line shelves,

each one a gay

gift to unseen friends.

Behind you, slightly over your shoulder,

I am smaller than I have ever been

and I look younger than I should.

You hold a pen, ready to sign books

for those who will not read them.

In your face wrinkles of novels

are still writing themselves.

Harry, you are the godmother of us all.

A few years earlier I met you in Denver.

A small circle of men gathered there to hear

you and John talk of Faerie happenings

and Mattachine and Commie unions

and Berdache and New Mexico

and the love of men for men.

The love of men for men.

You were the Faerie godfather of us all.

But even a decade ago, despite the jewels,

despite the colorful Native shirt

and wild skirt and animated conversation

you were already thin, frail--

I almost crushed you with a hug--

and I knew that the magic of youth was gone.

In front of the books you gaze into the camera,

your eyes clothed in armor. Despite the wrinkles,

despite the wisps of white flowing hair,

the gorgeous nelly necklace, the thinness

hidden beneath an almost-plaid shirt

your eyes blaze fire and truth.

Faerie godchildren, all of us, await your blessing.

I believe that with Radical Harry I was in fact blessed.