No activist was more central to the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement than Frank Kameny. As the movement’s chief strategist and tactician, he adopted the philosophy of nonviolent resistance from the Black civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Kameny dedicated his life to proving that LGBT Americans are neither depraved nor deranged and are entitled to full equality under the law.

Highlights

Federal Workplace Discrimination

A decorated World War II veteran, Kameny fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He had an IQ of 148 and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1957, he began working as an astronomer for the Army Map Service. A few months later, after refusing to answer questions from his superiors about his sexual orientation, Kameny was fired for being gay. Executive Order 10450, issued by President Eisenhower in 1953, prohibited gays and lesbians from serving as federal employees.

Kameny fought his dismissal in federal courts. In 1961, he filed the first gay rights appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. The appeal was denied, and Kameny spent nearly two decades fighting federal workplace discrimination. In 1975, the U.S. Civil Service Commission finally lifted its ban on gay and lesbian employees.

In 2009, at the age of 84, Kameny received a formal apology for his dismissal from the Army Map Service.

… The government’s policies … are a stench in the nostrils of decent people … an affront to human dignity, an improper restraint upon proper freedom and liberty … and a violation of all that this nation stands for.  – From Kameny’s 1961 petition to the Supreme Court

Trailblazing Organizations

In his early days battling the government, Kameny cofounded the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., with Jack Nichols. The Mattachine Societies of New York and Washington became the first gay civil liberties organizations in the United States. Kameny later helped create organizations that would become the National LGBTQ Task Force and the Washington Blade.

Sodomy Laws

In 1963,  Kameny and the Mattachine Society launched a decades-long battle to overturn the Washington, D.C., sodomy laws. Among other things, they cited the laws’ interference with their constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness. Kameny himself drafted the bill that overturned the laws 30 years later.

Annual Reminders

Early in 1965, with the Washington Mattachine Society, Kameny organized the first pickets for gay rights at the White House. Though modest, they provided the impetus for the landmark protests to come.

Kameny and Craig Rodwell took the lead in organizing the “Annual Reminders” the first carefully orchestrated public demonstrations for gay and lesbian equality, held each Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969 in front of Independence Hall (which then housed the Liberty Bell). Kameny and Barbara Gittings, a pioneering lesbian rights organizer, recruited protesters from Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C.

At the first Annual Reminder, 40 brave gay and lesbian picketers carried signs demanding equality. It was the largest gay rights demonstration in history. Over the next four years, the number of protesters more than tripled. These early “homophile” protests would pave the way for the Stonewall rebellion in 1969.

After their 1969 demonstration, Kameny, Gittings, and other key organizers suspended the Annual Reminders to marshal support for a march commemorating the first anniversary of Stonewall. Proceeding from Greenwich Village to Central Park, it is remembered as the first New York City Pride parade.

Kameny and Gittings are interviewed in “Gay Pioneers,” a 2004 documentary short about the Annual Reminders, co-produced by WHYY/PBS and Equality Forum.

Gay Is Good

In 1968, inspired by Stokley Carmichael’s declaration “black is beautiful,” Kameny coined the phrase “Gay Is Good.” A rallying cry for the movement, “Gay Is Good” became an ever-present badge of honor pinned to Kameny’s lapel. The defiantly positive statement proved foundational to the early pride celebrations.

Homosexuality as a Mental Illness

During this dynamic period, Kameny and Gittings were busy hatching additional plans. They began a multiyear campaign against the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for its classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1970, Kameny led members of the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance in a demonstration at the annual meeting of the APA. The next year, Kameny, Gittings, and fellow agitators stormed the meeting and Kameny seized the microphone, demanding to be heard.

B. Gittings, F. Kameny, and Dr. H. Anonymous. APA panel, 1972.

For the APA’s annual meeting in 1972, Kameny and Gittings organized a panel on homosexuality. When no gay psychiatrist would openly participate for fear of professional repercussions, Gittings recruited Dr. Henry Anonymous (John E. Fryer, M.D.), who appeared masked and using a voice modulator to conceal his identity. Kameny, Gittings, and Fryer asserted that toxic homophobia, not homosexuality, was the real disease. Consequently, the APA formed a committee to investigate the scientific data behind their diagnostic definition. They came up empty handed.

The person who really needs psychotherapy … is not the homosexual youngster who gets dragged to the psychiatrist’s office by his mother, but the mother, to relieve her anxieties about his homosexuality.  – Frank Kameny

By invitation, Kameny and Gittings were present in 1973, when the APA officially announced its declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. Kameny described it as the day “we were cured en masse by the psychiatrists.” At the time, electric shock therapy, institutionalization, chemical castration, lobotomy, and other sadistic “cures” for homosexuality were tragically forced on gay Americans.

In 2006, the APA presented Kameny and Gittings with the organization’s first annual civil rights award, named for Dr. John Fryer.

Gays in the Military

In 1975, Leonard Matlovich, a highly decorated active-duty Air Force sergeant, publicly declared his homosexuality. Kameny engineered it. He had been searching for the right case to challenge the ban on gays in the military, and Matlovich filled the bill. With Kameny’s help, Matlovich submitted a coming out letter to his commanding officer. Predictably, the military investigated him, declared him unfit for service, and recommended his discharge. With Kameny behind him, Matlovich fought the discharge. Within months, Matlovich became the first openly gay person to appear on the cover of TIME magazine.

For years, Kameny continued to chip away at the ban on gays in the military. He counseled countless potential gay military inductees, closeted soldiers, and gay service members facing discharge for their sexual orientation. He assisted scores of gays and lesbians encountering problems getting or keeping security clearances.

In 2010, a year before Kameny’s death, President Obama signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act. Kameny was invited to the ceremony, and the pesident congratulated him for his contributions to the long-overdue victory.

Recognition

Among countless other honors, Frank Kameny was celebrated as part of LGBT History Month 2007, and at the National LGBT 50th Anniversary Ceremony in Philadelphia on July 4, 2015.

The Library of Congress houses more than 70,000 letters, documents, and other memorabilia from Kameny’s vast personal archives in its permanent collection. A dozen of his handmade picket signs reside in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. Kameny’s Washington, D.C., home appears on the National Register of Historic Places.