Local
Longtime gay activist Frank Kameny dies
Community, public officials mourn loss of LGBT movement hero, pioneer
Frank Kameny’s gay rights activism predated the Stonewall riots by more than a decade. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)
Expressions of condolences from LGBT activists and their straight supporters poured in from across the country this week following the death in Washington on Tuesday of Franklin E. Kameny, one of the nation’s most prominent gay rights leaders.
Friends said Kameny, 86, appears to have died in his sleep while in bed at his house in Northwest Washington. A representative of the D.C. Medical Examiner’s office, who spoke to friends and well-wishers who stood outside the house Tuesday night, said the cause of death couldn’t be immediately determined.
Kameny’s passing came a little more than a month before the planned celebration on Nov. 15 of the 50th anniversary of his founding of the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first gay rights organization in the nation’s capital.
LGBT rights advocates Charles Francis and Bob Witeck, who were longtime friends of Kameny’s and established the project to preserve Kameny’s papers over a 50-year period, said they would be announcing soon plans for a memorial service to honor the gay rights leader’s life.
Witeck said Nov. 15 is being considered as a possible date for a Kameny memorial gathering.
Timothy Clark, Kameny’s tenant and friend, said he found Kameny unconscious and unresponsive in his bed shortly after 5 p.m. on Tuesday. Clark said he became concerned when he arrived home a few minutes earlier and noticed Kameny hadn’t retrieved his newspapers, which are delivered outside the house in the morning.
He said he called 911 and rescue workers determined that Kameny had passed away earlier, most likely in his sleep. Clark said he had spoken with Kameny shortly before midnight on the previous day and Kameny didn’t appear to be ill or in distress.
Kameny is credited with being one of the leading strategists for the early gay rights movement – beginning nearly a decade before the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village and continuing forward.
The Stonewall riots, triggered by a police raid of the Stonewall gay bar, are considered by most activist leaders as the starting point of the modern LGBT rights movement. But movement leaders credit Kameny and his collaborators in the Mattachine Society of Washington with laying the groundwork that enabled the post-Stonewall LGBT organizing to flourish.
“Frank was a revolutionary who lived to see the world change, and I’m comforted by that,” said Francis. “He was the first gay American to root the argument for gay civil equality in the words of Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.”
Gay historian David K. Johnson, who wrote about Kameny in two books on the gay rights movement, said Kameny broke from the early American “homophile” movement’s tactics of accommodation with the prevailing views that homosexuality was a disorder.
“Kameny’s style and tactics differed markedly from those of earlier homosexual leaders,” Johnson wrote in a 2002 article posted on the website of D.C.’s Rainbow History Project. “By unabashedly proclaiming that homosexuality was neither sick nor immoral, Kameny helped move gays and lesbians out of the shadows of 1950s apologetic, self-help groups and into the sunlight of the civil rights movement, setting the tone for a movement that continues today.”
It was during his years as head of the Mattachine Society of Washington that Kameny in July 1968 coined the phrase, “Gay is Good,” which activists say became a forerunner to the gay pride celebrations that followed the 1969 Stonewall riots.
Born and raised in New York City, Kameny served in combat as an Army soldier in World War II in Europe. After the war, Kameny received his doctorate degree in astronomy from Harvard University.
He came to Washington in 1956 to take a position teaching astronomy at Georgetown University. The following year, government recruiters persuaded him to take a job as a civilian astronomer with the U.S. Army Map Service in Washington.
NASA career derailed
Kameny told the Blade in a 2002 interview that the nation’s race against the Soviet Union for superiority in space had just begun in full force and he set his sights, among other things, on a possible role in the U.S. space program.
A short time later, Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Kameny said he would have seriously considered applying to become an astronaut. But that was not to come about.
Just five months into his job at the Army Map Service, U.S. government security investigators uncovered information leading them to believe Kameny was gay. They opened an investigation into his alleged “threat” to national security. Within a few weeks he was dismissed from his job, with his name placed on a list of people labeled as government security risks.
