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Communist and Homosexual: The FBI, Harry Hay, and the Secret Side of the
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American Communist History, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2012

Communist and Homosexual: The FBI, Harry

Hay, and the Secret Side of the Lavender Scare,
1943–1961

DOUGLAS M. CHARLES*

With the development of the Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s, a conflict
that pitted the Communist bloc against the democratic West involving potential
nuclear devastation and fears of domestic subversion, there developed in the
United States two closely related, and often conflated, but distinct public
phenomena. The first began in 1947 when Republicans in the Congress
expressed fears of homosexuals being employed by the State Department;
people, they believed, who like drunks and adulterers could be blackmailed into
betraying their country’s secrets and were therefore security risks. Thereafter,
the public witch hunt and purge of homosexuals in government service and
beyond—what has become known as the Lavender Scare—grew and expanded
until its demise in the 1970s. The second phenomenon began in 1950 and
focused on the issue of loyalty and the seeming threat posed by Communists in
government service and beyond. This second event inaccurately has been
dubbed McCarthyism,1 named for the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph
McCarthy, who provided a convincing rationale for why Americans were
seemingly losing the Cold War by the early 1950s—subversion—and who then
took advantage of the limelight to advance his political career. The two witch
hunts were (and still are) often conflated in the public and government minds at
the time, and indeed had much in common, but they were in reality similar and
parallel, but separate, witch hunts; or what the present author would call
fraternal twins.
It is not surprising that the two were conflated in 1950, for in February
of that year McCarthy had focused public scrutiny on the
Communists-in-government issue with his infamous Wheeling speech about

*Douglas M. Charles, Assistant Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University, Greater

Allegheny. Email: dmc166@psu.edu
1
Despite the event being named for him, the anti-Communist witch hunt was more driven by internal
security bureaucrats like Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover, who quietly
assisted McCarthy (and many others) in his endeavours until the FBI director no longer trusted him.
Afterwards, without Hoover’s help and advice, the reckless McCarthy began to unravel. This had led
one historian, Ellen Schrecker, to point out that the event should, accurately, be dubbed Hooverism.

ISSN 1474-3892 print/ISSN 1474-3906 online/12/010101–124 ß 2012 Historians of American Communism

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2012.666097
102 D. M. Charles

‘‘205 known Communists’’ in the State Department. He later altered these

numbers and singled out two of these as homosexuals, and never revisited the
sexuality issue again. On top of this, moreover, was the case of Whittaker
Chambers, the self-confessed former Soviet agent and homosexual who stood
as the prime example of the conflation of the two. The issue and McCarthy’s
charges prompted Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy publicly to
deny that the State Department employed Communists but he also admitted
that his department had dismissed 91 so-called ‘‘security risks’’, by which he
meant homosexuals. The phenomena that have come to be known as
McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare, however and significantly, predated
these public and popular mid-century witch hunts.
Officials of the FBI began a systematic, if separate and quiet, monitoring of
both Communists and homosexuals dating from 1936 and 1937, respectively.
In 1936, with the Second World War developing, President Franklin Roosevelt
verbally authorized the FBI to monitor domestic Communist and Fascist
movements to ascertain their impact on the ‘‘economic and political life of the
country as a whole’’.2 FBI Director Hoover used this broad directive to initiate
a systematic and in-depth monitoring of Communists not for prosecution as
criminals, but to acquire wide-ranging information about them through
intelligence investigations. This was a watershed moment for the Bureau, as
intelligence investigations against leftists continued, and never ended, from this
point forward even as the Soviet Union became the ally of the United States
during the Second World War.3
The FBI also began its systematic collection of information about homosex-
uals dating from 1937, after the FBI director had declared child kidnappings a
thing of the past—such as the famous Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932—but then
he was forced to deal with the kidnapping and brutal murder of 10-year-old
Charles Mattson in Tacoma, Washington. The event became a national cause
celebre in the press, not only highlighting the erroneous, and now-embarrassing,
comments of the FBI director, but prompting President Roosevelt, personally,
to promise that the FBI would not stop until the perpetrator—who was believed
to be a ‘‘degenerate’’—was captured (he never was).4 Hoover, who was a
conservative bureaucrat amid New Dealers, actively catered to the president’s
political interests to retain his job.5 He initiated an all-out effort to find the
murderer and focused on ‘‘sex offenders’’, which at the time invariably meant
2
Confidential memo, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, 24 August 1936, Folder 136, Official and
Confidential Files of J. Edgar Hoover.
3
On the FBI, never ending monitoring of Communists despite the USSR becoming the Second World
War ally of the United States, see Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in
Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2002).
4
Douglas M. Charles, ‘‘‘The Victim of a Degenerate’: The Origins of the FBI’s Surveillance of Gays,
1937,’’ presented to the British Association for American Studies, The University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, Scotland, March 2008.
5
See Douglas M. Charles, J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and
the Rise of the Domestic Security State (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007).
 Communist and Homosexual 103

homosexuals, who were popularly believed to prey on children. FBI officials

even created a special ‘‘research’’ file on ‘‘sex offenders’’ in 1937 to assist them
in their efforts.6 Thereafter, FBI agents would systematically collect informa-
tion on homosexuals and this effort would only grow. During the Second World
War, for example and foreshadowing the Cold War, homosexuality came to be
regarded as a security risk—three examples of homosexual charges were those
levelled against Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, Senator David Walsh
who was chairman of the powerful Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, and
Philip Faymonville of the Lend-Lease mission at the US embassy in
Moscow7—leading FBI officials to create in 1942 a ‘‘sex perverts in govern-
ment’’ file.8 FBI interest in homosexuals then culminated, not originated, in
1951, during the Lavender Scare, with the FBI’s creation of its massive Sex
Deviates file, a file used to ensure the firing of gays from government and, later,
non-government jobs by leaking specific information about them to trusted
recipients. Moreover, FBI officials created the Sex Deviates file by combining
their ‘‘sex offender’’ and ‘‘sex perverts in government’’ files into one massive
file. FBI officials would use and maintain the file until its incineration in the late
1970s.9
Therefore, while the Lavender Scare and McCarthyism seemed to have
originated, developed, and existed concurrently in the 1950s, in reality they did
not. They only received widespread public attention—in the form of what some
have described as panics—when the two converged popularly at the same time
in and around 1950. In terms of the FBI, at least, they were older, separate, and
unique phenomena that only by the 1950s drew together to become very closely
related events both involving concerns with subversiveness because gays and
Communists exhibited similar traits in the popular American mind: gays and
communists both kept their true identities hidden, both seemed to move
around in a secretive underworld, both had a common sense of loyalty, both
had their own publications and places to meet, both recruited members to their
6
Memo, [deleted] to DeLoach, 7 July 1959, FBI 80-662-NR; Memo, Henry Wolfinger, Records
Disposition Division, to Directors of NCD and NNF, re: Disposition Job No. NO1-65-78-5, 28
December 1977, in author’s possession [I would like to thank Athan Theoharis for a copy of this
document].
7
On Walsh, see Douglas M. Charles, J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists, 105–6. On Welles,
see Irwin F. Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). The examples of Welles and Walsh did not include conflating
Communism with homosexuality. There was a third that did, that of Philip Faymonville, but his case
unique as he worked at the US embassy in Moscow and was embroiled in a political struggle at the
embassy. See Sabina Medilovic, ‘‘‘Moral Degeneracy’: FBI Investigation of Philip R. Faymonville of the
Lend-Lease Mission to the Soviet Union,’’ (honors thesis: Pennsylvania State University, Schreyer
Honors College, Spring 2008); Mary Glantz, ‘‘Conflict without Compromise: US Military and
Diplomatic Personnel in Russia, 1941-43,’’ The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 12:3 (September 1999):
101–121.
8
Memo, Henry Wolfinger, Records Disposition Division, to Directors of NCD and NNF, re:
Disposition Job No. NO1-65-78-5, 28 December 1977.
9
The Sex Deviates file grew to over 330,000 pages by the 1970s. On the Sex Deviates file, see Athan
Theoharis, ‘‘Secrecy and Power: Unanticipated Problems in Researching FBI Files,’’ Political Science
Quarterly 119:2 (2004), 282–284.
104 D. M. Charles

