Harry Hay: Painful partings
By Leslie Feinberg


As Harry Hay’s dream of organizing homosexuals took on material reality with the formation and growth of the Mattachine Society in 1951, he faced painful partings.

Hay approached Anita, his partner of 13 years with whom he had adopted two children. He told her about the therapist who had said that Hay could “close the book” on his gay sexuality. “I told her that what the psychiatrist had said wasn’t true, that the book would not close.” Hay explained that he saw homosexuals as a scapegoated minority that had to be organized. The two were legally divorced in September 1951. (”The Trouble with Harry Hay”)