Local

Covering Frank Kameny

A reporter’s 35-year journey chronicling the nation’s preeminent gay activist

Published

15 years ago

October 20, 2011

Frank Kameny served as a colorful, reliable source for the Blade and other news outlets during his decades of activism. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

I met Frank Kameny for the first time in the summer of 1974 at a meeting in Washington of the Gay Activists Alliance, now the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance.

At 24 years old, I had just landed my first job as a reporter covering the energy and environment beat for a company that published newsletters specializing in reporting on government regulations.

With an undergraduate degree in political science and a year’s worth of graduate studies in journalism under my belt, I walked into that GAA meeting at D.C.’s Quaker Meeting House near Dupont Circle knowing next to nothing about gay rights, gay politics or the gay community.

In the process we know as coming out, I had come to terms with myself as a gay man just months earlier.

So with that as a backdrop, I listened intently to the main topic of the meeting — reports of arrests of gay men at cruising areas by undercover officers assigned to the D.C. police vice squad.

Most of the arrests were not linked to sex in public places, one of the members reported. The men, whom the GAA member described as consenting adults, were merely seeking to meet one another for a sexual tryst or perhaps a lasting friendship that was to take place in the privacy of their homes, not in the public areas where they met.

But in an action I learned later was a routine practice throughout the country at that time, the undercover officers reportedly posed as willing participants and enticed the gay men into “soliciting” them to engage in sodomy, which was a criminal offense that led to an arrest. In some cases the undercover officers used body language suggesting they were inviting the men to touch them in a sexually suggestive way.

If the men took the bait and touched the officers, they were charged with committing a lewd act, a development that could ruin their careers, especially if they worked for the government.

After listening to these reports, a man appearing in his late 40s or early 50s with a booming voice and an obvious thorough knowledge of the issue at hand mapped out a strategy for GAA’s and the gay community’s response: The entrapment arrests of gay men would be portrayed as an “utter” waste of taxpayer’s money and police resources at a time when “real” crime was running rampant in the city.

This self-assured man, who I quickly learned was gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, raised his voice to emphasize each of his points, attracting the attention of a maintenance worker in the hallway outside the room. He said police officials were unresponsive to earlier requests to stop the entrapment arrests and it was time to take another course of action.

Kameny said GAA should enlist community allies to help it lobby the City Council to eliminate city funding for the vice squad, which was known at the time as the Prostitution, Perversion, and Obscenity (PPO) Branch.

“It’s an outrage and an injustice,” I recall him saying. “We’re citizens of this city. The police, like all government officials, are public servants. And public servants answer to us.”

Much to my amazement, within a year or two, the City Council, voted to eliminate from the police budget funding for the PPO Branch. Although some of its work in the area of prostitution continued, the police practice of entrapment of gay men soon came to an end.

I was naïve and uninformed on the nuances of the gay rights movement when I attended that meeting in 1974. But I knew a good news source when I saw one.

Frank Kameny become known for his sense of humor during his long activist career and feared his tactics would get him disbarred if he had decided to pursue a law degree. (Washington Blade photo by Doug Hinckle)

Frank Kameny over the next 25 years or more was to become my preeminent news source in my coverage of the LGBT community as a reporter for the Washington Blade.

From the start, I had the good fortune of getting to know Frank Kameny and getting a crash course from him on the history of the gay movement and its current struggles and aspirations.

Since Kameny’s death last week, much has been written about his vast contribution to the LGBT movement over a 50-year period, especially in the decade before the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, which is viewed as the starting point of the modern gay movement.

What hasn’t been reported as widely is Kameny’s impact on the lives of individual lesbians, gay men, and transgender people whom he helped and with whom he interacted. His self-confident and assertive demeanor on behalf of the rights of all LGBT people and his unyielding spirit for fighting injustice – no matter how great the odds appeared to be – came across to those around him.

I’ll never forget the story told to me by a gay man I met at a GAA meeting about six months after that first meeting I attended in the summer of 1974. Appearing in his 40s, the man told me he was born and raised in a conservative, fundamentalist Christian household in southern Virginia and had struggled to accept his homosexuality. He said five years of psychotherapy upon moving to the D.C. area had little effect in helping shake his inner struggles over his sexual orientation.

