Harry Hay was a gay American labor activist and, briefly, a professional stage and film actor, who is remembered as the founder of the modern American gay rights movement. He met actor Will Geer in 1934 through theater work, and the two became lovers and remained partners into the 1950s amid their shared involvement in West Coast labor organizing, including the 1934 San Francisco general strike. In August 1948, drawing on Kinsey's newly published research on human sexuality, Hay conceived the idea for a homosexual rights organization, which became the Mattachine Society in 1950 -- the first sustained gay rights group in the United States. He later co-founded the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (1966) and the Radical Faeries (1979), a countercultural gay spirituality movement, with his later partner John Burnside, who remained with him until Hay's death in 2002. Hay has been called "the father of gay liberation."
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