vsarna's review
3.0
Great book and I really enjoyed how the author didn’t shy away from showing Hay’s triumphs and his downfalls. I will say I gotta give it a 3 because there were several sections that could have been cut out and I wouldn’t have missed them. I also wish there was better presentation of Hay’s life because I was bored through several parts of the book
tangleroot_eli's review
3.0
The trouble with Harry Hay is the trouble of history itself. Hay was, as are we all, a product of his time and place. When he was starting Mattachine in the early '50s, there was less of a sense of all "isms" being interconnected. The struggles of gays and those of racial minorities were not seen as linked, and the struggles of gay men were not seen as being the same as those of lesbians. Similiarly, the Radical Faeries were born at a time when we were less aware of the damage caused by cultural appropriation. So faulting Hay because Mattachine was made mostly of white gay men and because the Faeries because they borrowed so heavily from American Indian traditions makes an unfair assertion that he should have approached organizing in his time with the consciousness of our time. At the same time, neither would it be prudent of us to use Hay's model as the ultimate blueprint for gay organizing, which some still seem to want to do. Hay's quest for a unified theory of homosexuals both excluded many in the community and promoted the conformity he'd so long fought against in straight society. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, if we have seen farther than others, it is because we were standing on the shoulders of giants. In The Trouble with Harry Hay, Stuart Timmons does a very good job of showing us what a giant Hay was, and how broad were his shoulders; however, once we're standing on them, we can clearly see how much farther there is to go.
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