Fifty years ago, the Army Mapping Service’s investigation of astronomer Dr. Franklin E. Kameny’s homosexuality prompted an unprecedented reaction by Kameny.  Kameny’s fight against dismissal from federal employment led over the next four years to legal action all the way to the Supreme Court and to the creation of a new gay activism and the first gay community institutions in Washington, DC.

Community springs from a feeling of commonality – of oppression, of shared values, or of shared experiences.  Social institutions reinforce, perhaps even create, a sense of community.  But community requires people to create and sustain it.  The photo portraits displayed here celebrate the men and women who sowed the seeds of that community.  They have created new institutions and organizations, revitalized existing ones, led social and political campaigns, and made a place for our community in Washington, DC’s wider community.

1975’s Just Us, the first guide to Washington, DC’s gay community, celebrated a community that had exploded into being in less than a decade.  Just Us listed nearly sixty community organizations, including social spots.  Fewer than ten had existed five years earlier.

Washington’s gay community had no lengthy history of slowly evolving institutions.   The community of homosexuals existed in the shadows, ostracized and persecuted by the society around them, with jobs and housing at jeopardy.  Most men and women socialized in ‘safe’ restaurants and clubs.  They created house parties for themselves and held private events where they could.

Until gay and lesbian individuals felt secure enough to be ‘out’ to themselves and the public, organizations didn’t form.  The sense of release and self-affirmation that launched the 1970s for local gays grew from the social turmoil of the late 1960s.  It animated a remarkable group of men and women who set about organizing to provide for all of the needs of their community.

Like gardens, communities require constant attention, work, and nurturing.  Like gardeners, the pioneers who plant and tend the community are rare individuals.  The men and women who created the gay community’s media, health, social, religious, business, and political organizations were and are pioneers.  As such, they served as role models for many who came after them.  In the first years of a publicly gay presence in Washington, DC, the early community pioneers broke the ground that others have tilled since then.

Changes.
The 1960s, the decade of initial gay activism in the city, brought a new attitude to the city’s homosexuals, one that furthered founding of the first community organizations.

In the summer of 1961, Alan Kress, better known to his friends as ‘Liz Taylor’, created the city’s first organization for female impersonators, known today as the Washington Academy.  Initially a social organization, Kress’s group grew to become a support system for the drag community, mounting social events, mentoring newcomers, and providing safe opportunities for members to practice the arts of illusion.

In November 1961, Dr. Franklin E. Kameny and Jack Nichols founded the city’s first gay civil rights organization, the Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW), a group which redefined the goals and tactics of gay activism.  They proclaimed and lived their slogan “Gay is Good”.  MSW generated unprecedented publicity for the city’s gay men and women. Its growing visibility, its outreach to clergy, and its public demonstrations laid the groundwork for others.  Local and national media took note of a new tone in gay activism.

In the last years of the 1960s, as gay activists proclaimed “Gay is Good”, the city’s gay men organized the first motorcycle club, the Spartans (1968).  Bar owners increasingly pushed social and legal restrictions on drinking and dancing (although legally there were no bars in Washington; only restaurants that served liquor).  Joanna’s, a women’s bar on 8th St. SE, opened the first dance floor for same-sex dancing.  Others followed.  Students at Howard University formed The Group of Washington, one of the first black gay social clubs.

Mattachine published the Homosexual Citizen and The Insider and the Guild Press published homosexually-oriented material on 8th St. SE.  The first gay discos had opened at Plus One and Zodiac Den.  In October 1969, Nancy Tucker and Bart Wenger (aka Art Stone) first published The Gay Blade.  The community had news, a few organizations, and men on motorcycles.

In the first years of the 1970s, DC’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer (LGBTQ) community created:

•  support groups for gay men and lesbians (and their parents and friends),
•  associations of bar owners, businesses, students, and attorneys,
•  music, theatre, and social groups, community and women’s centers,
•  political and activist groups,
•  churches and a synagogue,
•  a community radio program,
•  a local and national press,
•  medical clinics, and
•  youth groups.

By the time the first National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights and the Third World Conference came to town in 1979, there was a community.  Not a finished one, or even a complete one, but a thriving one.   In those ten years, community pioneers secured civil rights protections from the DC school board and government, ran the first ‘out’ candidate for Congress, began fighting racist and sexist discrimination within and without the community, fought off Anita Bryant and anti-gay resolutions, confronted Howard and Georgetown universities over their refusal to recognize student groups, saw gay men and lesbians appointed and elected to political offices, established medical facilities to take care of community needs, brought an end to harassment and entrapment by the Metropolitan Police Department (and even gave them sensitivity training!), and created a vibrant social and artistic life for themselves and the community.

In another ten years, community pioneers and those they inspired refined and broadened many of these early institutions.  Women created more alternatives to the bar scene.  Racist and sexist carding was brought to an end.  The gay community woke up to AIDS in its midst and created a wide range of health and social support services.

In the 1990s, Washington, DC’s ethnic gay communities put down their own roots in the ever-expanding community.  Medical, religious, and political institutions matured.  Gay men and women gained acceptance as political candidates in society at large.

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