The trouble with Harry Hay, as Stuart Timmons titled his biography of the gay-rights pioneer, was an aggravated sense of fairness. It propelled him toward unpopular causes where he fought (what was in his worldview) the good fight with extreme prejudice and pit-bull tenacity.

His shining hour lasted three years (1950–53). Along with his lover (Viennese-gone-Hollywood designer Rudi Gernreich), another couple (Bob Hull and Chuck Rowland) and a Los Angeles friend (Dale Jennings), Hay founded the first gay rights organization in the United States — the Mattachine Society — almost 20 years before the Stonewall Riots of 1969 turned his dream into a universally accepted reality.

This is the often overlooked, if not forgotten, story that Jon Marans has chosen to dramatize in his new play, The Temperamentals, which moved uptown into New World Stages on the strength of some startlingly good notices in a tiny Off-Off-Broadway venue last year.

The playwright himself admits he backed into the material when the San Jose Rep asked him to write the book for a musical based on Studs Terkel's "Coming of Age," a book of interviews with political activists and anarchists. Harry Hay's name came up in a chapter called "The Others," and Marans decided to toss him into his musical stew for spice as a recurring character.

"Each time he came onto the stage, he absolutely stole the show," Marans remembers. "At first I couldn't figure it out. Then I realized there were two reasons: One was that he was joyously unapologetic about who he was — even today, I find this astounding — and the other thing was he had a philosophy and an outlook people had never seen before. That just fascinated them the minute he stepped out."

From that eye-opening intro, Marans started pursuing Hay like a newfound friend. "Besides talking to people, reading things, Googling all over the place, there's obviously an enormous amount of research that I did. But research is a tricky thing: you know so much you gotta be careful, because you can't put it all in."

Backing off a bit from a facts-first stance, he has fashioned a history lesson with a heartbeat. "That's really what, at its core, it is — a love story," Marans readily admits.  Continued...