What was the original Mattachine Society?
“The Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was an early national gay rights organization in the United States, preceded by several covert and open organizations, such as Chicago’s Society for Human Rights. Communist and labor activist Harry Hay formed the group with a collection of male friends in Los Angeles to protect and improve the rights of gay men. Branches formed in other cities, and by 1961 the Society had splintered into regional groups. At the beginning of gay rights protest, news on Cuban prison work camps for homosexuals inspired Mattachine Society to organize protests at the United Nations and the White House in 1965.”
“The Mattachine Society was named by Harry Hay at the suggestion of James Gruber, inspired by a French medieval and renaissance masque group he had studied while preparing a course on the history of popular music for a workers’ education project. In a 1976 interview with Jonathan Ned Katz, Hay was asked the origin of the name Mattachine. He mentioned the medieval-Renaissance French Sociétés Joyeuses:”
Wikipedia
“One masque group was known as the ‘Société Mattachine.’ These societies, lifelong secret fraternities of unmarried townsmen who never performed in public unmasked, were dedicated to going out into the countryside and conducting dances and rituals during the Feast of Fools, at the Vernal Equinox. Sometimes these dance rituals, or masques, were peasant protests against oppression—with the maskers, in the people’s name, receiving the brunt of a given lord’s vicious retaliation. So we took the name Mattachine because we felt that we 1950s Gays were also a masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others, through struggle, to move toward total redress and change.”
Jonathan Katz, Gay American History. Crowell Publishers, 1976.
And why did we name our site Mattachine Army? Simple. We uphold the ideals of the original Mattachine Society in the 21st Century and are, like Harry Hay and all the others, re-dedicated to their principles:
“We believe [we] have the right to be. We believe that the civil rights and human dignity of homosexuals are as precious as those of any other citizen … we believe that the homosexual has the right to live, work, and participate in a free society. Mattachine defends the rights of homosexuals and tries to create a climate of understanding and acceptance.”
Mattachine Society Poster, 1960
Join us. Unite, re-dedicate, preserve, protect. Thank you Harry Hay and all the pioneers who fought so we could have what we enjoy today, and who inspire us to keep striving for more.