ranks, and people believed both were mentally abnormal.10 Feeding these
perceptions, in part, were also contemporary perceptions of masculinity that
helped to define ‘‘softness’’ towards Communism or intolerance of gays
employed by the government all while the federal bureaucracy had consistently
evolved, by mid-century, to target homosexuals in an exclusive way.11
Nevertheless, while some may have conflated Reds with Lavenders, to best
understand the witch hunts, they need to be viewed separately even if they both
held common traits. Indeed, as David Johnson points out, even some in the
1950s tried to educate the public about not conflating homosexuality with
Communism, or, viewed another way the issues of security and loyalty.
Similarly, Athan Theoharis has noted that in 1950, after McCarthy singled out
one case of homosexuality, Democratic Senator Millard Tydings implored
Republicans to ‘‘stop this continual heckling about homosexuals and let us get
on with the main work of finding Communists’’. But because the issue was a
very popular and now-political one, coloured by bias in the unsophisticated
public and political discourse of the time, and because the federal bureaucracy
had long experience in targeting homosexuals, these efforts largely failed.12
One particular case exists, however, that illustrates the dichotomy between
Communism and homosexuality and how the FBI—irrespective of public
perceptions—viewed and targeted both. This FBI case is significant because it
involved a man who pioneered the gay rights movement and who also happened
to be a member of the Communist Party. His name was Harry Hay.13
Hay is an excellent case study because as a Communist, FBI agents
monitored closely his leftist activities prior to and after the advent of the
Lavender Scare; and since he founded the first significant gay rights group, the
Mattachine Society, FBI agents intensively investigated that group not once but
twice after the advent of the Lavender Scare. What is remarkable about these
FBI efforts, however, is that FBI officials never realized that Hay, the
Communist threat, had founded the Mattachine Society, the seeming homo-
sexual subversive threat. The question is therefore raised that if in the 1950s
Communism and homosexuality were conflated in the public and government

10
Johnson, Lavender Scare, 30–38; Theoharis, Chasing Spies, 172–173.
11
See in particular K.A. Cuordileone, ‘‘‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and
the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949-1960,’’ Journal of American History 87 (September 2000):
515–545; Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge,
2005). It is not my view that issues of masculinity and gender were the driving or most important aspect
of the witch hunts. Clearly, though, they were an important part of it. My views fall more in line with
those put forward by Margot Canaday regarding the development of the federal bureaucracy and its
interest in homosexuality, and how viewing it solely through a ‘‘McCarthyist lense’’ is inadequate, in The
Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
12
David Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal
Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 31.
13
There exists a chasm in the historiography of the Lavender Scare when it comes to the FBI. The
best book on the topic, David Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and
Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), in 277 pages Johnson
indexes the FBI not at all, and J. Edgar Hoover only seven times.
 Communist and Homosexual 105

minds, why did FBI officials not link Hay—a man whom they regarded as such
a threat that he was listed for emergency detention as a Communist—to
homosexuality and his own gay rights group, which FBI officials specifically
targeted in 1953 and 1956? Since the FBI’s interest in Hay as a Communist
predates the advent of the Lavender Scare, this case is illustrative about how
FBI officials viewed both Communism and homosexuality and suggests that
while the two may have popularly been regarded in similar ways during the
1950s, with Communist and homosexual investigations sometimes walking a
fine line, FBI officials, in fact, regarded and investigated the two separately.
The FBI’s interest in Hay further alludes to the methods with which FBI agents
investigated and collected information on both Communists and homosexuals,
and raises questions about how efficacious these techniques were in national
security cases whether involving Communists, gays, or both. What do these
investigative tactics employed by FBI agents tell us about the ‘‘threat’’ of both
Communists and homosexuals in the minds of FBI officials? And, finally, what
does all of this and the FBI’s investigative interests and failures tell us about
Harry Hay and the origins of the modern gay rights movement?
How and why the FBI acted as it did is a significant historical issue because
there is a lacuna in the literature about the FBI and gays. For example, while
the Lavender Scare has been documented well, the best book on the topic,
David Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, all but overlooks the FBI’s central role.
And while Johnson captures very well the public side, development and politics
of the Lavender Scare, by overlooking the FBI he misses a significant aspect of
it since the FBI was a leading investigator of presumed homosexuals and its
efforts in that regard long predate the 1950s Lavender Scare itself. Similarly,
and reflecting the lack of easily accessible information and sources about
the FBI and gays, Marcia Gallo suggests in her history of the Daughters of
Bilitis—the lesbian homophile group—that it was monitored by the FBI as part
of the Bureau’s COINTELPRO effort.14 While FBI agents indeed investigated
DoB, it was not via the FBI’s secretive and sensitive counterintelligence
disruption programme. Robert Dean examines how America lurched towards
the Vietnam War but examines the Lavender Scare and some State Department
targets who were the subject of FBI investigations. He concluded that bucolic
conservatives, including FBI officials, sought to undermine the elite eastern
establishment in the State Department and they used gender and sexuality
issues to achieve this. While the thesis may be compelling in regard to the
confines of the 1950s, it is less so when taking into account the longer and
broader history of the FBI’s targeting of gays which extended far beyond the
State Department, power machinations and the eastern elite.15 The best
examination of the FBI and gays, to date, is that offered by Athan Theoharis in
his book Chasing Spies where he notes the FBI’s efforts to promote a politics of
14
Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian
Rights Movement (New York: Carrol & Graf, 2006), xvii–xx.
15
Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), chapters 4–6.
106 D. M. Charles

counterintelligence and morality during the early Cold War. He further

illustrates examples of the FBI engaging in gay baiting and assisting in the
purging of gays from government jobs because they were viewed as security
risks and political liabilities given the bigoted assumptions of the time and the
politics of the Lavender Scare. Yet his assessment is part of a larger study of
the failure of the FBI in counterintelligence during the early Cold War.16 This
article hopes to advance our understanding of the FBI’s role in the Lavender
Scare, and how FBI officials viewed and investigated homosexuals within the
overarching context of McCarthyism.
In Harry Hay’s case, there are several closely related reasons why the FBI did
not realize Hay was both a Communist and gay rights advocate. These reasons
do not stand as evidence of FBI incompetence. Rather they illustrate well the
means by which FBI officials investigated both Communists and gays,
investigative tactics that, first, relied heavily on informers who were not
always fully in the know and, hence, FBI officials were not always in the know
despite their inaccurate popular reputation as omniscient investigators. Second,
they also illustrate the political focus of the FBI during the Hoover years when
FBI officials looked more to a subject’s radical politics as an indicator of a
threat than whether that subject actually was a true threat to American national
security. Finally, among the reasons why FBI officials failed to link Hay to
Mattachine were his own particular personality traits—not the least of which
was his strict and personal sense of secrecy, including multiple uses of
pseudonyms—and the way in which events involving Mattachine going public
unfolded.
Harry Hay was born on 7 April 1912 in Worthing, England, to upper
middle-class parents whose international work in mining made them wealthy.
Travelling extensively, the Hays eventually settled in California where Harry, a
young child, thereafter grew up. Because his mother was born in Arizona, and
his father was a naturalized citizen from New Zealand, Hay was an American
citizen—the issue of his citizenship would concern FBI officials at a later date.
As a teenager, Hay began to realize he was homosexual and, while working on a
family farm, the hired hands there introduced him to socialism. In both
respects, Hay’s life thereafter would never be the same again.17 Harry went on
to Stanford University and while there developed a fondness for acting but, due
to a sudden illness, he was forced to drop out. He then moved to Los Angeles
where he pursued drama, and his own sexuality, having affairs with various
actors until one—Will Greer, who later and famously played Grandpa Walton
on television—introduced him to the Communist Party. Hay thereafter, and
increasingly, became an active party member. The party, however, was not
tolerant of homosexuality and his Communist friends encouraged Hay to

