Frank Kameny in 1948. Frank Kameny in a recent photo. Images courtesy of Lisa Keen
The Black civil-rights movement had Martin Luther King, Jr. Women had Susan B. Anthony. And the gay-rights movement had Frank Kameny.
Actually, the gay civil-rights movement still has Frank Kameny. The man who many consider a founder—if not the founding father—of the modern gay civil-rights movement recently turned 84.
It was Kameny who coined the phrase "gay is good" and pushed the movement to aim to establish homosexuality as fully equal to heterosexuality. He helped persuade the American Psychiatric Association to take homosexuality off its list of mental illnesses. He fought policies banning gays from civil service jobs and from having security clearances. He was the first openly gay candidate for Congress.
And yet, Kameny would be the first to say his strategies weren't always successful.
"Stonewall accomplished what we had tried to do without success," he said recently about what is known by most in the gay civil-rights movement as the Stonewall Rebellion. It was a spontaneous uprising on June 28, 1969, at a New York City gay bar—a flare up between police and patrons that propelled the growth of the gay civil-rights movement.
This month marks the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, and Kameny credits the riots outside the bar that night with "creating a generalized grassroots movement that provided the basis from everything else that proceeded, including large numbers of people coming out of the closet and all the subsequent issues that came along."
Kameny was already out of the closet in 1969. In fact, he had been out for more than a decade already.
Twelve years before Stonewall, Kameny, who holds a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University, was a civil service worker with the then U.S. Map Service. The agency fired him for being gay. That was in 1957 and, at that time, the firing meant Kameny was barred forever from holding a job in the federal government.
"The firing presented to me a very real, personal issue that needed to be resolved," he said during a recent telephone interview from his home in Washington, D.C.
He resolved it by fighting back. He sued the government over the civil service ban on "homosexuals" but ultimately lost, in 1961, when the U.S. Supreme Court denied his petition to appeal. The denial, he said, ended "my own personal case," but launched his involvement in "gay activism and militancy." The personal became political.
Kameny became a gay community organizer, founding a chapter of the new gay political group—the Mattachine Society—in Washington, D.C., and focusing its members on ending discrimination in civil service and the armed forces, repealing anti-sodomy laws, and winning the right to hold security clearances. In 1965, Mattachine members put on their business attire, hoisted placards, and staged the first gay demonstration on the sidewalk in front of the White House, protesting second-class citizenship and the anti-gay policies of the Civil Service Commission.
"It took eighteen years from my firing to get the civil service ban reversed, on July 3, 1975," Kameny recollected. From razor-sharp memory, Kameny also recalled the 1993 sodomy law repeal in the District of Columbia. "It took 30 years, one month, four days, and 11 hours, to repeal it," he said. "I wrote the repeal bill." For a decade, too, Kameny aggressively pressed the American Psychiatric Association ( APA ) over its classification of homosexuality as sickness. "It took ten years to reverse the psychiatrists for the mass cure on Dec. 15, 1973" he said pinpointing when the APA declassified homosexuality per se as mental illness.
One issue still remains for Kameny, however—the ban on gays in the military. The current policy was enacted by Congress and signed into federal law by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Known as "don't ask, don't tell," the policy permits lesbian and gay soldiers to serve in the military only if they stay in the closet.
"With the present Obama administration," said Kameny, "we are hopefully in the process of change. But I get impatient."
Again, the personal is political. Kameny is a veteran of the Army, having served in World War II.
"I've always resented, for 66 years, that I had to lie in order to serve in a war effort that I supported," he said. "They asked and I didn't tell, although as a healthy, vigorous teenager there were things to tell."
Over all his years, Kameny has been guided by a core philosophy.
"I have absolute faith in the validity of my own intellectual processes," he said. "If the world and I disagree, I will give it a second chance to make their point. If we still disagree, then I am right and they are wrong. As long as they don't get in my way, fine. If they do, there will be a fight. And I tend not to lose my wars.
"Therefore, over the years of issues that I've chosen to address, I have not chosen to adjust myself to society but with considerable success adjusted society to me," said Kameny. "And society is better off for the adjustment that I have administered. "
©2009 Keen News Service