Twelve years before the Stonewall riots blew the gay rights movement open, an unsung hero led the charge.
Franklin Kameny (left), a World War II veteran, was fired from a U.S. Civil Service job in 1957 on suspicion that he was a homosexual. He refused to capitulate and refused to be ashamed of his sexual orientation, taking the case to the courts, suffering loss after loss. He branched out to take on the American Psychiatric Association to have homosexuality removed from its list of disorders, working with the Mattachine Society, the leading gay rights group of the time. He fought for nearly a decade before the APA reversed its position. In 1971 he ran for Washington D.C.’s nonvoting congressional delegate, hoping to be the first openly gay candidate to win public office, and lost, two years before Harvey Milk‘s first defeat as a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a position Milk finally won in 1977.
How times have changed since then. Kameny has gone from a peculiar dissident to a celebrated hero of the LGBT rights movement, and his home in Washington has been declared a D.C. historic landmark. He’s being honored this year at the Pride celebration in Washington D.C., at the age of 84, for his work. Most of the institutions Kameny took on have now been reformed in favor of LGBT rights, and the terms and arguments fought during that first push have been enriched with layers upon layers of queer liberation thought.
But it was the first leaders and activists who had to push the hardest, who struggled to maintain dignity against seemingly insurmountable odds. They fought battles they knew they were going to lose, on issues yet unclear if there could ever be a victory.
Fifty years ago, had the Internet existed, websites like this one would have been promptly shut down as obscenity. So it seems fitting to take a moment now to honor Kameny, who took one of our community’s first steps toward freedom.
