Will Roscoe: "Radical Love, Visionary Politics: The Adventure of Harry Hay"
Will Roscoe was a friend and colleague of Harry Hay for over twenty years and edited Hay’s collected writings, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder. His own work, including The Zuni Man-Woman, Queer Spirits: a Gay Men’s Myth Book, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, and Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love, reflects Hay’s lasting influence.
Roscoe has been active in the lgbt movement since 1975, and as a community-based scholar, he has lectured extensively throughout the U.S., Canada, and Australia. He holds a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California at Santa Cruz and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State University. In 2002 he was canonized by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for his work promoting harm reduction at lgbt clubs and circuit parties.
Performance: Selections from Jon Marans’ The Temperamentals
Featuring Vince Gatton, Stephen Speights, and Joey Stocks.
Jon Marans’ The Temperamentals first appeared Off-Broadway in 2009, and returned again to a larger audience in 2010. The play beautifully interwove the story of the emergence of the Mattachine Society with the romance of Harry Hay and Rudi Gernreich. It was well received by critics and audiences alike: the New York Times described it as “intellectual, emotional and sexual,” while David Mixner later wrote that “the cast ably enables us to see their personal struggle as they ironically have to choose between the safety of accepting oppression and the risks of wanting to live in freedom.”
Marans has said that his interest in Hay grew from a show he wrote in 1999 that was adapted from a Studs Terkel collection of interviews with older activists called “Coming of Age.” Hay was among those that Terkel portrayed and so Marans wrote him into three scenes. But every time the Hay character appeared, he seemed to take over the scene. “I was just blown away by the response,” Marans said. “I thought, ‘Why is he stealing the show?’” Part of the answer, he realized, was that “Hay was a visionary and a revolutionary. He saw the world differently than anybody else did back in 1950, and there was something very exciting about hearing that. And he was joyously unapologetic about who he was.”