Kameny challenged the dismissal before the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which set personnel policies for federal employees. The commission upheld the firing, prompting Kameny to take the matter to court. After losing in the lower courts, he appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first known gay person to file a gay-related case before the high court.
The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling against Kameny and declined to hear the case. But Kameny’s decision to appeal the case through the court system motivated him to become a lifelong advocate on behalf of LGBT equality.
Gay historian Johnson wrote in his 2002 article that Kameny’s lawyer withdrew from the case after the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against Kameny, forcing Kameny to write his own appeal to the Supreme Court.
Johnson called Kameny’s 60-page legal brief filed before the high court a groundbreaking challenge to the federal government’s policy barring homosexuals from working for the government in any capacity. Johnson said it served as Kameny’s and the gay movement’s strategy document for advancing legal rights for gays in the years going forward.
Kameny’s Supreme Court brief, or petition, also offered the world its first glimpse of what became his trademark use of blunt, sometimes inflammatory language combined with reasoned arguments to challenge anti-gay policies.
“The government’s regulations, policies, practices and procedures, as applied in the instant case to petitioner specifically, and as applied to homosexuals generally, are a stench in the nostrils of decent people, an offense against morality, an abandonment of reason, an affront to human dignity, an improper restraint upon proper freedom and liberty, a disgrace to any civilized society, and a violation of all that this nation stands for,” he wrote in his Supreme Court petition.
“These policies, practices, procedures, and regulations have gone too long unquestioned and too long unexamined by the courts,” he wrote.
Gov’t apologizes to Kameny
Although Kameny lost his own case, he spent the next decade working with attorneys and other gay and lesbian federal workers to chip away at the then U.S. Civil Service Commission’s ban on gay federal employees through new court challenges. By 1975, after losing several cases to gay employees who won reinstatement to their jobs over a period of years, the Civil Service Commission dropped its ban on gay employees.
The change, which came under the administration of President Gerald Ford, was based on court rulings saying the government could not discriminate against homosexual federal employees if no evidence exists to show a harmful “nexus” between someone’s sexual orientation and their ability to perform their job.
Kameny, who called the development a major victory for gay rights, turned next to ongoing efforts to end two other anti-gay policies of the government – the ban on gays from receiving government security clearances and the ban on gays in the military.
In 2009, the Obama administration through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management – the successor agency to the Civil Service Commission – issued Kameny a formal apology for his 1957 firing. The apology was extended by OPM Director John Berry, an openly gay man.
In an area of work for which Kameny is less known, he established a paralegal practice in the 1970s that continued through the 1980s and early 90s to represent gays encountering problems obtaining or retaining security clearances as well as gays facing discharge from the military because of their sexual orientation.
Activists following his paralegal work, including those who he helped keep their security clearances, called Kameny a tenacious counsel who sometimes worked with lawyers and other times served as an administrative representative before adjudicatory hearings, including discharge hearings in all branches of the military.
“When the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA) was on the verge of firing me simply for discovering I was gay, I enlisted Frank Kameny’s help in resisting,” said Jamie Shoemaker, a linguist and NSA career employee.
“His gutsy, unapologetic efforts to save my career and that of many others with security clearances led to a ground-breaking change in the attitude of our country’s intelligence agencies toward gays,” Shoemaker said.
Kameny said he was pleased when his security clearance practice became mostly unnecessary in the 1990s when President Bill Clinton issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in the issuance of government security clearances.
Soliciting sodomy
In his work with military service members ensnared in what activists called witch hunts, where military investigators pressured vulnerable gays to identify other gays under false promises of lenient treatment, Kameny coined another phrase aimed at helping those under investigation – “Say nothing, sign nothing, get counsel.”
Charles Francis and others who knew Kameny said his paralegal work met an important need in the years before groups such as Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network emerged to take on this type of legal work.