16
Theoharis, Chasing Spies, chapter 7.
17
Stuart Timmons, The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston:
Alyson Publications, 1990), 32–36.
 Communist and Homosexual 107

distance himself from it.18 Acceding to their advice, and still struggling with his
own sexual identity, in 1938 he met a woman and fellow party member named
Anita Platky and in that same year married her while also joining the party
himself. That Hay married was an unsurprising development that many gay
men of that era experienced, and when he later divorced his wife she
commented to him, alluding to his disinterest in her: ‘‘You didn’t marry me —
you married the Communist Party’’.19
Hay was not only consumed with leftist politics during his marriage to Anita,
he was also coming to terms with his homosexuality and thinking about that
along political lines. No doubt thanks to his interest in leftist politics and
organizing, he began to think about organizing gays in 1948. He was involved in
presidential politics, as a supporter of Henry Wallace’s progressive campaign
for the White House, and resolved briefly with others over beer to form an
openly gay group called ‘‘Bachelors for Wallace’’. Hay then wrote up his ideas
for the group, but in the following days his compatriots unsurprisingly
developed cold feet and his idea remained just that—a fleeting idea.20
Beyond politics in 1948, Hay pursued his other interests by teaching a music
history class at the People’s Educational Center. Over subsequent years, he
pondered his idea about a gay rights group until in 1950 he finally put his ideas
onto paper and showed them to Bob Hull, a gay friend and fellow Communist
who was a student in his music class. When Hull subsequently showed his
former lover and now-roommate and fellow Communist Chuck Rowland what
Hay had written, it excited the activist and organizer in Rowland. ‘‘My God,
I could have written this myself!’’, he blurted out. In short order, in November
1950 in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles where Hay lived, the men all met
to discuss the proposal, including Hay’s boyfriend—Rudi Gernreich—and Dale
Jennings, a writer and activist who had dared to champion the cause of interned
Japanese–Americans during the war. Over multiple meetings, the men refined
their ideas, significantly modelling their organization on the Communist Party,
of which at least three of them had been members. Part of that involved
devising a theoretical basis to underpin the group because, as Rowland said,
‘‘[h]aving been a Communist, you’ve got to work with a theory’’. Hay
suggested basing it upon the idea that homosexuals were ‘‘an oppressed cultural
minority’’.21
They decided to call their group the Mattachine Foundation. Hay came up
with the name ‘‘Mattachine’’ from his historical studies of music and he derived
18
Hay believed that in certain cases, the party would make exceptions for gay members. See
Timmons, The Trouble With Harry Hay, 108–109. On the Communist Party’s homophobia and anti-gay
policies, about which the literature is thin, see Simon Karlinsky, ‘‘Russia’s Gay Literature and Culture:
The Impact of the October Revolution’’ in Martin Duberman, et al., eds., Hidden From History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Meridian, 1990), 347–364.
19
As quoted in Timmons, The Trouble with Harry, 97.
20
Jonathan Katz, ‘‘The Founding of the Mattachine Society: An Interview With Henry Hay,’’ Radical
America 11:4 (1977), 28–29.
21
Marcus, Making Gay History, 24; Dudley Clendinen, ‘‘William Dale Jennings, 82, Writer and Gay
Rights Pioneer,’’ New York Times, 22 May 2000, B7.
108 D. M. Charles

it from an obscure Medieval French masque group called the Société Mattachine
that, while performing in public, wore face masks which permitted them to
satirize the French aristocracy without retribution—a brave act indeed given the
ruthless and repressive tendencies of the French aristocracy. Hay believed the
name aptly fit the position of homosexuals in the 1950s in that they had to
remain hidden from open society for fear of retribution and attack.22 The
Mattachine Foundation formalized its mission by 1951 and it included uniting
gays both among themselves and with heterosexual society; to educate the
public about homosexuality; and to engage in activist politics.23
FBI agents first became aware of Harry Hay in mid-February 1943 when an
informant, called ‘‘Source A’’ in FBI files, provided the Bureau’s Los Angeles
field office with a letter Hay had written in 1938 to the chairman of the
L.A. Communist Party’s membership committee. Hay’s letter was valuable to
FBI agents—and to historians today, as it offers us previously unknown
information about Hay’s past—because it provided details about his member-
ship in the Communist Party. In the letter, Hay asked for readmission to the
Communist Party of Los Angeles explaining that he had first joined it, using the
pseudonym Karen Hunter, shortly after his 22nd birthday in the Spring of
1934. He explained that his initial membership and ‘‘allegiance’’ was ‘‘a purely
emotional one’’. He also explained that, at the time, the ‘‘Sunday School
instruction for new members . . . was purely perfunctory’’. Hay stated that his
unit’s—in effect, his cell’s—policy was ‘‘one of shoving the new member into
action out of which they hoped to God political development would eventually
spring’’. None of this appealed to the young Hay nor did the attitude of his
fellow party members at that time, leading him to drop out and pursue his
larger interests in drama with leftist theatre groups in Los Angeles. By 1938,
however, these outside groups had all gone defunct, and so Hay wanted back in
the Communist Party. But this time around, as he told the membership
committee chairman, he wanted to use the pseudonym ‘‘Mac’h Eann’’, which,
Hay explained, was ‘‘one of the gaidhlic [sic] appendages of my own name,
Harry Hay’’. He also expressed a desire to be admitted into ‘‘one of the
unexposed Studio units’’ of the Communist Party because he wanted to form
‘‘a Labor Front Theatre’’. He hoped this would attract what he regarded as true
party members and, he argued, in time, the inevitable result would be that ‘‘the
jaded bourgeoise [sic] finds itself coming at least once for each play’’.24
An FBI agent in Los Angeles, after receiving this letter, investigated the lead
and learned that Hay ‘‘was employed as a senior material planner by the
Interstate Aircraft and Engineering Corporation’’ but had lost his job due to
staffing issues. Moreover, upon further investigation, in which FBI agents
obtained three photographs of Hay, the agent confirmed with ‘‘Source B’’ that
the photos were ‘‘a true likeness’’ of the educational director of the Joe Hill
22
See D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 63–64; and Warren Johansson, ‘‘Mattachine
Society’’ in Wayne R. Dynes, ed., Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (New York: Garland, 1990), 779.
23
For their goals see Meeker, ‘‘Behind the Mask of Respectability,’’ 83.
24
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 12 June 1943, FBI 100-211619-1.
 Communist and Homosexual 109

Branch of the Communist Party in Los Angeles. Given the war-related work,
this company was involved in, and since Hay apparently was an important
Communist party member in L.A.—all despite the fact that the Soviet Union
was an ally of the United States in the Second World War—explains the FBI’s
interest here.25
In August 1943, an FBI agent in New York City looked into Hay’s
background after learning that he was once employed in that location before
moving to Los Angeles. (After their marriage, the Hays moved to New York
City until after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.) The agent consulted with
Hay’s metropolitan draft board to learn more intimate details about him
including the fact that Hay was being treated for secondary stage syphilis,
information that seemingly confirmed to FBI agents his subversive nature since
Communists were popularly regarded as having innately weak moral characters.
Having a venereal disease would in some people’s minds confirm this; it
probably also alluded to an assumption of psychological problems which some
also believed to be behind one’s adherence to Communism (and homosexu-
ality). The FBI agent also gleaned from draft records information about Hay’s
educational background, his employment history, his marital status and his
return to Los Angeles. With all of this information collected, FBI officials
deemed Hay a threat and ordered his name placed in the bureau’s Custodial
Detention Index. As an individual listed in this index, the Los Angeles field
office was required to monitor Hay and continually update its information to
reflect his current status and activities.26
The Custodial Detention Index was created in September 1939 following the
outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. FBI Director Hoover ordered
his agents to identify, broadly, ‘‘persons of German, Italian, and Communist
sympathies’’. In the event the United States became involved in war, these
individuals would, presumably, be detained as threats. The main problem with
this index, however, was that the programme had no statutory backing and,
therefore, FBI officials had no legal authority to detain anybody. But by June of
1940, after the fact of its creation, Hoover sought approval to create this index
from Attorney General Robert Jackson. Jackson approved the index, basing its
detention authority on a 1798 alien detention statute. When Jackson was
replaced in 1941 by Francis Biddle, a man more concerned with civil liberties
than his predecessor, he ordered Hoover to terminate the Custodial Detention
programme. While Biddle was, in fact, willing to accede to the detention of
foreign nationals in the United States, he was not willing to authorize the
detention of Communists nor did he have any desire to prosecute American
citizens who might be on the list. Hoover did not comply with the attorney
general’s wishes, however. He retained the programme cleverly by renaming it
the ‘‘Security Index’’. Technically, then, Hoover obeyed his superior’s orders
25
Ibid.
26
Report, SAC New York, 20 August 1943, FBI 100-211619-2; confidential memo, Hoover to SAC
Los Angeles, 10 August 1943, FBI 100-211619-Not Recorded [NR]. On the view of Communists (and
gays) having weak characters and psychological problems, see Johnson, The Lavender Scare, 35–36.
110 D. M. Charles

