Before the National LGBTQ Task Force, before the Human Rights Campaign, even before the Stonewall uprising, there was the Mattachine Society.
The organization, formed in 1950 in Los Angeles, can’t claim to be the first gay rights group (no one used LGBTQ+ back then) — that honor goes to the short-lived, Chicago-based Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924, and an inspiration for Mattachine. But Mattachine can claim to be the first one that lasted long — into the 1970s.
The founders of the Mattachine Society included labor organizer Harry Hay, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, Dale Jennings, Konrad Stevens, James Gruber, and Rudi Gernreich (the latter most famous as a fashion designer). The group took its name from the Societé Mattachine, a satirical dance and theater troupe in medieval France.
At first the Mattachine Society was secretive, with its leaders’ names unknown to members. It functioned as a support group for gay people — the membership was mostly men — and served to educate them about fighting for equal rights in conservative post-World War II America.
Hay, who had been a member of the Communist Party, soon ran afoul of that conservatism. He was called before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, but the committee members decided he was insignificant, so he did not face any punishment. However, he had already split from the Mattachine Society two years earlier, as the other leaders feared his presence would bring the attention of politicians who were out to purge Communists. Mattachine did get investigated by the FBI between 1953 and 1956. After Hay’s departure, the group became public, and in the 1950s and ’60s it could claim thousands of members in chapters in cities throughout the nation, including San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
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Generally, the Mattachine Society worked within the political and legal system to advance gay rights, rather than taking to the streets. Members discussed how to avoid entrapment by police and how to fight any criminal charges. They talked about how to resist the pathologization of homosexuality by organized religion and mental health groups. They held “sip-ins” in bars to make their presence known. They published ONE Magazine, the first widely distributed gay publication, and several chapters had newsletters.
Some considered the Mattachine Society hostile to women, but certain chapters had women members. Eva Freund, for instance, was one of the first women in the D.C. chapter, where Frank Kameny, now legendary, was president. She found some of the men patronizing, but she stood up to them, she told The Washington Post in 2019. “I did not act in a meek and subservient fashion, which was what I was expected to do,” Freund said. She eventually turned her attention to the D.C. chapter of the National Organization for Women, becoming its first out lesbian member.
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One of her memories of Mattachine was coediting and distributing the D.C. chapter’s newsletter, the Insider. It was mostly distributed in bars, and when one bar owner turned her and another Mattachine member away, fearing the newsletter would call unwanted attention to the nightclub, Freund and her colleague sneaked copies into the restrooms. “We figured they’d get found eventually,” she told the Post. “Perhaps it was our attempts to keep pushing this that helped people rethink what they were doing on a personal level.”
Most Mattachine chapters disbanded by the 1970s, when there was a new, post-Stonewall style of activism. Some members joined the Gay Liberation Front, founded in the wake of Stonewall, and others even denounced the Stonewall uprising because they worried it would set the movement back. New York Mattachine members posted a sign on a window at the Stonewall Inn urging “peaceful and quiet conduct.”
Harry Hay, however, praised those who rose up at Stonewall. “The importance of Stonewall is that it changed the pronoun from I to we,” Hay once told the Associated Press. “When I told them at Stonewall that I had been thrown out of the Mattachine Society because I insisted that we were a cultural minority and not individuals, they couldn’t believe that. By the time of Stonewall they thought we had always been a cultural minority.” Hay went on to found the Radical Faeries and lived to be 90, dying in 2002. There was a failed attempt to make his L.A. home a historic landmark, but the stairs leading to it — the Mattachine Steps — have been given that distinction by the city.
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Some have carried on the Mattachine name. Mattachine Midwest was founded in Chicago in 1965 as an independent organization after the demise of at least two chapters affiliated with the national group. It endured until 1986, providing support groups, a crisis hotline, and other services in addition to its political activism.
In 2011, Charles Francis founded a reimagined Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., which does what he calls “archive activism — identifying, conserving and interpreting the LGBTQ historical record.”
The history of the Mattachine Society and those associated with it has been chronicled in books, plays, and films. The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement, a biography by Stuart Timmons, was published in 1990. Behind the Mask of the Mattachine by James T.T. Sears came out in 2007. The Temperamentals by Jon Marans, a play dealing with the society’s founding, premiered off-Broadway in 2009. The documentary Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay, directed by Eric Slade, was released in 2002. And the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project recently hosted a Zoom discussion titled “Homosexuals Are Different”: Mattachine Society & LGBTQ Rights in the 1950s, which was recorded and can be viewed below.
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