Local
Covering Frank Kameny
A reporter’s 35-year journey chronicling the nation’s preeminent gay activist
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.
District of Columbia
Catching up with the asexuals and aromantics of D.C.
Exploring identity and finding community
There was enough commotion in the sky at the Blossom Kite Festival that bees might have been pollinating the Washington Monument. I despaired of quickly finding the Asexuals and Aromantics of the Mid-Atlantic—I couldn’t make out a single asexual flag among the kites up above. I thought to myself that if it had been the Homosexuals of the Mid-Atlantic I would’ve had my gaydar to rely on. Was there even such a thing as ace-dar?
As it turned out, the asexual kite the group had meant to fly was a little too pesky to pilot. “Have you ever used a stunt kite?” Bonnie, the event organizer asked me. “I bought one. It looked really cool. But I can’t make it work.” She sighed. “I can’t get the thing six feet off the ground.” The group hardly seemed to care. There was caramel popcorn and cookies, board games and head massages, a game of charades with more than its fair share of Pokémon. The kites up above might as well have been a coincidental sideshow. Nearly two dozen folks filtered in and out of the picnic throughout the course of the day.
But I counted myself lucky that Bonnie picked me out of the crowd. If there’s such a thing as ace-dar, it eludes asexuals too. The online forum for all matters asexual, AVEN, or the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, is filled with laments: “I don’t think it’s possible.” “Dude, I wish I had an ace-dar.” “If it exists, I don’t have it.” “I think this is just like a broken clock is right twice a day type thing.” What seems to be a more common experience is meeting someone you just click with—only to find out later that they’re asexual. A few of the folks I met described how close childhood friends of theirs likewise came out in adulthood, a phenomenon that will be familiar to many queer people. But it is all the more astounding for asexuals to find each other this way, given that asexual people constitute 1.7% of sexual minorities in America, and so merely .1% of the population at large.
To help other asexuals identify you out in the world, some folks wear a black ring on their middle finger, much as an earring on the right ear used to signify homosexuality in a less welcoming era. The only problem? The swinger community—with its definite non-asexuality—has also adopted the signal. “It’s still a thing,” said Emily Karp. “So some people wear their ace rings just to the ace meet-ups.” Karp has been the primary coordinator for the Asexuals and Aromantics of the Mid-Atlantic (AAMA) since 2021, and a member of the meet-up for a decade. She clicked with the group immediately. After showing up for a Fourth of July potluck in the mid-afternoon, she ended up staying past midnight. “We played Cards against Humanity, which was a very, very fun thing to do. It’s funny in a way that’s different than if we were playing with people that weren’t ace. Some of the cards are implying, like, the person would be motivated by sex in a way that’s absurd, because we know they aren’t.”
Where so many social organizations withered during the pandemic, the AAMA flourished. Today, it boasts almost 2,000 members on meetup.com. Karp hypothesized that all the social isolation gave people copious time to reflect on themselves, and that the ease of meeting up online made it convenient as a way for people to explore their sexual identity and find community. Online events continue to make up about a third of the group’s meet-ups. The format allows people to participate who live farther out from D.C. And it allows people to participate at their preferred level of comfort: while many people participate much as they would at an in-person event, some prefer to watch anonymously, video feed off. Others prefer to participate in the chat box, though not in spoken conversation.
A recent online event was organized for a discussion of Rhaina Cohen’s book, “The Other Significant Others,” published in February. Cohen’s book discusses friendship as an alternative model for “significant others,” apart from the romantic model that is presupposed to be both the center and goal of people’s lives. The AAMA group received the book with enthusiasm. “It literally re-wired my brain,” as one person put it. People discussed the importance of friendship to their lives, and their difficulties in a world that de-prioritized friendship. “I can break up with a friend over text, and we don’t owe each other a conversation,” one said. But there was some disagreement when it came to the book’s discussion of romantic relationships. “It relegates ace relationships to the ‘friend’ or ‘platonic’ category, to the normie-reader,” one person wrote in the chat. “Our whole ace point is that we can have equivalent life relationships to allo people, simply without sex.” (“Allo” is shorthand for allosexual or alloromantic, people who do experience sexual or romantic attraction.)
