I want you to realize, of course, that by honoring me you are all honoring yourselves. When I first riffled in 1948 through Alfred Kinsey's best-selling book The Sexual Behavior of the Human Male I sensed then that this book should require that all Americans forevermore recast their thinking about homosexuals. In a rush of brains to the head I realized that, although he hadn't said as much, in my mind he had turned us 180 degrees around from being miscreant, criminal, or degenerately misled, isolated, miserable human beings into being a body of thousands if not millions of people. His chapter five was implying to me that we were a class, a class of people with the social and political dimensions of a cultural minority.
Indeed, a viciously oppressed minority, who, were we to organize, might someday might even liberate ourselves under principles protected by the American Constitution. If there were indeed thousands of us in every big city, we men and women should start to get together and talking about ourselves, and this book could be a starting tool.
It took me nearly two and a half more years to find four more left-wing, GLB working-class-oriented, struggle- trained guys who were willing to even try to get groups like this coming together. I figured it would take the brothers who know the techniques and the disciplines formally used to recruit underground even just to organize respectable semipublic discussion groups around Alfred Kinsey's popular best-seller The Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, In the Teeth of the Savage by Senator Joe McCarthy, whose anti-Gay witch hunt was thriving at that time. Because it was necessary that people feel socially safe and secure in such meetings. I was right, we did need that, but the end results for the four possible organizers I had found were electric. When I first proposed to them that henceforth we see ourselves as the organizing committee of a viciously oppressed cultural minority, they first gasped and then suddenly lit up like the shooting stars of fireworks on the Fourth of July. It was wonderful. For the first time they were hearing positive words about themselves, and it had an electric effect on them just as it had on me two years before. My words had shifted their world reality forever. The right words at last were doing just what right words have always done in the old fairy stories. From that perspective it was really quite impossible to dream that in less than 50 years I would be addressing a hall full of delegates themselves representing hundreds of groups around the country, all dedicated to the cause of Gay liberation. For this old warrior it is a heavy experience to be here with you today and to be accepting this splendid award.
But before I relinquish the microphone I would like to dwell for a bit on two pieces of business suggested by today's plenary. The first is a vital issue which should have been tackled and resolved at the first national conference of Gay men and women, known as NACHO, North American Committee of Homophile Organizations, held in San Francisco in August of 1966, three years before Stonewall. When that phrase I used Gay men and women was still cogent. We never got around to it that August, as indeed we never got around to it again in either this century or this millennium. The topic was and still is full comprehension of the vast differences between Gay men and women. Comprehensive and comprehension building towards a mutual appreciation of those differences, as well as a mutually shared appreciation that perhaps the particular contribution that each gender makes to its parent community may spring directly from the grass roots of those differences. Where upon the two groups now better comprehending and appreciating one another instead of pushing each other's guilt buttons, would be able to construct a bridge over those differences, fully conscious and appreciative that they are there at all times and so walk and work together on those issues and projects in which both groups have interest and concerns.
The second topic is one that should be more fully comprehended and appreciated by all the genders and taught firmly to all their offspring. The great English biologist Thomas Huxley said almost a hundred years -ago and his position as far as I know has never been questioned. "No negative trait," and as I imagine many of you already know a negative trait is one that does not reproduce itself - "no negative trait ever continues to appear in a given species millennia after millennia after millennia unless it in some way serves the survival of that species." When I first encountered that statement, now almost thirty years ago, another set of fireworks went off in my head. Was that the reason so many of our forebears in other times and tribes past were visionaries, or seers, or in more contemporary terms the minds, the modern dancers, the great actors and actresses, beloved poets, and performance artists? In effect, the community serves as specialists of their times.
Radical Faeries, who are my particular group, have already discovered as a worldwide tribe of sissy Gay men that we have hated since we were little, and gotten beaten up in school, the negative adversarial principles of competition now already turning lethal at every level. We would rather share. We have hated the negative adversarial effects of governance by voting. We prefer instead collectively self-respective governance by a sharing consensus. Some Radical Faeries myself included, have been politically training hetero groups including trade unions to successfully and joyously to function by consensus this last fifteen years. Could these sorts of things be some of the gifts that we bring?
Were the quoting of Huxley's principles to appear above the masthead of Gay newspapers and journals together with such a query as could great mother nature be scrambling into the dream coding ingredients of us? Those ingredients, which one day another Michael Ventrist (sp?) or another Alan Turing would fashion into necessity of our survival and let it constantly be re-imprinting itself in every Gay consciousness, young and old. Do you think it might nudge brothers about to fling into the ecstasies of unsafe sexual play into having second thoughts? Were the teaching of Huxley's exciting and challenging principles and Project 10 young Gay communities' response to it be made mandatory in all American public high schools, could it happen that the teenage suicide rate might be substantially reduced, when they discover we have a value?
I thank you for inviting me to come and speak my mind and I thank you again for this lovely award.
Have, all of you, a nice millennium.
[HARRY HAY]
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