NAMBLA-Gate: The Case of Kevin Jennings

By Cliff Kincaid  |  January 18, 2010

Sean Hannity of Fox News, who has called for the firing of Obama Education Department official Kevin Jennings, interviewed a former FBI agent, Bob Hamer, who infiltrated the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and documented their criminal activities.
Harry Hay, who "inspired" Obama-appointed Education Department official Kevin Jennings to lead a life of homosexual activism, was not only a supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) but a prominent member of the Communist Party USA and "Radical Faerie" who believed in the power of the occult. 
As disclosed by Peter LaBarbera's Americans for Truth organization, Jennings said in 1997 that Hay should serve as an inspiration. "One of the people that's always inspired me is Harry Hay, who started the first ongoing gay rights group in America," Jennings said.
Jennings didn't mention that Hay actively campaigned for the "rights" of pedophiles and publicly supported NAMBLA. But Jennings had to be aware of this fact. Two popular books about Hay- Radically Gay, edited by Will Roscoe and published in 1996, and The Trouble With Harry Hay, written by Stuart Timmons and published in 1990- documented Hay's support for NAMBLA. These books were issued by pro-homosexual or left-wing book publishers and popular among "gay" activists like Jennings.
The Timmons book shows Hay wearing a "NAMBLA walks with me" sign at a "gay rights" demonstration. Although Hay apparently never formally joined the organization, he spoke about his support for NAMBLA on many different occasions, including at NAMBLA conferences.
He did join the Communist Party (CPUSA) and remained a Marxist until the day he died.  
Jennings was announced as the Assistant Deputy Secretary, Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools, in the Department of Education on May 19. His official biography mentions his role in creating an organization, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which is supposed to provide factual information about the history of the "gay rights" movement to teachers and students. But the references to Hay in GLSEN literature fail to include anything about his CPUSA, pro-NAMBLA or Radical Faerie activities.
For example, a GLSEN "Education Department Resource" pamphlet from the year 2000 identifies the Timmons book as "a readable biography of the founder of the first ongoing American gay rights group." That means that somebody at GLSEN read the book, including its discussion of Hay's pro-NAMBLA activities. But nothing is said about Hay's objectionable record.
It is certainly interesting that the GLSEN description of the Hay book sounds like what Jennings had himself said about Hay.
More to the point, GLSEN recommends a book Jennings himself edited entitled, Becoming Visible: A Reader in Gay and Lesbian History for High School and College Students, which includes a favorable profile of Harry Hay by Timmons. Indeed, the material is from the Timmons book.
So the idea that Jennings was unfamiliar with Hay's pro-NAMBLA record is simply impossible to believe. It is the case that Hay supported the criminal sexual exploitation of children and the evidence indicates that Jennings knew about this but that his organization concealed the information from those who had a right to know about it.
Hay's support for NAMBLA grew out of his own sexual relationships as a child with adult predators. In his own twisted and bizarre world, Hay says he ultimately found the sexual abuse to be beneficial. By his own admission, he had a terrible relationship with his father, who beat him.  
In the article, "Our Beloved Gay/Lesbian Movement at a Crossroads," Hay maintained that real child molestation involved the "sexual coercion of Gay and Lesbian youth into heterosexual identities and behaviors." Hay believed that homosexuals "should unite to sue the whole guilty hetero community for compensation" for practicing this "heterosexual coercion" on "Gay kids."
The praise of Hay by Jennings has led to questions about Jennings's relationship with NAMBLA itself. "We don't know if Mr. Jennings supports us or not," is all that a NAMBLA spokesman says. NAMBLA has a whole section of its website devoted to Hay.
LaBarbera contends that "It would seem fairly easy for Jennings to clarify his position on NAMBLA-all he has to do is issue a clear statement of his opposition to this evil 'man-boy love' organization."
But even if he were to condemn NAMBLA in strong terms, there is still the matter of why his organization, which targets young people, promotes a favorable book about a communist pervert.
Hannity On The Attack
Sean Hannity of Fox News, who has called for the firing of Obama Education Department official Kevin Jennings, interviewed a former FBI agent, Bob Hamer, who infiltrated the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and documented their criminal activities. Asked if Jennings had been unaware of Hay's pro-NAMBLA activities when he said that Hay had been an inspiration to him, Hamer replied that Jennings "knew the agenda of Harry Hay and he certainly supported Harry Hay and Harry Hay is a strong advocate of NAMBLA."
Hannity asked, "And so Jennings had to have known that?"
Hamer replied, "Well, certainly. Harry Hay didn't hide his support for NAMBLA."
After he turned to Marxism and embarked on a career of homosexual activism, Hay abandoned his wife, a fellow member of the CPUSA. He had been introduced to the Communist Party by actor Will Geer, who played Grandpa on "The Waltons" television show and was a communist himself.
Interestingly, the federally-funded National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting put taxpayer dollars into a 2002 film, "Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay," which ignores Hay's support for NAMBLA and involvement in the occult but actually has some important and relevant information about his CPUSA activities.
