Politics & Power Quote by Harry Hay

Hay’s jab lands like an inside-the-movement intervention: not anti-gay, but anti-assimilation. When he condemns “the national gay press” for “its emphasis on consumerism,” he’s pointing at a familiar bargain offered to marginalized people: you can have visibility, even a little pride, as long as you show up as a demographic. Buy the right things, frequent the right neighborhoods, look employable, and the culture will tolerate you. In that deal, politics becomes lifestyle, and liberation gets repackaged as shopping.

The intent is disciplinary in the best sense: to yank a movement back toward solidarity, risk, and structural critique. Hay, a founder of the Mattachine Society and a lifelong radical, came of age when being publicly gay meant raids, job loss, blackmail, and worse. Against that backdrop, a glossy press oriented around nightlife, brands, and “marketplace” representation can read less like progress than like selective amnesia: the people most endangered by repression are rarely the ones advertisers want.

Subtext: the press is being asked to choose what kind of community it serves. Consumerism flattens difference into taste, and taste is easiest to monetize. It also encourages a hierarchy of who counts as “good” gays: affluent, presentable, coupled, property-owning. Hay’s critique is not prudishness; it’s a warning that liberation framed as purchasing power turns citizenship into a receipt, and turns collective struggle into a niche product line.