Founded by Communist Party organizer Harry Hay and others, the Mattachine Society began with a radical program: to promote a sense of solidarity and group identity among homosexuals. The Society's charter stated that homosexuals constituted "one of the largest minorities in America today," and were a group "victimized daily as a result of our oppression." According to Hay, the name Mattachine derived from a medieval French society of unmarried townsmen who performed during the Feast of Fools wearing masks. Their performances were always thinly disguised protests against the aristocracy. Hay said he chose the name because homosexuals in the 1950's were also a "masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others." The society published a magazine, One, which eventually sold about 2,000 copies a month, and helped bring in new members.

In the context of the anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy, moderate Mattachine members became suspicious of the organization's radical founders, and, by 1955, had gained control of the organization. The moderates rejected activist tactics and quietly maintained that homosexuals were really no different from heterosexuals. To this end, they sought out heterosexual allies -- sociologists, psychologists, and legal and medical "experts" -- to endorse the view that homosexuals were "normal." The group came to be known as a "homophile" organization. By the 1960s, working with the women's organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, Mattachine Society chapters all over the country had begun a steady push for greater rights for homosexuals.

Source: Miller
Image: Corbis-Bettman

Source: Barale