If Harry Hay is known to the public today, it’s usually as a founder of one of the early and conservative gay rights organizations or as an oddball loner name-checked in lists of gay rights pioneers. Both impressions are incorrect. Hay was a crucial and fascinating theorist and activist whose life and work has been slowly rediscovered by scholars since the early 1980s.

Hay was born April 7, 1912, to a wealthy American family in London. His life was radically changed by two powerful forces he discovered in his teens: Marxism and homosexuality.

Radicalized by IWW organizers and Native American farmhands he met while working on his uncle’s property in Smith Valley, Nevada, Hay encountered the word “homosexuality” in English socialist Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex in a neighborhood public library. Later, he remembered he “KNEW — that I had found a word that validated me . . . I wasn’t peculiar, . . . or the only one of my kind in the whole world after all. There were others: the book said so . . . and they believed in comradeship and being everything to each other.”