by ending the Custodial Detention programme but he only did so inasmuch as

he re-labelled it. Hay’s name would continue to be listed for decades.27
For the next 18 years, as a subject in the Custodial Detention Index, FBI
agents kept tabs on Hay but particularly his activities within leftist and
communist circles, reflecting the dominant concerns of the FBI at that time.
FBI agents learned, for example that Hay had been transferred from the Joe
Hill branch of the party to the Midtown Section and that he ‘‘was controlled
though June, 1943’’. That Hay was ‘‘controlled’’ was the Communist Party’s
way of noting that Hay had paid his party dues through June of 1943. Hay
was also reported to have ‘‘participated’’ in a labour rally led by labour
leader William Z. Foster in Los Angeles on 18 July 1943. FBI agents also
checked into Hay’s background, noting his immigration to the United States
as a boy, as well as information about his parents, spouse and his various
places of employment to that date, the facts of a NLRB complaint he had
filed, and his credit background (he had none). Finally, the special agent in
charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office noted in a report that a
30-day mail cover—a surveillance method in which FBI agents take note of
the addresses of incoming and outgoing mail—had been placed on
Hay’s place of residence. FBI agents noted several pieces of mail (the
names and addresses have been redacted in FBI files) including the fact that
Hay had ‘‘regularly received’’ The Daily People’s World and In fact
magazine.28
By November 1945, FBI agents developed even more information about
Hay. One means of confirming Hay’s current employment status and place of
residence was an FBI agent telephoning him directly ‘‘through use of an
appropriate pretext’’ on 26 October. Pretext interviews were ways in which FBI
agents confirmed details about their targets without ever revealing either to the
target or his employer that the caller worked for the FBI. The FBI agent learned
from Hay, directly, that he worked as a machinist at the Salsburg Motor
Company, which was the ‘‘successor corporation’’ to Hay’s previous employer,
and he confirmed Hay’s home address.29
FBI agents also learned further details about Hay from their informants
dubbed Sources A and B. Source A related that Hay regularly attended the
bimonthly meetings of the Echo Park Communist Political Association Club,
and that he had been selected to be a delegate to the Southern California
District Communist Political Association Convention. In 1944, amid the spirit
of wartime unity, the Communist Party USA renamed itself the Communist
Political Association by presenting itself not so much as a political party but as a
political pressure group that worked to support leftist candidates in both the
Democratic and Republican parties. From Source B, FBI agents learned that at

27
Athan Theoharis, The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2004), 53–55.
28
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 25 September 1943, FBI 100-211619-4.
29
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 6 November 1945, FBI 100-211619-5.
 Communist and Homosexual 111

the convention Hay did not play ‘‘an active role’’ but did attend all of the
convention’s sessions.30
By October 1948, FBI officials in Washington grew worried that the Los
Angeles office was not keeping them up-to-date with information about Hay
over the previous 3 years. FBI Director Hoover wrote the Los Angeles SAC
noting the absence of regular reports on Hay—actually there was not an
absence of reports but only one brief report reiterating his status as a
naturalized citizen which was submitted in 1947—and informed him that,
normally, while regular reports were not required ‘‘on Security Index card
subjects unless the subject is also a top functionary’’, he wanted regular reports
on Hay. The basis of Hoover’s request was ‘‘the tense international situation at
the present time’’. Hoover was referencing the increased tensions between the
United States and the Soviet Union during the presidency of Harry Truman as
reflected in the Berlin Airlift, which had begun that summer just 4 months
previous. Given these international realities, Hoover believed that Hay and his
links to the ‘‘Communist Party and related groups’’ indicated that he and they
were ‘‘considered a threat to the internal security’’ and therefore were worthy of
more intense FBI scrutiny.31
The Los Angeles SAC responded with a new report in February 1949 that
detailed FBI agents’ increased monitoring of Hay’s activities. FBI agents
confirmed, through informants, that as of May 1947, Hay was a member of the
Communist Party and a member of the United Automobile Workers Union.
Agents also learned at this point, again from an informant, that ‘‘during the
latter part of 1946" Hay taught Marxism classes for the Communist Party, and
that in 1947 he continued this activity but, this time, ‘‘in private homes’’.
Finally, the Los Angeles SAC reported that, among others, Hay had written the
local US attorney to protest the fact that 10 local Communist Party
‘‘functionaries’’ had received government subpoenas.32
FBI officials did not only collect information about Hay’s Communist Party
activities from the field work of FBI agents. In July 1949, a member of Hay’s
own family, who lived in Wisconsin, wrote the FBI while apparently staying at
the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, Colorado (the letter was written on that
hotel’s stationary). The relative learned that Hay and his wife were
Communists, and holding meetings at their home, and despite the fact that
‘‘blood is thicker than water’’ he or she believed ‘‘the security of the United
States is more important to me than anything else’’. This person, while noting
that ‘‘the Communist Party is a legal organization’’ nevertheless believed ‘‘the
activities of its members are against the best interests of the United States’’ and
therefore offered the FBI Harry’s and Anita’s names.
30
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 6 November 1945, FBI 100-211619-5; Michael J. Heale, American
Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1990), 130.
31
Memo, Hoover to SAC Los Angeles, 25 October 1948, no file number but seemingly attached to
FBI 100-211619-7.
32
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 16 February 1949, FBI 100-211619-7.
112 D. M. Charles

FBI Director Hoover responded to Hay’s relative noting that he ‘‘appreci-

ate[d] your writing to me as you have’’, and he promised to give the letter
‘‘appropriate attention’’. Even more, Hoover relayed to Hay’s relative the name
of the FBI’s SAC at Milwaukee and asked the relative if he or she wanted to
contact the FBI again to do so directly through this agent. Hoover then gave
instructions to the Milwaukee SAC that any information he may receive in the
future from this person should immediately be forwarded to the Los Angeles
field office.33
Over subsequent years, FBI agents kept careful note of changes in Hay’s life
and would periodically update his now-Security Index card—the name of the
index having been changed by this point—with his latest address or place of
employment. The internal FBI document used for changing information on
one’s Security Index card illustrates the political focus of FBI officials when
keeping note of information about their targets. The form, which asked for
work and home addresses, also asked for aliases, race, sex, whether the
individual was native born, naturalized, or an alien. It also singled out the
target’s political affiliation inasmuch as it specified Communist, Socialist
Workers Party, Independent Socialist League, or ‘‘miscellaneous’’. The form
also contained two notations, specific to the FBI and in bureau jargon, that, by
1950, would involve Harry Hay. In November of that year, Hay’s Security
Index card was ‘‘tabbed’’ for ‘‘COMSAB’’, which was FBI parlance for a target
subject who was employed by a company that held a government contract and,
therefore, the subject was considered under suspicion as a potential saboteur.
Communist sabotage—COMSAB—in other words. It was Hay’s political
affiliation and job, then, that laid the basis for government detention of Hay, if
need be, in the future. It should be noted, as well, that by 1950 Hay had left the
Communist Party and formed Mattachine. Yet despite the FBI’s aggressive
interest in his political affiliations and activism, there was nothing whatsoever
mentioning this significant development in his FBI file that year
(or Mattachine’s FBI file later). A significant reason for this was the FBI’s
reliance on informers. Since Hay kept his gay and straight (i.e. Communist)
worlds separate, the Bureau’s Communist informers—the FBI’s primary source
of information on Hay—knew nothing of his gay organizing.34
FBI officials’ ignorance of Hay’s sexuality and gay organizing is significant
given what they knew about Hay’s fellow founding members of Mattachine,
Chuck Rowland and Bob Hull. FBI officials knew that both men were
Communists—and because of it they listed both men in the bureau’s Security
Index—and they knew that both men were homosexuals, information that is, of
course, reflected in both of their FBI files. But when FBI agents reported or
noted that Rowland and Hull were gay, they did so only as an aside. The fact
that they were homosexual was neither crucial information nor inextricably
linked to their Communist Party activities. In fact, FBI agents mainly took note
33
Letter, Hoover to [deleted], 26 July 1949, FBI 100-211619-8.
34
Memo, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 13 November 1950, FBI 100-211619-10.
 Communist and Homosexual 113

