The Trouble With Harry Hay

A centenary edition of Stuart Timmons' award-winning biography of Harry Hay, founder of the modern gay rights movement.

In 1950, Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society, and thus gave rise to the modern gay movement. Today, lesbian and gay activism is taken for granted. But four decades ago, it required a visionary and courageous spirit to organize gay people. Now, Stuart Timmons has chronicled those tumultuous early years of the homophile movement, and the colorful life of its founder. Here is the story of the man who started it all.

In 1950, Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society, and thus gave rise to the modern gay movement. Today, lesbian and gay activism is taken for granted. But four decades ago, it required a visionary and courageous spirit to organize gay people. Now, Stuart Timmons has chronicled those tumultuous early years of the homophile movement, and the colorful life of its founder. Here is the story of the man who started it all.

In a galvanizing sweep through the Twentieth Century, award-winning historian Stuart Timmons chronicles the story of the man who founded the modern gay movement. After decades of searching and struggle, Harry Hay created the Mattachine Society in 1950, the nation's first gay political group. Today, LGBT activism is taken for granted. But over a half century ago, it required a visionary and courageous spirit to organize a stigmatized and closeted class of people.In this Centenary Edition of The Trouble with Harry Hay, Timmons documents those tumultuous early years of the homophile movement and the colorful life of its founder.This newly updated biography is a classic study of the man who started it all."This engrossing,well-written book rescues Harry Hay from the realm of myth and also recovers large chunks of gay history. On both counts, it is a solid, praiseworthy achievement."--Martin Duberman, Founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School and Professor Emeritus of History at City University New York

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY. INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER. New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Winner of the 2021 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. One of The Washington Post's Top 50 Nonfiction Books of 2020. From a young Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, and the Creator and Executive Producer of The Book of Queer (coming June 2022 to Discovery+), the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall. In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back. Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory.

This is the first collection of the words and speeches of the founder of the Mattachine Society and the modern gay movement.

Charts LA's gay history, from the first missionary encounters with Native American cross-gendered 'two spirits' to cross-dressing frontier women in search of their fortunes, and from the 1960s gay liberation movement to the creation of gay marketing in the 1990s.

A new edition of a classic work of history, revealing the anti-homosexual purges of midcentury Washington. In The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson tells the frightening story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a “Lavender Scare” more vehement and long-lasting than Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. Drawing on declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in midcentury Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where anti-homosexual purges ruined the lives and careers of thousands of Americans. This enlarged edition of Johnson’s classic work of history—the winner of numerous awards and the basis for an acclaimed documentary broadcast on PBS—features a new epilogue, bringing the still-relevant story into the twenty-first century.