A Quote by Harry Hay

I knew that I was gay in every bone of my body. So I did the only thing I could do. I started the movement. — © Harry Hay
I knew that I was gay in every bone of my body. So I did the only thing I could do. I started the movement.
I still skate occasionally but last time I did, at our show in Hanford, I did a 360 frontside varial over our rolled-up banner and broke every damn bone in my body. Ok, I only broke one bone. Well, I didn't break any bones, but I could have!
In less than a century we experienced great movement. The youth movement! The labor movement! The civil rights movement! The peace movement! The solidarity movement! The women's movement! The disability movement! The disarmament movement! The gay rights movement! The environmental movement! Movement! Transformation! Is there any reason to believe we are done?
When I meet gay kids and they know who we are, I remember that's amazing because literally every gay person in every gay story I knew growing up was doomed to die. There weren't any positive gay stories and it's incredible that has changed.
I get so sick and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents did to them. You know what your parents did to you? The best thing they could do. The best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic.
When I started acting, doing theater stuff at a young age, I was always the comic relief-type roles, so I knew I had a funny bone and could make groups of people laugh, but I didn't really take it seriously until I started getting paid on a weekly basis; then I was like, 'Oh, well, this could be a lifestyle.'
Rumors went round that I might be gay. In some ways, I was happy w/ this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive, and courageous; in any case one's sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood.
I knew I could play well on the grass, but I really played so well today. I knew exactly what I had to play to beat her. I just did everything I could in the moment. I was very focused for every point. I knew that I had to go forward for every shot I was playing to push her back, and yeah, I did it.
The ball scene was never really only gay people. I think people have this notion that if there's a man hanging around a gay man, he must be gay, but that's just stigma. Back in the day, it was the same; there were lots of different people there: gay, straight, whatever. They did not care what they were called because they knew who they were.
That's the biggest thing I struggle with. We could never hope to represent every gay person in America. There will be people who will say, 'Well, my experience of being gay isn't like that,' to which I can only say, 'That's fine.'
What interested me the most was that when I [traveled to Europe] I knew what Joseph Beuys was doing, he knew what I was doing, and we both, we just started to talk. How did I know what Daniel Buren was doing, and to an extent, he knew exactly what I was doing? How did everybody know? It's an interesting thing. I'm still fascinated by it because, why is it now, with the Internet and everything else, you get whole groups of artists who have chosen to be regional? They really are only with the people they went to school with.
When I was young, they thought I was from outer space. I was the only gay person they probably knew, and they struggled with that. Everybody knew I was gay. They just didn't want to talk about it.
To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.
I knew I could sing. That one thing I did believe in was that I could sing, but then constantly getting rejected, it started to get me down. But my voice was always there and my dream and my ambition was always there when I went through bad times.
The only thing I have going on at a personal level is just the way I knew I was gay and I knew what that meant inside me, but the gender aspect of who I am came later.
When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.
I really love yoga. I love the mindfulness of it, where not only are you exercising your body, but you're also building that mind/body connection as far as being aware of every movement - what your body's doing, how your body's feeling.
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