of the fact that the men were dismissed from the Communist Party because
they were homosexual, recognizing that the Communist Party only looked on
gays with disdain.35 And when FBI officials evaluated the men to decide
whether to retain them in the Security Index, they decided to do so expressly for
their Communist Party associations and not for being homosexual. No
information about their sexuality, in fact, was even listed with the Security
Index recommendations despite FBI officials knowing about it.36 What is more,
FBI officials even linked Rowland and Hull, although tangentially, to
Mattachine. In 1953, when Rowland and Hull lived together in a boarding
house, FBI agents cultivated another boarder or the home owner as an
informant. This woman reported to FBI agents that in Rowland’s and Hull’s
room, she saw Mattachine letterhead, Mattachine literature, and copies of ONE
magazine. Although ONE was, in fact, separate from Mattachine, at this
juncture FBI officials believed ONE to be published by the Mattachine Society.
But when it came to Hay, FBI agents knew nothing of his sexuality or gay
organizing and, therefore, did not and could not report it.37
The FBI’s investigative reliance on informers is significant because when in
1953 FBI agents began to investigate Hay’s homophile organization, the
Mattachine, it again relied heavily on informers. FBI officials became
concerned with Mattachine after Los Angeles Mirror reporter Paul Coats
exposed the group when he published a story about it and questioned whether a
‘‘well-trained subversive’’ could influence them since gays were ‘‘a scorned part
of the community’’ who banded together for ‘‘protection’’ and were ‘‘bad
security risks’’. As evidence, he cited the fact that the group’s lawyer, Fred
Snider, was ‘‘an unfriendly witness at the Un-American Activities Committee
Hearing’’.38
Thereafter, Mattachine fell under the Bureau’s COMINFIL programme, an
investigative effort initiated by FBI officials to determine whether groups had
been infiltrated and were under the influence of Communists. When relying on
informers for information about Mattachine, FBI agents used those insurgent
members from the San Francisco region who had an interest in proving that
Mattachine was above board and free of subversives. These informers assured
FBI officials that Mattachine was free of Communists (although these
insurgents did not know about Hay since he remained secretive), but especially

35
For Rowland see letter, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 17 July 1952, FBI 100-355009-19; report,
SAC Los Angeles, 17 July 1952, FBI 100-355009-19; report, SAC Los Angeles, 19 February 1954, FBI
100-355009-22. For Hull, see letter, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 17 July 1952, FBI 100-392963-1;
report, SAC Los Angeles, 16 July 1952, FBI 100-392963-1.
36
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 3 September 1952, FBI 100-355009-20; report, SAC Los Angeles, 29
August 1952, FBI 100-39296-3. FBI agents even developed information that Hull had attempted to get
the reason (homosexuality) for his expulsion from the Communist Party official changed so that he could
rejoin it at a later date. See report, SAC Los Angeles, 2 March 1954, FBI 100-392963-4; memo, SAC
Los Angeles to Hoover, 16 June 1955, FBI 100-392963-5.
37
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 19 February 1954, FBI 100-355009-22.
38
Douglas M. Charles, ‘‘From Subversion to Obscenity: The FBI’s Investigations of the Early
Homophile Movement, 1953–58,’’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 19:2 (May 2010): 267–268.
114 D. M. Charles

after they seized control of the group from its original founders (including Hay)
shortly after the FBI began its COMINFIL investigation. Thereafter, with their
own informers essentially in control of Mattachine, FBI officials were
convinced that Mattachine was free of Communist influence.39
By 1954, FBI officials became interested, again, in Hay’s citizenship because
of ‘‘discrepancies in the information set forth in the files of the Los Angeles
Office concerning the place of birth of subject’s father’’. What concerned the
Los Angeles office was that Hay had claimed ‘‘derivative United States
citizenship as a result of his father’s naturalization in 1892, [but the] place of
naturalization [was] not stated’’. That FBI officials were concerned about this
reflects the common belief that subversives were infiltrating from abroad, and
also reflects a possible remedy if Hay was deemed a threat: deportation. The
Los Angeles SAC, therefore, requested FBI headquarters to inquire with the
Immigration and Naturalization Service about Hay’s father and his immigration
status. Yet again, it should be noted, there was no reference as of 1954 about
Hay and Mattachine in Hay’s FBI file despite the fact that since 1953 the FBI
had begun its intensive, and in depth, investigation of Mattachine.40
By April 1954, FBI officials had an answer about Hay’s father. The INS
reported that it had no record of Hay’s father’s naturalization, but observed that
its archive went no further back than 1906. The FBI was advised, therefore,
that Hay’s father would have been naturalized in a court of law. The FBI’s
Washington, DC, field office also reported that it was searching passport
records for naturalization information because Hay’s father travelled exten-
sively as a mining engineer.41
By May, FBI agents discovered that Hay’s father—who was born in
New Zealand—had, in fact, been naturalized in 1892 at Oakland, California.
What is more, FBI agents observed that Hay’s mother was born in Fort Bowie,
Arizona, but had then moved to England. FBI agents also noted the extensive
travel habits of both of Hay’s parents.42 By July, FBI agents further learned that
Hay was 4 years old when he entered the United States—having been born in
England.43 By August, FBI agents had failed to find any further information on
Hay’s immigration status in State Department records; they had also searched
the FBI’s fingerprint file yet document redactions make it impossible to
determine whose fingerprints, exactly, they were looking for. (It was either
Hay’s or his father’s.)44 Finally, it was also during 1954 that, in addition to
COMSAB, Hay was now tabbed for what FBI officials called ‘‘DETCOM’’, or,
detain as Communist. To reiterate, in the event of a national emergency Hay,

39
Douglas M. Charles, ‘‘From Subversion to Obscenity: The FBI’s Investigations of the Early
Homophile Movement, 1953–58,’’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 19:2 (May 2010): 270–276.
40
Memo, SAC LA to Hoover, 23 February 1954, FBI 100-211619-12.
41
Memo, SAC Washington Field Office to Hoover, 13 April 1954, FBI 100-211619-14.
42
Report, SAC WFO, 21 May 1954, FBI – no number.
43
Memo, SAC LA to Hoover, 6 July 1954, FBI 100-211619-17.
44
Memo, SAC WFO to Hoover, 9 August 1954, FBI 100-211619-18.
 Communist and Homosexual 115

and others like him, would therefore, and presumably, be detained by the
government as a result of their political party affiliations.45
By 1955, the FBI’s interest in Hay shifted, but, again, it never included
information about Hay’s founding or ouster from the Mattachine Society. The
context of this shift was the testimony offered by Stephen Wereb, an FBI
informant, to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as it held
hearings in San Diego investigating alleged Communist activities in the state of
California. Wereb, who owned a typewriter service in Inglewood, California,
was recruited by FBI agents to be an informant in the Communist Party and he
was just that between October 1943 and the end of 1947. Wereb fell into this
line of work after he had met an FBI agent at a social function and complained
to him about his running across Communist literature during his various
business travels. Once recruited, Wereb infiltrated the Los Angeles area
Communist Party, took a Marxist training course, then became a functionary of
the Party. He served variously as a local press director, treasurer and convention
delegate.46
At one point in his testimony, Wereb was asked if the Communist Party at
any time during his infiltration openly advocated the use of violence or
advocated revolution. Wereb replied in the affirmative, stating that in his
Marxism classes his teachers noted that one day the Communist Party would
do just this. Then he singled out two teachers, one of whom was Harry Hay.
Wereb claimed that Hay had taught that the goal of Marxism and Leninism was
to ‘‘overhaul’’ the election system of the United States to allow, for example,
one member of the National Maritime Union to vote for the entire group—this
was based on the fact that at any given time, one-third of union members were
at sea. The problem, Wereb explained, was that the Communist Party would
make sure that this one voting person was their ‘‘stooge’’. Because this
testimony was offered by an FBI informant, the San Diego SAC reported it to
FBI Director Hoover and quoted and cited the testimony in the printed HUAC
hearings.47
Because Wereb had mentioned Hay’s name publicly in his HUAC testimony,
and in relation to violence and revolution which suggested the possibility of a
Smith Act violation, the Los Angeles SAC reported to the FBI director that

