In May 1970, however, the couple left California for New Mexico, where they found new premises for the kaleidoscope factory. In New Mexico, Hay and Burnside not only continued their work for gay rights, but they also became involved in a successful effort to block a federal canal-building project that would have diverted water from the Rio Grande for the benefit of wealthy private developers while local agrarian communities would have suffered a devastating loss of water for irrigation.

The move to New Mexico had been partly motivated by the high cost of living in Los Angeles, but it also provided Hay the opportunity to study Native American cultures, with which he had been fascinated since hearing Quechua and Aymara music in the Chilean mountains as a child. In more recent years he had extensively studied the role of berdaches or two-spirit people in Amerindian cultures.

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The Radical Faeries

In addition to these studies, Hay had also been reflecting on gay consciousness, concluding that whereas heterosexual men see themselves as subjects and their female partners as objects, gay men perceive in their lovers fellow subjects--"equals to be respected and cherished."

In a 1976 "Call to Action" Hay envisioned a "gay fairy family of loving-sharing equals." He pursued the idea by founding the Radical Faeries two years later.

Meetings of the Radical Faeries generally occur in rural settings, and their celebrations combine Native American and New Age elements. The first took place in the desert near Tucson, Arizona in September 1979. Since then the Radical Faeries movement has spread across the United States and also to Europe.

Belated Recognition

Over the next decade Hay was somewhat eclipsed by younger members of the glbtq rights movement. He was "rediscovered," however, at the end of the twentieth century, and by the end of his life he was recognized and revered as a founding elder of the movement for equality.

Stuart Timmons published a biography, The Trouble with Harry Hay, in 1990, and a collection of Hay's writings, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, appeared in 1996. When in 1999 the choice of grand marshal for San Francisco's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade was put to a public vote for the first time, Hay was the winner. He was also the subject of Eric Slade's PBS documentary Hope along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay (2002), which was nominated for an Emmy and won numerous awards at film festivals.

In 1999 Burnside moved Hay, who was suffering from lung cancer, to San Francisco's Castro district, where he was cared for by hospice nurses and care-taking members of the Radical Faeries. At the same period Hay arranged for his personal papers to be donated to the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library.

Harry Hay died on October 24, 2002. At his side were John Burnside, with whom he had registered as domestic partners only weeks before, and his care givers from the Radical Faeries, who laid Hay out and sprinkled rose petals over him.

Biographer Timmons had visited Hay a few weeks before, at which time Hay had given him a message: "Tell my people I want them to be happy and strong. And free. And contributive. And to fly."

"Domestic partnership" is the generic term for a variety of forms of legal and institutional recognition of same-sex couples that fall short of same-sex marriage.

The glbtq history of Los Angeles, the U.S.'s second largest metropolis, is replete with cultural, social, and political firsts.

McCarthyism, which attempted in the late 1940s and early 1950s to expunge Communists and fellow travelers from American public life, made homosexuals the chief scapegoats of the Cold War.

A social role for individuals who crossed or mixed male and female characteristics was one of the most widely distributed institutions of native North America.

Early in the gay rights movement activists challenged organized labor to broaden its struggle against discrimination to include sexual identity; consequently labor unions became some of the first mainstream organizations to call for equal rights.

Both parades and marches have served to render the glbtq community visible; whereas marches typically attempt to effect political change, parades and pride events affirm identity and community.

A movement that emerged in the late 1970s, the Radical Faeries identify with the gender variant sacred outsider that has appeared and reappeared in many cultures throughout human history.

Primarily a nature religion that seeks to commune with the divine through the contemplation and celebration of nature and its mysteries, Wicca--like other contemporary pagan traditions--celebrates our existence in this world.

Both male and female berdaches (or two-spirit persons), common among Native American tribal cultures, were characterized by gender variation sanctioned by supernatural dreams and visions.

Legendary drag performer and recording artist Ray Bourbon appeared in silent movies, vaudeville acts, Broadway plays, and, from the 1940s through the 1960s, performed across the United States in a gay nightclub circuit.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

Formed soon after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the short-lived but influential Gay Liberation Front brought a new militancy to the movement that became known as gay liberation.

Associated particularly with the 1960s fashion revolution, Rudi Gernreich was one of the great modernists of fashion design, making his clothes futuristic both technically and stylistically.

Philanthropist and political activist James C. Hormel became the first openly gay United States ambassador despite the vociferous opposition of conservative groups.

Editor and author Dale Jennings was a pioneer of the American gay rights movement, one of the co-founders of both the Mattachine Society and ONE, Inc.

Jim Kepner was both a pioneering gay journalist and a homophile activist who founded the International Gay and Lesbian Archives.

A pioneer in the American gay rights movement and in glbtq studies, W. Dorr Legg won a landmark Supreme Court decision establishing the right to send homosexual content through the U.S. mail.

One of the earliest American gay movement organizations, the Mattachine Society was dedicated to the cultural and political liberation of homosexuals; but in the face of McCarthyism, it adopted conservative policies of accommodationism.

Throughout his adult life, Cecil Rhodes, one of nineteenth-century Britain's most ambitious imperialists, conducted romantic friendships with younger male associates.

In his 1960s and 1970s images of hikers, bikers, and surfers, photographer and activist Mel Roberts captured the spirit of the California Dream that lured thousands of gay men to the Golden State in search of freedom and opportunity after World War II.

An early leader in the struggle for glbtq rights, Los Angeles activist Don Slater was sometimes at odds with others in the movement but never wavered in his devotion to the cause.

The confrontations between police and demonstrators at the Stonewall Inn in New York City the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 mark the beginning of the modern glbtq movement for equal rights.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.