He said his meeting Kameny and other activists at GAA meetings, and subsequent weekly phone conversations with Kameny on a wide range of issues over a period of months, boosted his self-confidence to a degree that he could never attain in years of therapy.

“I fired my therapist,” he told me while smiling broadly “Frank and the other folks here gave me the insight to understand that the external forces of discrimination and oppression and homophobia are what got me down,” I recall him saying.

Kameny’s assistance to individual LGBT people blossomed in his role as a paralegal counsel representing gays encountering problems with security clearances in the late 1960s through the 1980s. When his clients were comfortable going public with their case, Kameny provided me with copies of his legal briefs challenging actions by various U.S. government agencies, often the Defense Department, seeking to deny or revoke a gay person’s security clearance.

Those targeted for loss of a clearance usually worked for the government or for a private company doing contract work for the government. The main argument used for revoking a clearance was that gay people were susceptible to blackmail and were thus a threat to the safeguarding of government secrets.

Kameny often argued that the government had yet to disclose a single case where a gay person breached government secrets due to blackmail or coercion related to his or her sexual orientation.

He noted that government security officials appeared to be obsessed with the private sex lives of gays holding security clearances. In the course of investigating a gay person over a clearance, security officials demanded to know the identities of all of their sex partners over a period of years and insisted they reveal the specific types of sexual acts the gay person performed with his or her partners.

Kameny’s characteristic response to these inquires surfaced in a 1969 case in which he represented a New York gay man named Benning Wentworth, whose application for a clearance was opposed by the government solely on grounds of his status as a “sexually active” homosexual.

“We state to the world, as we have stated for the public, we state for the record and, if the [Defense] Department forces us to carry the case that far, we state for the courts that Mr. Wentworth, being a healthy, unmarried, homosexual male, 35 years old, has lived, and does live a suitable homosexual life, in parallel with the suitable active heterosexual sexual life lived by 75 percent of our healthy, unmarried, heterosexual males holding security clearances,” Kameny stated in a government hearing to adjudicate Wentworth’s clearance application.

Added Kameny, “Mr. Wentworth will get his clearance as the sexually active homosexual that he is and that he will continue to be…just as heterosexuals get their clearances as sexually active heterosexuals.”

He won many of his cases when, at his suggestion, his clients submitted letters disclosing their sexual orientation to co-workers and family members, eliminating, in Kameny’s assessment, any chance of blackmail threats to reveal the client’s homosexuality.

Some of his clients and fellow activists urged Kameny to get his law degree and become a lawyer, noting that he already knew more about the field of security clearance law than most lawyers. He told me his becoming a lawyer would tie his hands, saying the sometimes outlandish tactics he used would get him disbarred.

“They can’t disbar me if I’m not a member of the bar,” he often said.

In cases where he represented members of the military under investigation for being gay in the years prior to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Kameny was blunt about the only means of preventing a discharge: “Lie through your teeth,” he told his clients, or refuse to answer any questions about your sexual orientation.

In one of his military cases in the 1980s, Kameny was scheduled to attend a hearing to discuss planned action by the Army to discharge a service member who was identified as being gay by an acquaintance who was pressured into “snitching” on his fellow service member, as Kameny put it.

For some reason, Army officials insisted on meeting with the service member in private, saying Kameny couldn’t attend that particular session, in which the service member was to be “interviewed,” Kameny said.

As a gesture of protest, Kameny placed his foot in the doorway of the meeting room, preventing one of the officials from closing the door. He backed down after being threatened with arrest, saying the gesture was intended to emphasize his strong opposition to the closed meeting.

His use of fiery language as well as humor often surfaced in his testimony before public hearings held by governmental bodies, including the D.C. City Council.

In the early 1990s, Kameny testified before a D.C. Council committee deliberating over a proposed alley closing sought by Georgetown University to clear the way for construction of a new law school building located near the U.S. Capitol.