LGBT movement colleagues also credit Kameny with playing a lead role in the effort to persuade the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders. As a scientist by profession, Kameny wrote and spoke often beginning in the 1960s about what he called the faulty or “junk” science that the psychiatric profession used to support its claim that homosexuality was a mental disorder.
Kameny and others supporting him within the profession argued that nearly all of the “gays are sick” theories were based on studies of patients in therapy. There were little or no studies made of the overwhelming majority of gays who never sought therapy and functioned well in society despite widespread anti-gay prejudice, Kameny and others argued.
When broader studies were conducted of gays and lesbians in the population at large, findings showed there were no differences in the numbers found to have mental health problems between samples of gays and straights, Kameny often pointed out.
In yet another area of work, Kameny is credited with playing an early and effective role in pushing for repeal of state sodomy laws, which made it illegal for consenting adults to engage in oral or anal sex in the privacy of the home. In keeping with his characteristic defiant rhetoric, Kameny sought to dramatize what he called the “lunacy” of laws prohibiting private, consenting sex.
On a number of occasions he publicly solicited public officials, including D.C.’s police chief in the 1960s, to engage in sodomy with him. In 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s sodomy law in the case Bowers vs. Hardwick, Kameny said he wrote letters soliciting sodomy to each of the Supreme Court justices that voted to uphold the law.
“I defied them to prosecute me,” he told the Blade. “They never did.”
Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said Kameny “led an extraordinary life marked by heroic activism that set a path for the modern LGBT civil rights movement.”
“From the early days fighting institutionalized discrimination in the federal workforce, Dr. Kameny taught us all that ‘Gay is Good,’” Solmonese said. “As we say goodbye to this trailblazer on National Coming Out Day, we remember the remarkable power we all have to change the world by living our lives like Frank – openly, honestly and authentically.”
Chuck Wolfe, CEO of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, said Kameny’s death marked the “loss of a hero and a founding father of the fight to end discrimination against LGBT people.”
“Dr. Kameny stood up for this community when doing so was considered unthinkable and even shocking, and he continued to do so throughout his life,” Wolfe said. “He spoke with a clear voice and firm conviction about the humanity and dignity of people who were gay, long before it was safe for him to do so. All of us who today endeavor to complete the work he began a half century ago are indebted to Dr. Kameny and his remarkable bravery and commitment.”
Local activists who knew Kameny said they are deeply saddened over his passing but pleased to have shared time with him at several LGBT events in Washington during the past three weeks.
On Sept. 30, D.C.’s LGBT Community Center honored Kameny along with three other activists with its community service award at a ceremony at the downtown Hotel Sofitel. Kameny delivered what his activist friends called his standard and beloved fiery speech asserting his 50-year struggle to change society to bring about full and unabridged rights for LGBT people. It was to be his last speaking engagement.
His passing inside his house on Tuesday came several years after the city designated the house at 5020 Cathedral Ave., N.W., as a historic landmark because of the work Kameny and his activist colleagues performed there since the 1960s on behalf of LGBT rights. In 2010, the D.C. City Council voted unanimously to name a two-block section of 17th Street near Dupont Circle as Frank Kameny Way in honor of Kameny’s lifelong work on behalf of equality for the LGBT community and the community at large.”
Kameny’s death also came five years after Francis and Witeck helped arrange for the Library of Congress to acquire more than 50,000 documents from the Kameny Papers Project, which pulled together nearly 50 years of papers and documents that Kameny compiled through his work on behalf of LGBT people.
“Frank Kameny was the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement,” Yale Law Professor William Eskridge told the Associated Press earlier this year.
Pride month festivities continue through the end of the month and there’s a new event for Rehoboth/Dewey Beach residents and visitors, Pride on the Bay, set for June 27.
