In the last 20 years the LGBTQ movement has made enormous social and political strides, but what we sometimes forget is that enormous strides begin with baby steps.

More than seven decades ago, a man who took many of those first baby steps and established the modern gay rights movement was a man named Harry Hay. 

Hay knew something about organizing unpopular political movements because as early as the 1930s Hay was a communist -- and this was at a time when the Communist party was very homophobic. Hay married a woman and was married for several years before finally acknowledging that he was gay.