The Mattachine Forms

March 22, 2007 at 3:08 am · Filed under MattachineSociety

The Mattachine Society was named by Harry Hay, 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. In a 1976 interview with Jonathan Ned Katz, Hay was asked the origin of the name Mattachine. He mentioned the medieval-Renaissance French Sociétés Joyeux:

“One masque group was known as the ‘Société Mattachine.’ These societies, lifelong secret fraternities of unmarried townsmen who never performed in public unmasked, were dedicated to going out into the countryside and conducting dances and rituals during the Feast of Fools, at the Vernal Equinox. Sometimes these dance rituals, or masques, were peasant protests against oppression — with the maskers, in the people’s name, receiving the brunt of a given lord’s vicious retaliation. So we took the name Mattachine because we felt that we 1950s Gays were also a masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others, through struggle, to move toward total redress and change.”

This French group was named in turn after Mattacino (or the Anglicized Mattachino), a character in Italian theater. Mattacino was a kind of court jester, who would speak the truth to the king when nobody else would. The “mattachin” (from Arabic mutawajjihin — “mask-wearers”) were originally Moorish (Hispano-Arab) sword-dancers who wore elaborate, colorful costumes and masks.

The Mattachine Society used so-called harlequin diamonds as their emblem. The design consisted of four diamonds arranged in a pattern to form a larger diamond.

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