Franklin Edward Kameny (May 21, 1925 – October 11, 2011) was an American gay rights activist. He has been referred to as "one of the most significant figures" in the American gay rights movement.
During the Lavender scare, in 1957, Kameny was dismissed from his position as an astronomer in the U.S. Army's Army Map Service in Washington, D.C., because of his homosexuality, leading him to begin "a Herculean struggle with the American establishment" that would "spearhead a new period of militancy in the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s".
Kameny formally appealed his firing by the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Although unsuccessful, the proceeding was notable as the first known civil rights claim based on sexual orientation pursued in a U.S. court.
Life and career
Early life Kameny was born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents in New York City on May 21, 1925. His father, Emil Kameny, was a Polish electrical engineer, and his mother, Rae Beck Kameny, was of Austro-Hungarian descent and worked as a high-ranking secretary. Franklin and his younger sister Edna spent their childhood in Richmond Hill, a neighborhood in southeastern Queens. From the age of four, he knew that he wanted to become a scientist, and by six, he narrowed down his interest to astronomy. When he was 12, he started attending Richmond Hill High School and graduated in 1941 at the age of 16. From there, Kameny went to Queens College, City University of New York, to learn physics, and at age 17 he told his parents that he was an atheist.De Leon, David. Leaders from the 1960s: A Biographical Sourcebook of American Activism. Greenwood Press (June 30, 1994). p. 253.
World War II When Kameny first entered college at 16, the draft age for World War II was 21. In November 1942, when Kameny was a sophomore in college, Congress lowered the draft age to 18 in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December. Seventeen at this time, Kameny would be subject to the draft in six months. However, in December 1942, the military created the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), a program that would train young men in technical fields such as science, engineering, medicine, and linguistics. Moreover, it would keep these men in classrooms rather than sending them to battlefields. To join this program, Kameny enlisted in the United States Army on May 18, 1943, completed basic training, and then was sent to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study mechanical engineering. However, in February 1944, General George Marshall recommended withdrawing all but 30,000 participants from the ASTP to prepare for the impending invasion of France. Consequently, Kameny was sent to the frontlines where he served as an infantry private. He served in the Army throughout World War II in Europe, and later served 20 years on the Selective Service board.
Ph.D. program After leaving the Army, he returned to Queens College and graduated with a baccalaureate in physics in 1948. Kameny then enrolled at Harvard University; while a teaching fellow at Harvard, he refused to sign a loyalty oath without attaching qualifiers, and exhibited a skepticism against accepted orthodoxies. He graduated with a master's degree (1949) and doctorate (1956) in astronomy. His doctoral thesis was titled A Photoelectric Study of Some RV Tauri and Yellow Semiregular Variables and was written under the supervision of professor Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
Arrest On August 26, 1956, Kameny was away from his home in Boston, attending a meeting for the American Astronomical Society in San Francisco. Following the conclusion of the meeting, Kameny was seen at a Key Terminal, a location labeled a hotspot for homosexual encounters. Staking out bathrooms marked for sexual encounters was common practice for vice squads. Two police officers were waiting behind a ventilation grille in the terminal men's bathroom, and witnessed Kameny and another man engaging in a sexual encounter. Kameny was detained and accused of "lewd and indecent acts." The San Francisco municipal court offered Kameny the option to plead guilty and accept a $55 fine and 6-months probation, to which Kameny obliged.
Washington, D.C. career and firing Relocating to Washington, D.C., Kameny taught for a year in the Astronomy Department of Georgetown University and was hired in July 1957 by the U.S. Army Map Service. When they learned of his San Francisco arrest, Kameny's superiors questioned him, but he refused to provide information regarding his sexual orientation. Kameny was fired by the commission soon afterward. In January 1958, he was barred from future employment by the federal government. Author Douglass Shand-Tucci later wrote,
Kameny was the most conventional of men, focused utterly on his work, at Harvard and at Georgetown... He was thus all the more rudely shocked when the same fate befell him as we've seen befall Prescott Townsend, class of 1918, decades before... He was arrested. Later he would be fired. And, like Townsend, Kameny was radicalized.Shand-Tucci, Douglas. The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture. St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (May 19, 2003). p. 268.