Boaters will tie up at the sandbar near Massey’s Landing from 12-4 p.m. Visit Pride on the Bay’s Facebook page for a map of the exact location. You can rent pontoons for the day at Dewey Beach Watersports (deweybeachwatersports.com).
Aqua Bar & Grill is sponsoring the inaugural event and will provide a floating DJ for the afternoon. Aqua will then host an after-party back on land (57 Baltimore Ave., Rehoboth Beach).
Local part-time resident Brian Sparrow is organizing the gathering, citing the need for more Pride-oriented events at the beach.
“I decided to create an event in June for Pride month,” Sparrow told the Blade. “There aren’t many Pride events in Rehoboth and Dewey where we can take advantage of the Rehoboth Bay.”
He noted that there is another event called “Bay Pride” but that it is held in late summer on a Sunday. “Having the event on Saturday will allow for more boat renting options for visitors and friends to join,” Sparrow said, adding that he plans to make this an annual event.
District of Columbia
McDuffie on LGBTQ support and standing up to Trump
‘I’m committed to governing with the queer community at the table’
Former D.C. Council member Kenyan McDuffie is running for mayor as Muriel Bowser’s third term expires in January. He’s running in a crowded Democratic primary field; recent polls show him in second place behind Council member Janeese Lewis George. D.C.’s primary is Tuesday, June 16.
The Blade sat down with McDuffie on June 8 for a wide-ranging conversation about his pro-LGBTQ record and challenges now facing the community.
The Blade reached out to fellow mayoral candidates Lewis George and Rini Sampath, who identifies as queer, for interviews. Neither responded to repeated requests over several weeks.
Blade: Members of the D.C. LGBTQ community are receiving information that most if not all the seven Democratic candidates for mayor, including you and Council member Janeese Lewis George, are strong supporters of the LGBTQ community. What message would you have for LGBTQ voters on why they should support you rather than one of the other candidates?
McDuffie: Thank you for the question, Lou. And thank you for your work over the years with the Washington Blade. I’m really looking forward to having this conversation. You know, Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States, and our city is one of the most beautifully diverse and inclusive cities in America because generations of LGBTQ+ residents, advocates, and organizations have fought to make it that way.
And throughout my time on the Council, I’ve been proud to support that work by advancing equity and opportunity and standing up for the rights and dignity of every resident across the District regardless of where they live, who they know, how much money they have. And as mayor, I’m going to build on that progress by ensuring D.C. remains a place where LGBTQ+ residents can live safely, where they can access quality healthcare and housing, they can build families and businesses and thrive in the neighborhoods of our city.
And now more than ever, making sure we protect residents from a hostile federal administration, including President Donald Trump, who seeks to roll back civil rights and civil liberties.
Blade: Some people, including members of the LGBTQ community, have criticized Mayor Bowser for what they say has been her position of not standing up forcefully enough against the Trump administration on various issues, including the deployment of National Guard soldiers in the city. What are your thoughts on that? How would you deal with the Trump administration if you were mayor?
McDuffie: Well, I’m going to deal with the Trump administration by prioritizing D.C. residents first. I’m going to stand up and fight back against federal infringement from Donald Trump and from Republicans in Congress or any other individual or organization that seeks to threaten Washington, D.C. residents.
And that means on day one rescind the executive order that permits cooperation between the Metropolitan Police Department and ICE and DHS [U.S. Department of Homeland Security]. And I know because of my work 13-and-a-half years on the Council doing research, authoring transformational legislation that protects people’s civil rights, that makes the Metropolitan Police Department more transparent, doing things like authoring the landmark NEAR Act [a 2016 D.C. law aimed at reducing violent crime].
I know from that work, and I know from my former work as a civil rights attorney in President Obama’s Department of Justice that you have to fight to ensure that we have a fair and more just society. I did that as a civil rights attorney traveling the country fighting to protect people’s civil rights. I did that as a prosecutor who fought crime and delivered justice for victims.