45
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 23 February 1954, FBI 100-211619-13. See especially this document’s
administrative page. Administrative pages were reserved for sensitive, embarrassing or unverified
information that FBI officials did not want in permanent FBI documents.
46
US House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation
of Communist Activities in the State of California, Part 6, 83rd Congress, 2nd session, 20 April 1954
(Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1954), 4779–4782. For more on California and anti-
Communism, see Michael J. Heale, ‘‘Red Scare Politics: California’s Campaign Against Un-American
Activities, 1940-70,’’ Journal of American Studies 20 (1986): 5–32.
47
US House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation
of Communist Activities in the State of California, Part 6, 83rd Congress, 2nd session, 20 April 1954
(Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1954), 4791; memo, SAC San Diego to Hoover, 26
January 1955, FBI 100-211619-[deleted, but 21]. Interestingly, the FBI has redacted the San Diego
SAC’s reiteration of what appears, publicly, in the published HUAC committee hearings.
116 D. M. Charles

Hay’s Security Index card was current and up to date.48 But my mid-June
1955, after FBI agents investigated Hay further to ascertain his current status—
they learned that he still held a manufacturing job, was primarily involved in the
dramatic division of the Hollywood Arts, Sciences and Professions Council
(HASP), and had been subpoenaed to appear before HUAC in Los Angeles on
27 June—the SAC in Los Angeles recommended that Hay be removed from the
Security Index since he no longer met the index’s criteria for listing.49
That criteria, which was outlined in SAC Letter 55–30 (Hoover issued these
letters to SACs to update them on current bureau rules and procedures),
involved whether Hay had been a member of the Communist Party in the past
5 years—he had not—or had ‘‘acted in a leadership capacity in one or more
front organizations which adhere to the policies and doctrines of a revolutionary
group within the last three years’’. Again, Hay had not. And even though by
1955 Hay had, in fact, been tabbed for both DETCOM—‘‘Detain as
Communist’’—and COMSAB—‘‘Communist Sabotage’’—he also no longer
met the requirements for those designations, as outlined in SAC Letter 55–12.
For all of these reasons, the Los Angeles SAC recommended Hay’s removal
from the Security Index. And on 28 June 1955, FBI officials authorized
the removal of Hay’s name. He was formally removed from the index on 26
July 1955.50
But things quickly changed for Hay vis-a-vis the Security Index just months
later. On 2 July 1955, Hay, along with his lawyer Frank Pestana, testified before
HUAC in Los Angeles. He testified that while he was born in England in 1912,
because his parents were both citizens of the United States at the time of his
birth, he was, in fact, an American citizen. He also testified that, for
employment, he was a production control engineer who made burners and
boilers. Hay was then asked by committee staffer Frank Tavenner whether he,
Hay, had also worked as a teacher. With this seemingly innocuous question,
Hay conferred with his lawyer and then declined to answer citing the First and
Fifth Amendments. Asked if he had any music training, he similarly declined to
answer. Asked if he had taught classes at the California Labor School,
information about which Tavenner claimed the committee had discovered in its
investigations, Hay declined to answer. Asked if he knew whether the
Communist Party selected people to teach at that school, Hay declined to
answer. Asked if the Communist Party instructed him to teach classes there,
Hay declined to answer. Mr Tavenner then advised Hay that an undercover
FBI informer named Stephen Wereb, who had infiltrated the county party,
testified that Hay had been instructed by the Communist Party to teach classes
at the Party’s Hawthorne Club. Hay responded: ‘‘I wish to state that I have
48
Memo, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 13 April 1955, FBI 100-211619-22. The Smith Act of 28 June
1940 prohibited any individual or organization from advocating the violent overthrow of the United
States government or membership in an organization advocating such a goal.
49
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 16 June 1955, FBI 100-211619-23.
50
Memo, SAC LA to Hoover, 16 June 1955, FBI 100-211619-24; memo, SAC LA to Hoover, 7 July
1955, FBI 100-211619-25.
 Communist and Homosexual 117

neither opinions nor recollections to give to stoolpigeons and their buddies on

this committee’’. With that remark, Tavenner asked Hay if anything Wereb had
said was untrue, but Hay declined to answer. Hay was also asked directly if he
taught a class on Marxism, if he was or ever was a member of the Communist
Party, and whether it was the Communist Party’s ‘‘plan’’ to deny membership
before HUAC. To all of these questions Hay declined to answer.51
Hay’s testimony was brief but fiery. But in later years, Hay explained that he
believed the committee did not press him further, nor seek a contemp charge
against him when he made his stoolpigeon remark, because he exuded what he
called a ‘‘gay consciousness’’ with his impertinent and grandiloquent way of
answering their questions. Hay believed that this prompted the committee
chairman, uncomfortable with Hay, to dismiss him as a witness to maintain
order given the laughter his answers sparked among those in the gallery.52
In August of 1955, the Los Angeles SAC reported these details to Hoover.53
Six months later, the SAC wrote Hoover again, reiterating the details of his
previous report on Hay, and advised the FBI director that Hay’s case had been
reevaluated and he recommended, again, that Hay not be listed on the Security
Index primarily because his activities were restricted to membership with
HASP. The SAC also advised Hoover that ‘‘[n]o request for interview [of Hay]
is being submitted at this time, inasmuch as it is believed that an attempt to
interview HAY would be unavailing in view of his refusal to testify before
HCUA [House Committee on Un-American Activities]’’.54
Upon receipt of this memorandum, however, an FBI official in Washington
took note of a discrepancy in dates in an FBI report from February of the
previous year in which an FBI informant reported that Hay was a member of
the Los Angeles Communist Party ‘‘[a]s of early 1950’’. Because this fell within
the 5-year time span of the Security Index’s criteria (from when the Los Angeles
office had originally removed Hay from the index), he asked that a form
FD-122 be filed on Hay. This was the form used to place a person in the
Security Index.55 On 16 March 1956, FBI Director Hoover consented and
ordered the Los Angeles field office to handle the paperwork. The reason
Hoover gave for Hay being re-listed in the Index was: ‘‘In view of Hay’s refusal
to answer questions concerning Communist membership on the basis of the
Fifth Amendment before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities . . . plus his extensive subversive background’’. By 5 April, Hay was
51
US House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, 84th
Congress, 1st session, 1–2 July 1955 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1955), 1872–1875.
In later years, Hay refuted the accuracy of the HUAC transcripts because, he claimed, he was asked if he
was a member of the Communist Party in 1954 and 1955 to which he answered ‘‘no’’—because he had
quit in 1950—rather than the transcript’s claim that he had refused to answer. See Stuart Timmons, The
Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1990),
189–190.
52
Timmons, The Trouble with Harry, 189.
53
Memo, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 11 August 1955, FBI 100-211619-26.
54
Memo, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 28 February 1956, FBI 100-211619-27.
55
Ibid; report, SAC Los Angeles, 23 February 1954, FBI 100-211619-13.
118 D. M. Charles

back on the Security Index. Clearly, though, Hay was re-listed not because of
any evidence that he was a genuine threat but because of his dramatic refusal to
cooperate with HUAC. In other words, for political reasons.56
Hay’s reappearance on the FBI’s Security Index in 1956 coincided with the
FBI’s second intensive investigative effort targeting the Mattachine Society. In
January of that year, FBI officials became aware of an article published in the
homophile magazine ONE 2 months before that, in light of the Lavender Scare,
raised the question of homosexuals being employed by, among other govern-
ment agencies, the FBI. As one of the leading investigative bodies investigating
and helping to purge gays from government, and no doubt due to rumours
about J. Edgar Hoover’s own sexuality, FBI officials again targeted Mattachine
and ONE—believing the two to be one and the same—in an effort to silence
them both for ONE’s controversial public claims and, significantly, not because
the group was believed to be Communist led. FBI officials not only ordered
another intensive investigation to unearth as much information as they could
about Mattachine and ONE, but they took pains to develop obscenity cases
against the two groups, who both were publishing magazines by 1956, in order
to put both out of business (they failed). And, yet again, FBI agents never
linked Hay to Mattachine, and no information exists about Hay in either his
own FBI file or Mattachine’s—except for one notation of the name ‘‘Mrs.
Henry Hay’’ on a Mattachine letter obtained from an informant; FBI agents
checked into the name and unearthed nothing. That no information about
Mattachine exists in Hay’s individual FBI file is significant, as FBI officials were
interested in any and all information that would allude to the man’s
‘‘subversive’’ nature and being involved in a group seemingly slandering the
FBI would certainly qualify in that regard. But Hay remained very secretive,
had been out of Mattachine for over 3 years, and FBI sources inside Mattachine
did not know who he was.57
For the next 5 years, and irrespective of his homophile work, FBI agents
worked to ascertain Hay’s activities in the Communist Party or sympathetic
groups. Over May and June 1956, for example, FBI agents again made ‘‘pretext
inquiries’’ with Hay’s employer—primarily via telephone calls in which the
agents did not reveal their identities or purpose—to confirm Hay’s current
home address and employment status. They also inquired with informants who
reiterated Hay’s membership with HASP which, according to those agents, was
the Southern California Chapter of the National Council of Arts, Sciences and
Professions and, according to HUAC, was a ‘‘Communist front’’. What’s more,
these informants also relayed to FBI agents that in November 1955 Hay had
sent ‘‘greetings’’ to John Howard Lawson, the radical playwright, screenwriter
and Communist Party member who was one of the Hollywood Ten and spent
56
Memo, SAC LA to Hoover, 5 April 1956, FBI 100-211619-28; memo, Hoover to SAC LA, 16
March 1956, FBI 100-211619—no serial.
57
Douglas M. Charles, ‘‘From Subversion to Obscenity,’’ 276–285. On the FBI and obscenity, see
Douglas M. Charles, The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade against Smut
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).
 Communist and Homosexual 119