Kameny appealed against his firing through the courts, losing twice before seeking review from the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to consider the case, turning down his petition for certiorari. After devoting himself to activism, Kameny never held a paid job again and was supported by friends and family for the rest of his life. Despite his outspoken activism, he rarely discussed his personal life and never had any long-term relationships with other men, stating merely that he had no time for them. He stated, "If I disagree with someone, I give them a chance to convince me they are right. And if they fail, then I am right and they are wrong and I will just have to fight them until they change."Hirshman, Linda. "OBIT: Present at the Creation: Frank Kameny, the modest, stubborn man who helped start the gay rights movement." Slate.com October 12, 2011
Kameny's pushback against the U.S. Government's policy on homosexual employees was the first of its kind from a gay man. He argued through written letters and eventually through the courts that the government's discrimination on the basis of sexuality is no different from discrimination based on race or religion.
Kameny eschewed conventional racial designations; throughout his life, he consistently cited his race as "human".
The Baltimore Vice Squad conducted a night raid on a homosexual bath house on March 14, 1969. They encountered Frank Kameny along with twenty-seven other men engaging in "homosexual activity," and arrested them, cited for participating in a "disorderly house." Kameny hired an attorney recommended by the ACLU and would serve no time for the arrest.
Gay rights activism
1960–1970 In late 1961, Frank Kameny co-founded the Washington D.C. branch of the national gay rights organization, Mattachine Society. In the year following the group's founding, Kameny led an initiative to declare the existence of the Mattachine Society of Washington publicly. The group sent letters to every government branch, including the entirety of Congress. Kameny also wrote to President Kennedy asking him to change the rules on homosexuals being purged from the government. The content of the letters included harsh criticism of the government's treatment of homosexuals and asserted that there were over three hundred members of the group. The letter was signed by the president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, Franklin E. Kameny.
The Mattachine Society of Washington discussed the prospect of public protest in 1963. The FBI and J. Edgar Hoover had made advancements to ban the Washington branch and had been threatened with the prospect of a march on behalf of the organization. Although supportive of the idea, Kameny refrained from taking part in a march due to the threat of damaging his public image.
In 1963, Kameny and Mattachine launched a campaign to overturn D.C. sodomy laws; he personally drafted a bill that finally passed in 1993. He also worked to remove the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
In 1964, Kameny argued that homosexuals faced more severe discrimination than blacks because the federal government did not help them and actively discriminated against them. He suggested that homosexuals would fare worse from the success of the civil rights movement: "Now that it is becoming unfashionable to discriminate against Negroes, discrimination against homosexuals will be on the increase... Homosexuality represents the last major area where prejudice and discrimination are prevalent in this country."
In 1965, after his tenure as MSW president came to a close, Kameny organized the first demonstration by a homophile organization. The 10-person protest took place outside the white house. Signs included the organization's demands: "WE WANT FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT, HONORABLE DISCHARGES, SECURITY CLEARANCES." Kameny had strict standards for those participating in his organizations. His requirements for picketers included men wearing suits and women wearing dresses, each sign measuring twenty-two by twenty-eight inches, and the message on the sign being the same on both sides. These efforts contributed to portraying a nonviolent and respectful protest.Peacock, Kent W. “Race, the Homosexual, and the Mattachine Society of Washington, 1961-1970.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 25, no. 2, 2016, pp. 267–96. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44862300. Accessed 22 Feb. 2024.
In coalition with New York's Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, the picketing expanded to target the United Nations, the Pentagon, the United States Civil Service Commission, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, for what became known as the Annual Reminder for gay rights.
Frank Kameny also contributed to homosexual activism by serving as an amateur attorney, defending government employees who had their security clearances revoked or suspended, due to allegations of "perversion" or "immoral acts." Kameny's activism in the legal system consisted of attacking the discriminatory hiring practices of the U.S. Government through court hearings. He made court hearings public and put on a spectacle to draw attention to his cases. He served as a plaintiff in his first case in 1967 alongside Barbara Gittings in defense of Donald Crawford's Department of Defense Hearing. Kameny and Gittings would serve as plaintiffs in another case later that year.
Unlike other homosexual activists at the time, Kameny rejected the idea that homosexuality was inferior to heterosexuality:
Kameny further argued that homosexuality can be a social good: "I take the stand that not only is homosexuality, whether by inclination or overt act, not immoral, but that homosexual acts engaged in by consenting adults are moral, in a positive and real sense, and are right, good and desirable, both for the individual participants and for the society in which they live." Eventually, he coined the slogan "Gay is Good" after listening to Stokely Carmichael chant "black is beautiful" in 1968.
In the 1968 election, three years after the end of his first term, Kameny was elected as president of the Mattachine Society of Washington.
1970–2000 In 1971, Kameny became the first openly gay candidate for the United States Congress when he ran in the District of Columbia's first election for a non-voting Congressional delegate. Following his defeat by Democrat Walter E. Fauntroy, Kameny and his campaign organization created the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Washington, D.C., an organization which continues to lobby government and press the case for equal rights.