Toward a Portfolio of Woodcuts (Harry Hay), 2013
This project is a series of text-based wood cut blocks, narrating about of the life and work of the founder of the modern gay rights movement in the United States, Harry Hay (1912-2002). Having been a communist activist in the 1930s-1940s, during the McCarthy era in the late 1940s, Hay was forced out of the Communist Party USA and then founded the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States.
Toward a Portfolio of Woodcuts (Harry Hay) narrates the contradictions of being communist and gay in the 1930s-1940s America and the beginning of the gay rights activism in the 1950s. The project calls on the repressions of gays within the old left and reveals the early political split within the gay rights movement in the United States between radicalism and assimilation. The project reveals conflicts between political beliefs and sexual identity and how the two intersected.