Hay joined the Communist Party in 1934 and eventually resigned but not for ideological reasons. Rather, the controversy surrounding the CPUSA and the need to avoid bringing even more critical attention to Hay's homosexual organizing efforts prompted his leaving the Moscow-funded and -controlled apparatus.
The "Hope Along the Wind" film explains, "Many American Communists would leave the party when Joseph Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union could no longer be denied. But when Harry Hay left in 1950 his reasons were very different."
In other words, Hay remained a Stalinist. 
"During his years in New York City, between 1939 and 1942, when he had access to the [Communist] Party's library, he read the historical writings of Marx and Engels and took advanced classes in Marxist theory with the intention of becoming a Party educator," says Radically Gay. In fact, Hay did become a CPUSA "educator."
Reports of the California Senate Fact-finding Committee on Un-American Activities identify Hay by name as an instructor during the 1940s at the California Labor School, a CPUSA front whose purpose was to "teach, advocate and propagandize Marxism-Leninism." Hay is described as a leader in the party in charge of communist-style entertainment activities. 
Hay was summoned to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1954 to testify about his CPUSA membership. But because he was officially out of the party by then, he refused to talk about it.    
His real contribution to communism in America was developing the idea that homosexuals, like the "workers" under capitalism, were being oppressed and had to assert their "rights." Although some CPUSA officials disapproved of the homosexual life-style, the Hay approach was seen as a means by which American society could be subverted and undermined. 
Some have claimed that Hay was "expelled" from the CPUSA, but the film explains that Hay realized he needed to leave the Communist Party so that he could do his work organizing the Mattachine Society, the first official "gay rights" group, on a more effective basis. This is explained through interviews with Hay and Miriam Sherman, a Communist Party organizer who served as Hay's "boss" in the party. 
Needless to say, the documented communist origin of the "gay rights" movement in the U.S. is not a subject you will see highlighted by "gay rights" groups or even discussed on the MSNBC cable show hosted by lesbian commentator Rachel Maddow.
The Radical Faeries
A Marxist atheist trained in materialism, Harry Hay tried to find spirituality in his own confused sexual identity, eventually developing the idea that he was a "Radical Faerie" who had male and female traits.
Hay's proposal for a "Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries" included a poem from the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Stuart Timmons, author of The Trouble With Harry Hay, documents Hay's involvement with Crowley, noting that Hay played the organ for the Los Angeles lodge of Crowley's Order of the Eastern Temple, a "notorious anti-Christian spiritual group" where "homosexual sex-magic rituals" took place. A drug addict, Crowley wrote the book, The Diary of a Drug Fiend.
A photo of Hay, known as the "Father of the Faeries," shows him wearing pearls, a blouse, and what appears to be a rainbow dress. Hay himself referred to his fellow "Faeries" as "sissy men." Members of his group gathered in the woods on a regular basis and paid homage to the earth.
Hay's confusion about sexual identity is something that should be pitied and studied. But it has been elevated by the "homosexual community" into another "right" to be guaranteed by government. This has now become known as the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) "community."
Demonstrating that he was familiar with the career of Harry Hay, Obama Education Department official Kevin Jennings noted in his 1997 speech that "In 1948, he [Hay] tried to get people to join the Mattachine Society." What Jennings did not say, perhaps deliberately so, was that the Mattachine Society was a communist front organization, another effort in the campaign to use and exploit homosexuals to undermine American society.
The "Hope Along the Wind" film notes that a "Marxist education Class" being taught by Hay produced several recruits for the new organization. Hay himself said, "All of them [the founders] thought of themselves as Marxists. We're all thinking in the same direction, feeling in the same direction, looking in the same way and feeling in our bodies: this is the beginning of a brotherhood. And this is the beginning of what we were going to be calling six months later the Mattachine Society."
These Marxists, led by Hay, expanded Hay's original Marxist idea that homosexuals were considered oppressed by the capitalist system and in need of special rights. But Hay's communist connections proved to be too controversial even at this time and he eventually left this organization as well.
Hay supported the 1948 presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace on the communist-dominated Progressive Party Ticket. Later, he acted within the Democratic Party, working as a member of Jesse Jackson's "rainbow coalition" to elect the black activist as president. Today, five states have legalized "gay marriage," the Democratic Party officially supports "gay rights," and President Obama wants to provide them access to the U.S. military. Harry Hay would be "proud." 
Hay remained true to the communist cause to the end of his life in 2002. One of his last public roles was as a representative of the "Radical Faerie Political Network" at the 1992 national convention of a Communist Party spin-off group, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS).
Stuart Timmons, the author of The Trouble With Harry Hay, wrote that it "saddened" Hay after the demise of the old Soviet Union to see people "throwing out the baby with the bath water" in completely denouncing communism. "Marxism needs to be revised, based on new scientific knowledge, particularly of human behavior," Hay said. "The underlying methodology will be proved sound."