Gay activists, led by Kameny and GAA, called on the Council to withhold approval of the alley closing and thus prevent construction of the building until the university ended its policy of refusing to recognize gay student groups on campus.

Shortly after beginning his testimony, Kameny opened his briefcase and pulled out a spray can that he identified as a room deodorizer. He pressed down on the nozzle, spraying a mist in the direction of the Council members seated about 10 feet in front of him.

The “stench of discrimination” being carried out by Georgetown University against gay student groups cannot continue, he said, drawing laughter from the Council members and the audience in the hearing room.

Kameny also directed his sense of humor toward anti-gay organizations, which he closely monitored. On several occasions during the 1980s and 1990s he rushed to the city’s office of corporations and created his own corporation under the exact name of an anti-gay group, preventing the group from setting up its own corporation to do business in D.C.

Although he’s known mostly for his work in the LGBT rights movement, Kameny contributed his talents to other progressive causes. He became the first open gay to be appointed to a prominent city post in the 1970s, when Walter Washington, the city’s first mayor under D.C.’s newly acquired home rule government, named Kameny to the D.C. Commission on Human Rights.

In the early 1980s, Kameny won election to the D.C. Statehood Constitutional Convention and played a lead role in drafting a constitution for the proposed State of New Columbia.

During all of his years as an activist and movement leader in which I had the privilege to cover him, Kameny excelled as a news source in more stories than I can count. Thank you, Frank. You’ll be sorely missed.

Up Next

National News in Brief: October 21

Don't Miss

Police Log: October 21

FUND LGBTQ JOURNALISM

District of Columbia

Comings & Goings

SMYAL names new program, development leaders

Published

3 days ago

August 14, 2026

Peter Rosenstein

From left, Carla Lester and Tad Czyzewski

The Comings & Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at [email protected].

Congratulations to Carla Lester, LICSW on her new position as Chief Program Officer with SMYAL. Upon accepting the position she said, “SMYAL deeply aligns with my passion for honoring, protecting, and upholding the rights of all individuals, particularly LGBTQ+ youth and others who have been historically underserved, to belong to communities that affirm their identities, treat them with dignity and respect, and support their well-being. At this point in my career, I was ready to transition to an organization whose mission more closely reflected my values and was rooted in the community. SMYAL offered the opportunity to serve both an organization and a population whose mission not only resonates deeply with me but also intersects with my own multiple identities.”

Lester is a healthcare and human services executive with more than 20 years of experience in behavioral health, federal and state health insurance programs, housing, health care, education, and community-based services. She has held senior roles at Carelon Behavioral Health, Pathways to Housing and N Street Village, leading clinical programs, Housing First initiatives, homeless outreach, trauma-informed services, and integrated case management.

She earned master’s degrees in Social Work and Divinity, and maintains active clinical social work licenses in D.C. and Maryland.

Congratulations also to Tad Czyzewski on his new position as Chief Development Officer at SMYAL. On accepting the position, he said, “While I’ve spent much of my nonprofit career in the arts, the current social and political environments made me want to apply my skills and passion more directly toward supporting and strengthening our community. SMYAL and this role felt like the right place to do that.”

Czyzewski brings more than two decades of experience in nonprofit leadership and strategy, fundraising, and business development. Prior to joining SMYAL, he served for eight years as executive director of The Choral Arts Society of Washington, where he led fundraising, financial management, and community engagement. During his tenure, he helped raise more than $15 million in contributed revenue. He guided the organization through a major rebrand and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to that Czyzewski served as Business and Development Director for Washington Revels, and held leadership and advisory roles with Chorus America, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He began his career in the corporate sector, including at Capital One, where his work in product development and marketing contributed to new financial products and more than $2 billion in deposits.

Czyzewski is a lifelong musician, has performed professionally as a classical singer, including with the Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra.

District of Columbia

Gay ANC commissioner sues D.C. over police ‘failure’ to pay reward money

Lawsuit says information led to conviction in murder, armed robbery cases

Published

5 days ago

August 12, 2026

Lou Chibbaro Jr.

