The motif of masks and unmasking was prevalent in the homophile era, prefiguring the political strategy of coming out and giving the Mattachine Society its name.

Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations, said that Hoover and Tolson sat in boxes owned by and used exclusively by gay men at the Del Mar racetrack in California.

Los Angeles area homosexuals created the Mattachine Society in 1950, in the home of communist activist Harry Hay.

They belied the carefully crafted image portrayed by the Mattachine Society and DOB that asserted homosexuals were respectable, normal people.

The Mattachine Society succeeded in getting newly elected Mayor John Lindsay to end the campaign of police entrapment in New York.

The Mattachine Society newsletter a month later offered its explanation of why the riots occurred: " It catered largely to a group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering ....

To many older gays and many members of the Mattachine Society that had worked throughout the 1960s to promote homosexuals as no different from heterosexuals, the display of violence and effeminate behavior was embarrassing.

On July 4, 1969, the Mattachine Society performed its annual picketing in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, called the Annual Reminder.

Although the Mattachine Society had existed since the 1950s, many of their methods now seemed too mild for people who had witnessed or been inspired by the riots.

Previous organizations such as the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, and various homophile groups had masked their purpose by deliberately choosing obscure names.

Not only had the Mattachine Society been active in major cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, but similarly marginalized people started the riot at Compton's Cafeteria in 1966, and another riot responded to a raid on Los Angeles ' Black Cat Tavern in 1967.

The Mattachine Society was named by Harry Hay at the suggestion of James Gruber, inspired by a French medieval and renaissance masque group he had studied while preparing a course on the history of popular music for a workers ' education project.

The Mattachine Society used so-called harlequin diamonds as their emblem.

The San Francisco national chapter retained the name " Mattachine Society ", while the New York chapter became " Mattachine Society of New York, Inc ." Other independent groups using the name Mattachine were formed in Washington, D. C. ( Mattachine Society of Washington, 1961 ), and in Chicago ( Mattachine Midwest, 1965 ).

The Homophile Movement was influenced by the successful activism of the Civil Rights Movement ( in 1960 the DOB's national president was Cleo Bonner, an African-American ), and higher profile members of the DOB such as Barbara Gittings, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon began to picket the White House, the State Department, and other federal buildings in 1965 and 1966 with members of the Mattachine Society.

The couple actively joined the national Mattachine Society, but Legg later led a split to co-found ONE, Inc .. As publisher of the organization's journal, Legg was forced to sue the United States Postal Service to defend its right to be distributed through the US Mail.

A largely amicable split within the Society in 1952 resulted in a new organization called ONE, Inc. ONE admitted women and, together with Mattachine, provided vital help to the Daughters of Bilitis in the launching of that group's magazine, The Ladder, in 1956.

The Daughters of Bilitis was the counterpart lesbian organization to the Mattachine Society, and the two organizations worked together on some campaigns, although their approaches to visibility in the mass media differed considerably.

Although the Mattachine Society began as a provocative organization with roots in its founders ' communist activism, leadership of the Mattachine thought it more prudent and productive to convince heterosexual society at large that gays were not different from themselves, rather than agitate for change.

One American Law Institute recommendation was to decriminalize sexual conduct such as adultery and homosexuality, for which reason the July – August 1955 issue of the Mattachine Society Review, the magazine of the country's first nation-wide homosexual organization, published a salute to Judge Hand featuring his photograph on the cover.

In the U. S., Gernreich was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the country's first sustained homophile organization.

The Daughters of Bilitis was the counterpart lesbian organization to the Mattachine Society, and the organizations worked together on some campaigns and ran lecture-series.

The Mattachine Society was the second gay rights organization that Hay established, the first being Bachelors for Wallace ( 1948 ) in support of Henry Wallace's progressive presidential candidacy.

In August 1961, Kameny and Jack Nichols co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, an organization that pressed aggressively for gay and lesbian civil rights.