And I’m going to do that as mayor to ensure that we use every legal and political tool available as mayor to resist any federal effort to roll back LGBTQ+ protections in Washington, D.C. And I’m committed to governing with the queer community at the table and lifting up their contributions to this city at the center of every decision that I make as mayor. You know that I’ve been a champion making Washington, D.|C. more equitable, more just, and economically inclusive. And I plan to continue to build on that work that I have done and the work that so many important people have done in the LGBTQ+ community in Washington, D.C. to make sure that our residents can live safely and thrive in Washington, D.C.
And so, we’re going to fight back against Trump and any hostile federal administration to make sure we’re protecting the residents first. And we will work with the federal government where there is an opportunity to do transformational economic development projects like RFK, transformational infrastructure projects like expanding Union Station. Both of those will create thousands of jobs and thousands of opportunities for D.C.-based small businesses.
But I will draw a very bright line when it comes to protecting the civil rights of individuals across the District of Columbia, including the LGBTQ+ community and our vulnerable neighbors like our immigrant neighbors and families who in many cases today are living in the shadows, afraid to leave their homes, afraid to go to work, afraid to walk their kids to school because they’re being snatched off the streets in safe places around schools and places of worship. And it is utterly despicable what Donald Trump has done and how he’s weaponized our federal law enforcement.
Blade: As a follow-up to that, reports surfaced last year that the mayor had to cut the budget for the Office of LGBTQ Affairs for this year by $600,000 because of a large cut in the city’s budget by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. Would you do something to try to restore the funds that were cut from that office?
McDuffie: Absolutely. I will as mayor fully fund the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs and direct it to proactively identify gaps in city services while also ensuring that the Office of Human Rights has additional resources to vigorously enforce efforts against discrimination across government agencies and within the private sector where it arises. I am a civil rights attorney by training. And I will bring the full force of the District of Columbia government to bear when it comes to protecting the rights of our residents, including especially our vulnerable communities like LGBTQ+ community.
And we’re going to fully fund the Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs and make sure it is doing the work proactively to identify any gaps in services any gaps in resources that are needed to shore up the supports and services to the community. And that’s been my record on the Council, too. As you know, I’ve supported on the Council marriage equality. That I’ve supported helping to repeal D.C.’s anti-surrogacy laws, expanding opportunities for LGBTQ couples.
You know that I’ve supported polices that recognize diverse family structures and co-introduced and passed the birth certificate equality amendment act. I supported efforts to reduce bureaucratic barriers faced by transgender residents. So, that’s the kind of work that I’ve done as a Council member. And as mayor I’m going to really fight and deliver for our LGBTQ+ neighbors to ensure that they’re supported, seen, heard, continue to be woven into the fabric of our city.
Blade: Do you or your campaign have any plans for participating in any LGBTQ Pride events during Pride month?
McDuffie: Oh, we are going to be not only front and center in marching in the Pride parade but being there as a resources to work directly with the organizers to make sure that they have every single thing that they need to build on the strong legacy of Washington, D.C.’s Pride community and all the festivities that are associated with it. I was so proud to stand on the steps of the Wilson Building last year for WorldPride and announce what Washington, D.C. does and how we do it and why we’re so special as a city. And when it comes to supporting Pride this year, I’m going to be right there marching with everybody else and ensuring that the longstanding relationships with the LGBTQ community across the District of Columbia are shown and displayed as our nation’s capital sets the example of what it looks like to really protect the beautiful diversity that we have in our city.
Blade: People have been talking about the poll just released by the Washington Post showing you to be 11 points behind Janeese Lewis George in the race for mayor. Do you have any reaction to that?
McDuffie: Well, what the poll shows is that I have the broadest coalition of support across the District of Columbia. Because I continue to show up and meet residents where they are. That demonstrates whether you are a longtime resident or whether you are Black or white or a member of the LGBTQ+ community. My support in the District of Columbia is deep, and it is broad.