The folks of the AAMA do not share a consensus on the importance of romantic relationships to their lives. Some asexuals identify as aromantic, some don’t. And some aromantics don’t identify as asexual, either. The “Aromantic” in the title of the group is a relatively recent addition. In 2017, the group underwent a number of big changes. The group was marching for the first time in D.C. Pride, participating in the LGBTQ Creating Change conference, and developing a separate advocacy and activism arm. Moreover, the group had become large enough that discussions were opened up into forming separate chapters for D.C., Central Virginia, and Baltimore. During those discussions, the group leadership realized that aromantic people who also identified as allosexual didn’t really have a space to call their own. “We were thinking it would be good to probably change the name of the Meetup group,” Emily said. “But we were not 100% sure. Because [there were] like 1,000 people in the group, and they’re all aces, and it’s like, ‘Do you really want to add a non-ace person?’” The group leadership decided to err on the side of inclusion. “You know, being less gatekeep-y was better. It gave them a place to go — because there was nowhere else to go.”
The DC LGBT Center now sponsors a support group for both asexuals and aromantics, but it was formed just a short while ago, in 2022. The founder of the group originally sought out the center’s bisexual support group, since they didn’t have any resources for ace folks. “The organizer said, you know what, why don’t we just start an ace/aro group? Like, why don’t we just do it?” He laughed. “I was impressed with the turnout, the first call. It’s almost like we tapped into, like, a dam. You poke a hole in the dam, and the water just rushes out.” The group has a great deal of overlap with the AAMA, but it is often a person’s first point of contact with the asexual and aromantic community in D.C., especially since the group focuses on exploring what it means to be asexual. Someone new shows up at almost every meeting. “And I’m so grateful that I did,” one member said. “I kind of showed up and just trauma dumped, and everyone was really supportive.”
Since the ace and aro community is so small, even within the broader queer community, ace and aro folks often go unrecognized. To the chagrin of many, the White House will write up fact sheets about the LGBTQI+ community, which is odd, given that when the “I” is added to the acronym, the “A” is usually added too. OKCupid has 22 genders and 12 orientations on its dating website, but “aromantic” is not one of them — presumably because aromantic people don’t want anything out of dating. And since asexuality and aromanticism are defined by the absence of things, it can seem to others like ace and aro people are ‘missing something.’ One member of the LGBT center support group had an interesting response. “The space is filled by… whatever else!” they said. “We’re not doing a relationship ‘without that thing.’ We’re doing a full scale relationship — as it makes sense to us.”
CJ Higgins is a postdoctoral fellow with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
District of Columbia
Bowser budget proposal calls for $5.25 million for 2025 World Pride
AIDS office among agencies facing cuts due to revenue shortfall
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed fiscal year 2025 budget includes a request for $5.25 million in funding to support the June 2025 World Pride celebration, which D.C. will host, and which is expected to bring three million or more visitors to the city.
The mayor’s proposed budget, which she presented to the D.C. Council for approval earlier this month, also calls for a 7.6 percent increase in funding for the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, which amounts to an increase of $132,000 and would bring the office’s total funding to $1.7 million. The office, among other things, provides grants to local organizations that provide services to the LGBTQ community.
Among the other LGBTQ-related funding requests in the mayor’s proposed budget is a call to continue the annual funding of $600,000 to provide workforce development services for transgender and gender non-conforming city residents “experiencing homelessness and housing instability.” The budget proposal also calls for a separate allocation of $600,000 in new funding to support a new Advanced Technical Center at the Whitman-Walker Health’s Max Robinson Center in Ward 8.