D.C. Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Tom Donohue (Washington Blade photo by Lou Chibbaro, Jr.)

Gay D.C. Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Tom Donohue on Aug. 11 filed a lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court charging that D.C. police acted improperly and violated a local law by not paying him $30,000 in reward money for his role in helping police identify and arrest — and obtain the subsequent conviction — of one man charged with murder and another man charged with armed robbery in separate cases.

Although the lawsuit alleges improper action by D.C. police in carrying out the city’s Crime Solvers reward program, it names as defendants the District of Columbia and the Office of the Attorney General for D.C., which, among other things, defends the city against lawsuits.

Donohue, who is a member of the city’s ANC Rainbow Caucus consisting of LGBTQ elected ANC members, held a news conference outside the D.C. Superior Court building on Aug. 11 to talk about the lawsuit before entering the courthouse to officially file it.

The lawsuit states that Donohue “provided key video evidence that led to the arrest and conviction” of a man initially charged with first degree murder for allegedly running over a bicyclist with his car after the two got into an argument.

The lawsuit states that police had offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the defendant in that case, but police “arbitrarily slashed the payment to $5,000 without prior notice or policy justification.”

Court records show that D.C. resident Eric Beasley was charged with first degree murder for killing David Farewell, 45, by hitting him with his car on Sept. 4, 2020, on the 2100 block of Young Street, S.E. The records show the evidence for the case was based in large part on video camera footage of the incident obtained by police. Donohoe has said he provided that video camera evidence.

The records show that during Beasley’s October 2023 trial a jury was unable to reach the required unanimous verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial.

According to the records, Beasley later agreed to an offer by prosecutors to plead guilty to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced in September 2024 to eight years in prison, a development that angered the victim’s family members who called it a “slap on the wrist,” according to a Fox 5 News report.

Donohue’s lawsuit says the second case in which he provided police with pivotal information involved a series of armed robberies known as the Fairlawn Serial Armed Robbery Spree that occurred in the Fairlawn neighborhood in Southeast D.C. in 2023 near where Donohue lives.

The lawsuit says evidence consisting of video surveillance footage provided by Donohue to police enabled police to determine they initially wrongfully arrested an 18-year-old male for the robberies. “Using Plaintiff’s security video, MPD identified, arrested, and convicted the actual robber, David Crocker, who was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison,” the lawsuit states.

It says one of the detectives investigating the case recommended a $10,000 reward for Donohue’s help in the case based on the police Crime Solvers reward program. The detective’s recommendation was approved by then-Assistant D.C. Police Chief Kyle Ramey on Aug. 4, 2025, according to the lawsuit.

But it adds, “Nevertheless, MPD improperly withheld payment.”

When contacted by the Washington Blade for comment on Donohue’s lawsuit allegations, a D.C. police spokesperson said “MPD does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”

Gabriel Shoglow-Rubenstein, who serves as press secretary for the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, which will be defending the city against the Donohue lawsuit, said he would look into obtaining a possible comment but said the office has a similar longstanding policy of not commenting on pending litigation.

“This action arises from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department’s arbitrary, bad-faith, and legally unsupportable failure to honor its public reward promises and administrative obligations to Plaintiff,” the lawsuit states.

It says the MPD violated the city’s Freedom of Information Act or FOIA law by not responding to Donohue’s request for information and documents related to the decision not to pay him the full reward money.

“MPD’s reduction of Plaintiff’s homicide reward from $25,000 to $5,000, and its withholding of his approved $10,00 robbery reward, were undertaken completely devoid of written standards, making such decisions inherently arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of administrative discretion,” it says.

It calls for Donohue to be awarded $30,000 in compensatory damages consisting of the $20,000 “unpaid balance” for the homicide case reward and $10,000 for the robbery case reward. It also calls for reimbursement for “reasonable” litigation costs and attorney’s fees. Donohue told the Washington Blade that at this time he is representing himself without an attorney.

Donohue told the Blade that the refusal by D.C. police to pay him the full reward money also limited his plans to donate some of that money to the family of murder victim David Farewell to help pay for a burial stone. He said that due to the family’s limited resources Farewell is buried in an unmarked grave

Delaware

New LGBTQ visitor center slated for Wilmington, Del.