Because I will govern as mayor in the way I have led as a Council member, which is by building the broadest coalition possible, walking across differences and really coming out with solutions to address intractable issues. So, I know that Washington, D.C. has been a national leader when it comes to protecting civil rights and ensuring fairness and justice. And I’ve been one of the people who led on those issues, making our city more racially equitable, more socially just, and more economically inclusive.
Blade: As you know, some of your critics have been trying to link you to the Pepco electric rate increase and for being responsible for higher utility costs. Do you have a response to that?
McDuffie: They try to link me to a number of things that are a part of what is a widespread disinformation campaign much like what we’ve seen on a national level from Trump and other Republicans. I don’t accept it. I think the fact that I’ve been elected four times in the District of Columbia, I demonstrate my ability to work with residents across the District of Columbia to get things done.
When it comes to utilities, I’m going to fight to lower utilities costs for residents, ensuring that we expand renewables and alternative energy sources, recognizing that Janeese Lewis George was the only Council member who voted against expanding solar a couple of years ago. But I’m also going to make sure that we have automatic enrollment for individuals in the District of Columbia who are having trouble paying for the utilities. I will make sure we protect seniors who are feeling a squeeze when it comes to being able to pay for utilities …
And we’re going to make sure that everybody understands why their energy bill is going up and push back against disinformation, so that they understand that a lot of what we’re seeing in increased utility bills, which I also face with my wife, is driven by demand on the regional grid at PJM. It is the data centers that are driving up our costs and lowering supplies. I’m going to hold those data centers accountable to pay their fair share for how they are contributing to the increase in utility costs that residents across the District of Columbia and across the region are seeing on their Pepco bills.
Blade: Thank you for your time. Do you have anything else you may wish to say to conclude your remarks?
McDuffie: Just to be clear that the disinformation campaign that Janeese Lewis George and her supporters are waging is one of the lowest political tactics that we’ve seen in D.C. politics. But she is banking on voters who are not doing their research. And what I know is that D.C. voters are smart. They know me from my work on the Council. And they know I am better qualified on day one to stand up and fight back against Trump to protect home rule and to deliver a city that is safer, that is more affordable and deliver a government that is more accountable and works for residents across the District of Columbia.
District of Columbia
David Archuleta, Monroe Alise named D.C. Pride parade marshals
Honorees ‘live authentically’ and ‘power of sharing your story’
The Capital Pride Alliance has announced that David Archuleta and Monroe Alise will be the grand marshals for the Pride parade on June 20.
Ryan Bos, the Capital Pride Alliance’s president, said the two were chosen for the way that they exemplify the theme “Exist. Resist. Have the Audacity!”
Archuleta is the “American Idol” season 7 runner-up and a strong supporter of the LGBTQ community.
He grew up religious and has been clear about his struggle to reconcile his faith, identity, and self-expression. In 2021, he publicly came out and has since been a major voice for LGBTQ visibility and acceptance. This year, Archuleta published the memoir “Devout,” which details his lived experience as a closeted Mormon teenager.
Alise is a transgender advocate and a D.C. native.
She has appeared in the shows “P-Valley” and “The Chi.” She also grew a major online following through her social media series “I’m CLOCKABLE,” where she discusses topics such as dating, culture, and self-discovery from the perspective of a queer person.
“Together, they represent to live authentically and the power of sharing your story to create change,” Bos said in a statement.
As grand marshals, the two will kick off celebrations leading up to the parade and participate in it. Alise will join the Crack of Noon Parade Brunch from 12-3 p.m. at Viceroy Washington, alongside honorees such as D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
The parade will kick off at 3 p.m. at the intersection of 14th and T Streets, N.W., before moving straight down 14th Street and ending at Pennsylvania Avenue at 7 p.m. The parade is free for anyone to watch at designated viewing areas.
More information about celebrations throughout Pride and the parade can be found at www.capitalpride.org.
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