time in jail, at a dinner held in his honour. This association concerned FBI
agents because, from their perspective, Lawson was ‘‘an important figure in the
CP’s organization in the Hollywood film industry’’. At this same time, the Los
Angeles SAC recommended on an administrative page keeping Hay on the
Security Index ‘‘in view of his refusal to answer questions concerning CP
membership’’ before HUAC.58
Over this 5-year period FBI agents were unable to develop any information
about Hay’s activities other than his place of employment, residence, and the
fact that he had divorced his wife, Anita Platky. The information FBI officials
maintained on Hay, however, was shared over this period out of the
Los Angeles office with unspecified recipients in 1958 and 1959. The reason
for the paucity of information on Hay over this period was the fact that he had
left the Communist Party.59
Given that over a 5-year period, Hay evidentially was no longer associating
with the Communist Party (he also walked away, for the time being, from his
homophile activities after the San Francisco insurgents seized control of
Mattachine), and therefore he did not meet the criteria for being listed in the
Security Index, in June 1961 the Los Angeles SAC wrote Hoover for
permission to recruit Hay as an FBI informant. He noted to Hoover that if
an initial interview with Hay went well, and if Hay was ‘‘cooperative’’, his office
would begin ‘‘to direct his activities’’ at a later date, and only after the
completion of a ‘‘background investigation’’. Hay seemed to be a good
candidate for recruitment because the FBI’s long investigation revealed that he
had no relatives ‘‘connected with the CP’’—Hay had divorced his wife by this
point and she, like Hay, was a Communist Party member—and because it
seemed clear that Hay had not been ‘‘expelled or rejected from the CP’’ but had
left the Party on his own volition. For these reasons, the SAC ‘‘desired to
ascertain subject’s present attitude towards the CP and to also ascertain if he
will cooperate with the FBI’’. An FBI official noted on the SAC’s memo, for
Hoover, that Hay had not been interviewed previously, but that he had been an
uncooperative witness before HUAC. Hoover approved the SAC’s request.60
On 4 August 1961, two FBI agents arrived at Hay’s home on Westwood
Boulevard in Los Angeles to interview him. The agents began their interview by
explaining to Hay that the FBI had jurisdiction ‘‘in security matters’’. But Hay
refused to allow the FBI agents to continue. According to the agents’ account,
and perhaps reflecting Hay’s own self-styled ‘‘gay consciousness’’, he ‘‘imme-
diately stated that he had nothing to say and did not wish to talk to the FBI and
58
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 25 June 1956, FBI 100-211619-29.
59
Report, SAC Los Angeles, 19 June 1957, FBI 100-211619-30; report, SAC Los Angeles, 9 July
1958, FBI 100-211619-31; memo, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 9 July 1958, FBI 100-211619-32;
cover letter with attached memo on Hay, 9 July 1958, FBI 100-211619-32; report, SAC Los Angeles, 26
June 1959, FBI 100-211619-33; report, SAC Los Angeles, 27 June 1960, FBI 100-211619-34; report,
SAC Los Angeles, 15 June 1961, FBI 100-211619-35. For the FBI’s intensive investigation of
Mattachine, see Douglas M. Charles, ‘‘From Subversion to Obscenity: The FBI’s Investigations of the
Early Homophile Movement, 1953–58,’’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 19:2 (May 2010): 262–287.
60
Memo, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 15 June 1961, FBI 100-211619-36.
120 D. M. Charles

terminated the interview’’. Hay’s response is not surprising. As a long

Communist Party member, he would have had an automatic distrust of the
FBI. Hay even knew of the FBI’s interest in him, beyond the fact that an FBI
informer had testified about him before HUAC. In 1948, after gaining
employment at Leahy Manufacturing, a long-time friend of his advised Hay
that FBI agents had inquired about him at his workplace and ‘‘knew all about
you [Harry]’’. In reality, Hay knew no details about the FBI’s monitoring of
him or of Mattachine beyond suspicions but those suspicions were enough to
colour his view of the FBI. Even though Hay refused to cooperate with the FBI
as an informer, and contrary to the FBI’s reaction when he refused to cooperate
with HUAC, the Los Angeles SAC recommended that due to Hay’s ‘‘lack of
activity’’ in the Communist Party since 1950 or ‘‘CP front activity’’ in the past
5 years that he be removed from the Security Index. He was removed from it.61
The question remains, however: why did FBI agents and officials completely
miss that Hay was homosexual and had founded the Mattachine Society which,
itself, was the subject of not one but two intensive FBI investigations? Indeed,
the only obvious reference to Hay in the Mattachine FBI file is a notation of the
name ‘‘Mrs. Henry Hay’’ that led FBI agents nowhere. Alternatively, Hay’s
fellow founding members of Mattachine were, in one way or another, noted in
the FBI’s file on the group.62 Moreover, FBI officials also knew that Hay’s
fellow founders Chuck Rowland and Bob Hull were Communists and
homosexuals and, like Hay, they were also listed in the bureau’s Security Index.
It seems there are five closely related reasons for the FBI’s investigative
failure to connect Hay to Mattachine and these reasons inform our under-
standing of both the FBI’s interest in Communists and how, despite obvious
commonalities, it was, in fact, unique from its interest in homosexuals. First, it
largely had to do with the secretive cell structure Hay had set up for
Mattachine, an organizational pattern based on the structure of the Communist
Party, in which the founding members of the organization remained safely
ensconced, and at a comfortable distance, in the anonymous so-called Fifth
Order. Few people, but especially most members of Mattachine itself, knew
who was running their organization. In fact, this was one reason that in 1953
Mattachine had an internal revolt leading to the ouster of Hay and his fellow
founders because its members had no idea who had founded and was leading
their group. Neither did FBI agents.
Second, Hay had a very secretive nature and a long history of using
pseudonyms. This particular personality trait insulated him from FBI agents’
investigative efforts. By way of monitoring his leftist politics, the FBI knew
about two of Hay’s pseudonyms—Karen Hunter and Mac’h Eann—but it
appears that Hay’s simple employment of ‘‘Mrs’’ in his name with Mattachine
stymied FBI agents who checked the name and found no damning information
61
Memo, SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, 22 August 1961, FBI 100-211619-38. On Hay’s knowledge of
the FBI’s interest see Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay, 131.
62
Charles, ‘‘From Subversion to Obscenity,’’ 273–274.
 Communist and Homosexual 121

