Kameny’s 50 Year Legacy Proves ‘Gay is Good’
By DCist contributor Christopher Durocher.
This weekend, the Library of Congress, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) each honored the contributions of Franklin E. Kameny, an 81-year-old D.C. resident who has served as a civil rights icon for the past half a century. Kameny’s activism began in 1957, when he appealed his dismissal from the Army Map Service of being gay. He has continued to live an out, proud life ever since.
Kameny rose to prominence as a gay rights activist after being fired from the Army Map Service. Kameny, a World War II veteran, lost his post as an astronomer for the service after officials discovered he was gay. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he was one of the first civil servants to appeal a termination on the basis of sexual orientation, arguing that homosexuality was not a disorder or criminal act, but rather characteristic of a minority group comprising about ten percent of the population. Despite his groundbreaking efforts, the lower court dismissed his case, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal.
In 1959, Kameny helped D.C.’s gay community take a small step by convincing then-D.C. police chief Roy E. Blick that his officers should not harass people dancing with same sex partners in D.C. bars. In 1961, Kameny founded the first gay-rights group in D.C., called the Mattachine Society, modeled after an organization of the same name founded in New York by famed gay rights activist Harry Hay. In 1965, Kameny led the first gay-rights demonstration in front of the White House. By the 1970s, he was running as an openly gay candidate for D.C.’s congressional seat, founding a more proactive and proud civil rights organization, called the Gay and Lesbian Activist Alliance, and successfully lobbying the APA to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
The Library of Congress honored Kameny in a ceremony at the Thomas Jefferson Building last Friday, October 6, commemorating the library’s acquisition of more than 70,000 of his personal letters and documents, along with his collection of picket signs used during one of the nation’s earliest gay-rights demonstration held in front of the White House.
On Saturday, the APA awarded him the John M. Fryer, M.D. Award in recognition of his efforts to remove homosexuality form the organization’s list of mental disorders. Later in the evening, the HRC honored Kameny, along with tennis legend Billie Jean King, during its 10th Annual National Dinner at the Washington Convention Center. Kameny was the recipient of the organization’s National Capital Area Leadership Award.
With renewed attention on this still-active octogenarian, the D.C. gay weekly magazine MetroWeekly offers an interview with him in this week’s issue.
Kameny tells of the witch hunt atmosphere that led to his prosecution after a police sting operation at a San Francisco bus terminal in1955 and about his subsequent dismissal from the Army Map Service. In the 1970s Kameny coined the radical phrase “Gay is Good.” Now, after 50 years working towards equality for sexual minorities, Kameny has witnessed enormous progress. As he observes in the MetroWeekly interview, though, “There is still a good deal of a fight ahead of us for the coming years. The battle is not over, but at this point, we have a good, solid base.”