"If society and I differ on something, I'm willing to give the matter a second look.  If we still differ, then I am right and society is wrong; and society can go its way as long as it doesn't get in my way.  But if it does, there's going to be a fight.  And I'm not going to be the one who backs down.  That has been an underlying premise of the conduct of my life."

--- Dr. Franklin E. Kameny

          quoted in The Gay Crusaders, by Kay Tobin and Randy Wicker, 1972.

 

The conviction and self-assuredness expressed above has marked Dr. Franklin E. Kameny's career in gay civil rights on the national and local front for more than four decades.  If the federal government had known the determination and character of the man it picked on when it investigated in 1957 and then dismissed him in 1958 for homosexuality, it would have been well advised to leave him alone.  The US government would have kept an able astronomer, but the GLBT community would have missed gaining one of its foremost activists.

Kameny not only led a frontal attack on previously unquestioned persecution of homosexual's by divisions of the federal government but revolutionized the homosexual movement itself, moving it from assimilation and apologies for homosexuality to assertion of the normality of homosexuality and an uncompromising campaign for gay civil rights.  Inspired by Stokely Carmichael's 1968 assertion that Black is Beautiful, Kameny in 1968 coined the slogan Gay is Good as a memorable positive assertion of that normality.

In November 1961, he founded the Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW) with Jack Nichols, a twenty-three year old native Washingtonian.  Over the next decade, MSW created and defined gay activism in Washington, DC and much of the nation by pressing for an end to discrimination against gay men and lesbians on the part of the US Civil Service Commission, the US military, the American Psychiatric Association, and reform of sodomy laws.  Under Kameny and Nichols, Washington DC's gay activists launched campaigns, in the majority of which they were successful, against

• denial of security clearances to homosexuals,
• removal of homosexuals from the military,
• denial of employment by the federal Civil Service Commission,
• the criminalization of homosexuality and homosexual practices,
• entrapment and harassment by police and other civil authorities, and
• classification of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM2.

Dr. Kameny's organization also reached out to the religious community through its Committee on Religious Concerns and the Washington Area Council on Religion and the Homosexual, seeking support and understanding from local clergy.  As a public speaker and a personal adviser, Dr. Kameny brought the slogan Gay Is Good (formulated by him in 1968) to the general public.

Dr. Kameny and the local Mattachine Society, taking some inspiration from the African American civil rights struggles, changed the tactics of gay civil rights to an unapologetic direct assertion of civil rights, using public forums, picketing, and civil disobedience to draw attention to the assertion that homosexuals are normal American citizens fully entitled to all the rights of the nation's citizenry.

It is hardly an overstatement to say that Kameny and the Mattachine Society of Washington are directly responsible for most of the civil rights protections that the GLBT community now enjoys.  In 1971, Dr. Kameny again set a precedent by becoming the first openly gay candidate for the US Congress.  The 1971 Kameny for Congress campaign organization reconstituted itself in April 1971 as the Gay Activists Alliance / DC (later the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance), Washington, DC's foremost local lobbying organization for GLBT civil rights and local legislative initiatives.  Dr. Kameny has been an active member of GAA, now GLAA, since its founding.

That same year Dr. Kameny, the Gay Activists Alliance, and the Gay Liberation Front took their protests against psychiatry's classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder to a new level with a disruption of Attorney General Ramsey Clark's keynote speech at the American Psychiatric Association's convention in Washington, DC.  Following the zap of the speech, psychiatry began a retreat that led to its December 15, 1973 removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Kameny's home at 5020 Cathedral Avenue NW has served as the de facto center of Mattachine activities, a counseling center for those seeking legal assistance with issues of employment and other discrimination, and guest house for visiting gay movement activists.  Few sites in Washington, DC have such a long association with the history of local and national gay civil rights activism.

Dr. Kameny set the new direction of the gay movement, or the homophile movement as it was called then, in a July 22, 1964 speech to the New York Mattachine Society.  This speech set a new direction for the homophile rights movement.  Dr. Kameny set out both the philosophy of the Mattachine Society of Washington and the actual tactics which it was employing.  As he said in the speech:

"We cannot ask for our rights as a minority group ... we cannot ask for our rights from a position of inferiority or from a position, shall I say, as less than whole human beings."

Elsewhere in his speech, he added

"... we are dealing with an opposition which manifests itself - not always, but not infrequently - as a ruthless, unscrupulous foe who will give no quarter and to whom any standards of fair play are meaningless.  Let us respond realistically.  We are not playing a gentlemanly game of tiddly-winks or croquet or chess."

Kameny in photos, courtesy of Kay Tobin Lahusen and Jack Nichols

Kameny biography by Dr. David Johnson with additional material by Rainbow History,

Works by and about Dr. Kameny: bibliography

Dr Kameny's remarks on the first gay pickets in 1965

Dr Kameny's affidavit in support of SSgt. Leonard Matlovich, 1975

1997: Interview with Dr. Kameny by Jack Nichols, courtesy of Gay Today & Badpuppy.com

1997: Kameny to Activists: "End Lawyers Monopoly on Military Struggle!" by Jack Nichols, courtesy of Gay Today & Badpuppy.com

1998: Kameny Uncensored: New Christian Coalition Threat by Jack Nichols, courtesy of Gay Today & Badpuppy.com

From the Friends Radio  program, Spring 1978, Dr. Kameny speaking on the persistence of bigotry in federal government employment (click to hear Dr Kameny speaking).