associated with it. FBI agents had similar trouble identifying other homophile
activists at that time who employed pseudonyms, such as fellow Mattachine
founder Chuck Rowland who used the pen name David Freeman to criticize
the FBI in a magazine article. Despite their efforts, FBI agents never truly
associated Rowland with the article. Further, Hay’s divorce from his wife,
Anita, shortly after founding Mattachine also had no impact on the FBI’s
information. By this point, Anita had become disenchanted with the
Communist Party and, in the late 1940s, had left it. She knew of Hay’s
homosexuality, and while some of Hay’s party friends also knew, and despite
Hay experiencing ostracism from these friends after he left the Party, it does not
necessarily follow that it was only his homosexuality that led to his alienation.
Hay’s leaving the Party, in and of itself, would have generated negative feelings
and led to his ostracism among his brethren, and, in any event, the FBI’s
informers in the Party were clearly not knowledgeable of Hay’s
homosexuality.63
Third, the FBI began its investigation of Mattachine in 1953 when the group,
itself, was experiencing an internal revolt where vociferous insurgent members
from San Francisco sought to take control and make the group a more
transparent organization. They succeeded and this development led Hay
quietly to step away from his leadership role, leaving FBI agents to focus their
investigative efforts upon the new leaders of Mattachine, many of whom also
served as FBI informants but who did not necessarily know Hay. Therefore,
FBI agents learned nothing of Hay.
Fourth, in its investigations of both Hay and Mattachine, FBI agents clearly
relied, to a significant degree, on informers for their information. But since Hay
remained a very secretive man there was, in reality, no one in either
Mattachine—except for his fellow founders—or the Communist Party who
knew that he was linked to Mattachine. So while some of his Communist Party
compatriots willingly provided FBI agents with information about his
Communist Party activities, these informers obviously knew nothing about
his activities with Mattachine. Alternatively, the FBI’s informers among the
Mattachine members—the San Francisco insurgents who forced the group to
abandon its secrecy—did not know Hay so when they reported to their FBI
handlers, the FBI therefore knew nothing of him. Even when he attempted to
create his early and openly gay group that advocated for Henry Wallace,
Bachelor’s for Wallace, Hay used the name Eann MacDonald, again insulating
that effort from detection which, in any event, is irrespective of the fact that its
existence was but for a fleeting moment.64 In fact, as Hay’s biographer has
noted, Hay was very careful and pointedly kept his straight and gay worlds
separate. An example of this is the fact that Hay never revealed publicly that his

63
See Charles, ‘‘From Subversion to Obscenity,’’ Timmons, The Trouble With Harry Hay, 134,
158–161.
64
See Katz, ‘‘The Founding of the Mattachine Society: An Interview With Henry Hay,’’ 31.
122 D. M. Charles

boyfriend, Rudi Gernreich, had helped him to found Mattachine until Rudi had
died in 1985.65
And fifth, and perhaps most significant, another explanation for the FBI’s
failure to link Hay to Mattachine was the bureau’s near-obsession with leftist
politics. While FBI officials were officially interested in real and viable threats to
national security during the Hoover years, the reality is that FBI officials and
agents more often directed their interests at the radical political views and
activities of their selected targets rather than on any verifiable evidence of an
actual or impending threat to national security.66 Hay’s file, in fact, is an
example of this inasmuch as it seems to illustrate well that in their investigative
efforts FBI officials and agents wore political blinders that allowed them to see
only leftist and Communist political activity, which was not illegal and not
viable evidence of a genuine national security threat, involving Hay. This is
striking when it comes to Harry Hay because his interests primarily revolved
around leftist theatre and dramatic groups, hardly something threatening to
national security. This also held true with Rowland and Hull, who like Hay
were listed in the FBI’s Security Index but only because of their politics. When
FBI agents listed their rationale for listing all three men, never was their
sexuality even mentioned, even when FBI agents were fully aware of it.
The larger context of the FBI’s interest in Hay informs us about the Bureau’s
interest in both Communists and homosexuals. The FBI’s interest in
homosexuals was not that they were one and the same with Communists, but
that they could be blackmailed by Communists into betraying secrets or that
groups of gays could come under the influence of ‘‘a well-trained subversive’’.
It is true that there were many presumed popular similarities between the
seeming dual threats from both Communists and homosexuals, including that
they both used pseudonyms, were secretive, had their own literature, and that
both recruited members to their ranks. But these similarities are less built on
reality than on prejudice, bias and stereotyping. Moreover, while some may
have popularly, and politically, seen equivalence among Communists and
homosexuals even going so far as to take advantage of this to advance political
agendas, FBI agents investigated them in most instances separately and viewed
the two as separate concerns. The fact that FBI officials recognized that the
Communist Party looked on gays with disdain and purged them from its own
ranks is an indication of this. Even more, as part of the Bureau’s
COINTELPRO disruption programme, in 1960 FBI agents had planned to
have local police arrest a ‘‘key figure’’ in the Communist Party in New York
who was known to be homosexual. The arrest would then be publicized
in order to ‘‘embarrass the Party’’. Even though the plan never went
forward—because the target had stopped working for the party—it illustrates
the FBI’s awareness of the Communist Party’s homophobia and FBI officials’

65
Stuart Timmons, The Trouble With Harry Hay (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1990), 139, 146.
66
On the FBI’s interest in radical political views rather than real threats, see Theoharis, Chasing Spies.
 Communist and Homosexual 123

desire to use homosexuals against the Communist Party; not that there was
equivalence among them.67
There were, however, similarities between homosexuals and Communists
when it came to the FBI, and this had to do with how FBI agents investigated
both. First, FBI officials began investigating both in systematic ways at about
the same time: the mid-1930s. Communists were monitored in a systematic
way because of domestic concerns about their influence over the ‘‘economic
and political life of the country as a whole’’, issues that involved the
development of the Second World War. But FBI officials targeted homosexuals
as a result of the development of a panic involving child kidnappings, and the
resultant targeting of homosexuals due, in large measure, to stereotyping of
gays and their presumed criminal predatory sexual interests. Both were
regarded as public threats, but in unique ways. Second, FBI officials relied
heavily on informants for information about both Communists and homosex-
uals. While the Communist Party USA was clearly penetrated deeply through
FBI efforts, a significant problem when utilizing informers is the quality of their
information. (As informers, for example, these individuals’ trustworthiness is
already suspect.) Even still, when targeting Communists it was necessary for
federal authorities to prove membership in a subversive group to win a
prosecution in a Smith Act or McCarren Act case. This task was exceptionally
difficult, and whereas Communists were targeted for reasons of loyalty,
homosexuals were targeted for reasons of security (i.e. blackmail potential).
When targeting homosexuals, moreover, FBI agents did not have to prove
membership in any organizations, like Mattachine or ONE. Instead, all FBI
agents had to do was to develop enough damning information—from
informants—that would sufficiently cast doubt on whether an individual
could retain his or her employment with the federal government. Given the
widespread bias against homosexuality during the 1950s, it was easier for FBI
agents to develop homosexuality cases than Communist cases for it was easier
to identify a homosexual through stereotypes about their behaviour. And when
doing this, the veracity of an informants’ information was not a top concern, as
few would dare to reveal publicly or even challenge information about one’s
sexuality in the 1950s whether or not true. The best example of this was arrests
of gays for lewd behaviour in public. Few arrested individuals would dare
challenge the charges levelled against them, so many willingly forfeited their
bonds to avoid public embarrassment in a trial.
So while FBI officials targeted both Communists and homosexuals in the
1950s, they were not one and the same and simply viewing the two witch hunts
as deeply intertwined because of overarching public perceptions misses their
unique natures. Further illustrating this is the FBI’s own history. Prior to the
Cold War, McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare, FBI agents targeted those
67
United States Senate, Final Report, Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book III, 94th
Congress, 2nd session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976), 58.
124 D. M. Charles

whom they suspected of being homosexual. The best examples we know of are
Sumner Welles, Senator David Walsh and Philip Fayemonville. In the Welles
and Walsh cases, the issue was security and whether these individuals could be
manipulated by the enemy given their powerful political positions. In neither
case was Welles or Walsh suspected of being Communist. In the Fayemonville
case, he was similarly seen as liable to manipulation in his position as
Lend-Lease coordinator in Moscow, and while his colleagues suggested he may
have been a Communist, that had little to do with his alleged sexuality than
with a political power play among his embassy colleagues. The conflation of
Communism and homosexuality was an early Cold War phenomenon and
mainly a popular and political one.
So yes, there were many popular similarities about both Communists and
homosexuals by the 1950s, and these traits were popularized in literature and
taken advantage of in public by politicians or bureaucrats who had certain
political or security agendas. But when it came to the FBI, the primary
government body that investigated homosexuals and sought to prevent their
employment to forestall blackmail or avoid political embarrassment, FBI
officials in the secret side of the Lavender Scare investigated both separately.
And, in fact, it is more instructive for us today to view the two witch hunts not
as a phenomena deeply intermixed with McCarthyism and originating at that
time (they did not), but something unique, different, and older, albeit closely
related.
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