Joanna
At 01:25 PM 10/25/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>Harry Hay, who founded a secret organization six decades ago that
>proved to be the catalyst for the American gay rights movement, died
>early Thursday morning at his home in San Francisco. He was 90.
>
>Although little known in the broader national culture over the years,
>Mr. Hay's contribution was to do what no one else had done before:
>plant the idea among American homosexuals that they formed an
>oppressed cultural minority of their own, like blacks, and to create
>a lasting organization in which homosexuals could come together to
>socialize and to pursue what was, at the beginning, the very radical
>concept of homosexual rights.