He is known for his roles in helping to found several gay organizations, including the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States.

Finally on November 11, 1950, Hay, along with Gernreich and friends Dale Jennings and lovers Bob Hull and Chuck Rowland, held the first meeting of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles, under the name " Society of Fools ".

He develops this idea over the next two years, co-founding the Mattachine Society, the first sustained LGBT rights group in the United States, in 1950.

By 1965, influenced by Frank Kameny ’ s addresses in the early 1960s, Dick Leitsch, the president of the New York Mattachine Society, advocated direct action, and the group staged the first public homosexual demonstrations and picket lines in the 1960s.

Hay and the Mattachine Society were among the first to argue that gay people were not just individuals but in fact represented a " cultural minority ".

In particular, Hal Call and others out of San Francisco along with Ken Burns from Los Angeles wanted Mattachine to amend its constitution to clarify its opposition to so-called " subversive elements " and to affirm that members were loyal to the United States and its laws ( which declared homosexuality illegal ).

The decidedly clandestine Mattachine Society, founded by Harry Hay and other veterans of the Wallace for President campaign in Los Angeles in 1950, moved into the public eye after Hal Call took over the group in San Francisco in 1953, with many gays emerging from the closet.

To assist homosexuals with legal problems, in 1951 labor activist Harry Hay started the Mattachine Society, from his living room in Los Angeles.

Included are the records of ONE Magazine, the AIDS History Project, Morris Kight, Jim Kepner, James Fugaté ( a. k. a. James Barr ), Hal Call, Dorr Legg, Jeanne Cordova, Reed Erickson, Ivy Bottini, Dignity USA, Mattachine Society, Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center and hundreds of other collections.

The early gay rights movement, then called the Homophile Movement, was developed by the Mattachine Society, formed in 1950.

Leitsch, then, announced to the press that three members of Mattachine New York would turn up at a restaurant on the lower east side, announce their homosexuality and upon refusal of service make a complaint to the SLA.

During the 1960s, the various unaffiliated Mattachine Societies, especially the Mattachine Society in San Francisco and the Mattachine Society of New York, were among the foremost gay rights groups in the United States, but beginning in the middle 1960s and, especially, following the Stonewall riots of 1969, they began increasingly to be seen as too traditional, and not willing enough to be confrontational.

ONE and Mattachine in turn provided vital help to the Daughters of Bilitis in the launching of their newsletter The Ladder in 1956.

Life's photographer was referred to The Tool Box by Hal Call, leader of the San Francisco chapter of the Mattachine Society, who had long worked to dispel the myth that all homosexual men were effeminate.

Facing enormous opposition to its radical approach, in 1953 the Mattachine shifted their focus to assimilation and respectability.

Although the eight women who created the DOB initially came together to be able to have a safe place to dance, as the DOB grew they developed similar goals to the Mattachine, and urged their members to assimilate into general society.

Frank Kameny founded the Mattachine of Washington, D. C.

Kameny wrote that homosexuals were no different from heterosexuals, often aiming his efforts at mental health professionals, some of whom attended Mattachine and DOB meetings telling members they were abnormal.

The pickets shocked many gay people, and upset some of the leadership of Mattachine and the DOB.

The Mattachine and DOB considered the trials of being arrested for wearing clothing of the opposite gender as a parallel to the struggles of homophile organizations: similar but distinctly separate.

In 1966 the New York Mattachine held a " sip-in " at a Greenwich Village bar named Julius, which was frequented by gay men, to illustrate the discrimination homosexuals faced.

Mattachine was originally organized in similar structure to the Communist Party, with cells, oaths of secrecy and five different levels of membership, each of which required greater levels of involvement and commitment.

The jury deadlocked and Mattachine declared victory.

In a 1976 interview with Jonathan Ned Katz, Hay was asked the origin of the name Mattachine.

Most of the Mattachine founders were affiliated with Communism.