The Collective to feature gift shop, queer museum, more

Published

5 days ago

August 12, 2026

Thomas Weaverling

Members of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Delaware (GLAD) at the Griffin Community Center in Wilmington, Del. (Photo from Collection of Delaware Queer History, courtesy of Ivo Dominguez Jr.)

During Pride month this year, the Delaware Sexuality and Gender Collective (DSGC) announced plans for The Collective, which will become Delaware’s first LGBTQIA+ visitor center and Wilmington’s first dedicated LGBTQIA+ space in nearly 40 years.

“We’ve been talking about the concept of a brick-and-mortar space for a long time,” said Noah Duckett, co-founder of DSGC.

A licensed clinical social worker, Duckett co-founded DSGC with his mother, Julissa Coriano, in 2018. DSGC is an independent nonprofit organization that provides vital clinical and educational support, social programming and direct-need support to the LGBTQIA+ community.

Some of the programs DSGC offers include a free clothing closet for the trans community, meal support for people recovering from gender-affirming surgery, connections to pro bono legal services, a biannual Pride Market featuring over 100 LGBTQIA+-owned small businesses, and more.

“Our vision for The Collective is a place where our community can come to learn, create, work and be inspired,” said Coriano.

The Collective will feature a visitor center and gift shop highlighting LGBTQIA+-owned businesses in Delaware.

“I think that this is something that’s going to benefit our community so much,” said Duckett.

Some of the LGBTQIA+-owned businesses that DSGC has already partnered with include Stress Induced Art Attack, Moonbeam Art Collaborative, Voce Coffee, Groovy Gemini Co., Scout Cafe, Macaron Social and Huxley and Hiro.

“Specifically in Wilmington, we haven’t had an LGBTQIA+-dedicated space in almost 40 years,” said Duckett.

The Griffin Community Center, which operated from 1986 to 1990, was Delaware’s first LGBTQ+ community center. The Griffin was founded by Ivo Dominguez Jr. and James C. Welch and provided a range of community services during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, including AIDS hotlines, organizational offices and meeting space. The center ultimately closed because of a lack of financial support.

Duckett said DSGC hopes The Collective will carry on The Griffin’s legacy while building a sustainable space for the LGBTQIA+ community.

“I think now more than ever, there’s more and more spaces closing their doors. More and more spaces are losing funding, seeing reduced funding and reduced access, especially LGBTQ+ organizations and communities,” said Duckett.

The Collective will also feature Delaware’s first LGBTQ+ history museum, curated by LGBTQ+ historian Carolanne Deal.

“We don’t have any permanent displays in the state about Delaware’s queer history, and we want people to be able to access that history any day of the year, not just during Pride Month,” said Deal.

With a master’s degree in art history for museum professionals, Deal has more than seven years of experience in curatorial work and hands-on collections care.

“It’s mainly going to be a graphic display with photographs, articles and accessible text that draws people in and creates a story for the community,” said Deal.

Although the museum will not initially have an object collection, Deal said she hopes to add physical archival pieces in the future.

“Delaware has been at the forefront of a lot of queer civil rights, and it’ll be really amazing to have that enshrined in a permanent display that’s not only up for Pride Month,” said Deal.

Duckett said DSGC is currently raising funds with the goal of beginning construction this summer and opening by the end of the year.

Duckett told the Blade that fundraising efforts have reached just under $29,000 and that the organization is awaiting several major donations from community partner organizations.

However, he said DSGC continues to be denied many grants tied to federal or state funding because of restrictions on those funds being used for LGBTQ+-serving organizations.

“Private and corporate donations are absolutely vital,” said Duckett.

Anyone interested in supporting the construction and renovation of The Collective can donate online or contact [email protected] for more information.ose funds being used for LGBTQ-serving organizations.

“Private and corporate donations are absolutely vital,” said Duckett.

Anyone interested in supporting the construction of The Collective can donate online or contact [email protected] for more information.