In Senate testimony, the director of the C.I.A. By stepping into the light when homosexuality was so taboo that most people knew little about it, Kameny and other homophiles got the chance to change minds. Growing up in Queens during the Great Depression, he knew at the age of six that he wanted to be an astronomer. Even after Kameny’s own legal case had come to a dead end, he continued to believe that the courts could be an avenue for reform. Franklin Edward "Frank" Kameny (May 21, 1925 – October 11, 2011[1]) was "one of the most significant figures" in the American gay rights movement. Many homosexuals in federal employment resigned once detected; a number committed suicide. “Break up Kameny Hall,” they wrote in an open letter. Returning home, he enrolled at Harvard, and spent a year of his graduate training at an observatory in Tucson, Arizona, where, on the night of his twenty-ninth birthday, in 1954, he at last made love with a man: he and a young man named Keith drove out into the desert north of the city. Kameny and Nichols launched some of the earliest public protests by gays and lesbians with a picket line at the White House on April 17, 1965. The society retreated from activism during the Red Scare, and, by the time Kameny got in touch, its leaders were encouraging assimilation into the mainstream. Content: Members of Mattachine Society of Wash. D.C. come to NYC to march in gay Parade 1970. Maternal Health, Arts Club The day after Kameny first picketed the White House, Wicker led a march on the United Nations headquarters, in New York. On March 26, 1977, Kameny and a dozen other members of the gay and lesbian community, under the leadership of the then-National Gay Rights Task Force, briefed then-Public Liaison Midge Costanza on much-needed changes in federal laws and policies. (If he had omitted it altogether, he might never have had any trouble, Douglas M. Charles suggests in his 2015 history, “Hoover’s War on Gays.”) Not yet a champion of gay rights, Kameny claimed that he had let the other man touch him only out of curiosity, and he dodged the question about his orientation. By 1950, the tally of “shady” individuals removed from the State Department, most of them homosexuals, had reached ninety-one, a deputy under-secretary disclosed to Congress that year, in an attempt to counter accusations by Senator Joseph McCarthy that State harbored Communists and homosexuals. “Who could be more dangerous to the United States of America than a pervert?” a Republican senator from Nebraska demanded; he believed that Soviet intelligence agents were likely working their way through a list of homosexuals compiled by Hitler. The big issues were the anti-war movement, the counterculture."[25]. Cervini sets the opening scene of his book in what was known in gay slang as a “tearoom”—a public rest room where men negotiated, transacted, and hid homosexual activity, through a set of conventions that Cervini characterizes as a “silent choreography.” Back when homosexual acts were illegal, tearooms were convenient and discreet—a hookup app avant la lettre—although subject to intervention by the police. Notice for the Mattachine Forum in the Village Voice newspaper, April 13, 1967. Kameny was instrumental in founding the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1961, an organization that played a key role in advocating for the equal treatment of homosexuals by the federal government. Kameny was born to Ashkenazi Jewish parentage in New York City on May 21, 1925. Privacy Policy [15], Kameny is credited with bringing an aggressive new tone to the gay civil rights struggle. [4], Kameny protested his firing by the U.S. Civil Service Commission due to his homosexuality, and argued this case to the United States Supreme Court in 1961.

Photo by Kay Tobin Lahusen. "[13], In August 1961, Kameny and Jack Nichols co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington,[14] an organization that pressed aggressively for gay and lesbian civil rights. He lost the election, but it was the first time an openly gay candidate had run for Congress. It lifted off during that time and I had to make some choices about what I was going to concentrate on. Because the arrest occurred at a time before online mug shots, the blow to Kameny’s career took more than a year to land. The Smithsonian now has 12 of the original picket signs carried by gay and lesbian Americans at this, the first ever White House demonstration. There were glimpses, during the administrative hearings, of how change was going to arrive. Historic Landmark by the District of Columbia’s Historic Preservation Review Board. Roosevelt’s hand was eventually forced, however, by less tolerant politicians and officials, including the head of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover. [23], In November 2007, Kameny wrote an open letter of protest to NBC journalist Tom Brokaw (and his publisher Random House), who wrote Boom! It had a bolder mission than the New York and California branches: the pursuit of equal rights for homosexuals was written into its constitution. soon got wind of the new group, thanks to a blond nineteen-year-old who claimed to have been the lover of one of its members, and who, according to an F.B.I. Events Calendar Kameny appealed the commission’s ban, was rejected, appealed the rejection, and was rejected again. Convinced the Air Force would create another excuse to discharge him again, Matlovich accepted a financial settlement instead, and continued his gay activism work until his death from AIDS complications in June 1988. “Though you may have a cause which you think you should emphasize, you must face up to facts and think of your own good first,” she warned. A newspaper finally identified Kameny as homosexual in 1963, after he became the first openly gay man to testify before Congress.

“Michelangelo might not be able to get a job under such terms,” Senator Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, joked in 1955. Kameny’s new appeal was rejected, too, and, in the fall of 1960, after his lawyer bowed out, the New York Mattachines donated fifty dollars to help him take his case to the Supreme Court. [33] Mumble Sauce, Best Of D.C. His lie and his perseverance suggest a rule-follower in agony at finding himself on the wrong side of the rules for the first time. But by Kameny’s death in 2011, the society had become defunct. Kameny told the Mattachine Society that he and his lawyer were going to strike a bold new line in their appeal, arguing that homosexuality was “moral in a positive sense.” It had occurred to Kameny that, when it came to security clearance, a homosexual who was open could not be blackmailed. [14][31] Berry, who is openly gay, presented Kameny with the Theodore Roosevelt Award, the department’s most prestigious award. An astronomer for the Army Map Service was an unlikely, but crucial, combatant for erotic freedom. When the society … did photograph a closeted American journalist in bed with a male Soviet agent, but the journalist confessed to officials at the American Embassy, who helped him slip away to Paris.)

And, like Townsend, Kameny was radicalized."[12]. The disclosure backfired, however; voters were shocked that there had been so many homosexuals to get rid of in the first place. He kept the Mattachine Society of Washington under his thumb by enforcing a complex system of procedural rules.

[18] He described the day - December 15, 1973, when the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its manual of mental disorders - as the day "we were cured en masse by the psychiatrists."[19]. At one meeting, a friend whispered in his ear that the man sitting next to him was a police sergeant, infamous for an entrapment six years before that was so aggressive—he had followed his target from the men’s room of a movie theatre to its balcony and asked if he “wanted to take it”—that a judge threw out the case. [24] The letter was co-signed by former Washington Post editor Howard Kurtz, Harry Rubinstein (curator, National Museum of American History), John Earl Haynes, Dudley Clendinen and Stephen Bottum.

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Despite impressively thorough archival research, Eric Cervini, the author of a brisk, clear-eyed new biography, “The Deviant’s War” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is unable to provide Keith’s last name. He was promised that his criminal record would be expunged after serving three years' probation, relieving him from worrying about his employment prospects and any attempt at fighting the charges.[11]. Our free newsletters gives you daily updates on local news and we recommend things for you to do twice a week. He had no interest in movies, sports, or popular music. He worried that the case, which he allowed his name to be attached to openly, would scupper his chances of a job, but in September he was hired by a manufacturer of devices that tested paints and coatings (one of his specialties as an astronomer had been applying the reflective surface on a telescope’s focussing mirror).

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