Among the city agencies facing funding cuts under the mayor’s proposed budget is the HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, Sexually Transmitted Disease, and Tuberculosis Administration, known as HAHSTA, which is an arm of the D.C. Department of Health. LGBTQ and AIDS activists have said HAHSTA plays an important role in the city’s HIV prevention and support services. Observers familiar with the agency have said it recently lost federal funding, which the city would have to decide whether to replace.
“We weren’t able to cover the loss of federal funds for HAHSTA with local funds,” Japer Bowles, director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, told the Washington Blade. “But we are working with partners to identify resources to fill those funding gaps,” Bowles said.
The total proposed budget of $21 billion that Bowser submitted to the D.C. Council includes about $500 million in proposed cuts in various city programs that the mayor said was needed to offset a projected $700 million loss in revenue due, among other things, to an end in pandemic era federal funding and commercial office vacancies also brought about by the post pandemic commercial property and office changes.
Bowser’s budget proposal also includes some tax increases limited to sales and business-related taxes, including an additional fee on hotel bookings to offset the expected revenue losses. The mayor said she chose not to propose an increase in income tax or property taxes.
Earlier this year, the D.C. LGBTQ+ Budget Coalition, which consists of several local LGBTQ advocacy organizations, submitted its own fiscal year 2025 budget proposal to both Bowser and the D.C. Council. In a 14-page letter the coalition outlined in detail a wide range of funding proposals, including housing support for LGBTQ youth and LGBTQ seniors; support for LGBTQ youth homeless services; workforce and employment services for transgender and gender non-conforming residents; and harm reduction centers to address the rise in drug overdose deaths.
Another one of the coalition’s proposals is $1.5 million in city funding for the completion of the D.C. Center for the LGBTQ Community’s new building, a former warehouse building in the city’s Shaw neighborhood that is undergoing a build out and renovation to accommodate the LGBTQ Center’s plans to move in later this year. The coalition’s budget proposal also calls for an additional $300,000 in “recurring” city funding for the LGBTQ Center in subsequent years “to support ongoing operational costs and programmatic initiatives.”
Bowles noted that Bowser authorized and approved a $1 million grant for the LGBTQ Center’s new building last year but was unable to provide additional funding requested by the budget coalition for the LGBTQ Center for fiscal year 2025.
“We’re still in this with them,” Bowles said. “We’re still looking and working with them to identify funding.”
The total amount of funding that the LGBTQ+ Budget Coalition listed in its letter to the mayor and Council associated with its requests for specific LGBTQ programs comes to $43.1 million.
Heidi Ellis, who serves as coordinator of the coalition, said the coalition succeeded in getting some of its proposals included in the mayor’s budget but couldn’t immediately provide specific amounts.
“There are a couple of areas I would argue we had wins,” Ellis told the Blade. “We were able to maintain funding across different housing services, specifically around youth services that affect folks like SMYAL and Wanda Alston.” She was referring to the LGBTQ youth services group SMYAL and the LGBTQ organization Wanda Alston Foundation, which provides housing for homeless LGBTQ youth.
“We were also able to secure funding for the transgender, gender non-conforming workforce program,” she said. “We also had funding for migrant services that we’ve been advocating for and some wins on language access,” said Ellis, referring to programs assisting LGBTQ people and others who are immigrants and aren’t fluent in speaking English.
Ellis said that although the coalition’s letter sent to the mayor and Council had funding proposals that totaled $43.1 million, she said the coalition used those numbers as examples for programs and policies that it believes would be highly beneficial to those in the LGBTQ community in need.
“I would say to distill it down to just we ask for $43 million or whatever, that’s not an accurate picture of what we’re asking for,” she said. “We’re asking for major investments around a few areas – housing, healthcare, language access. And for capital investments to make sure the D.C. Center can open,” she said. “It’s not like a narrative about the dollar amounts. It’s more like where we’re trying to go.”
The Blade couldn’t’ immediately determine how much of the coalition’s funding proposals are included in the Bowser budget. The mayor’s press secretary, Daniel Gleick, told the Blade in an email that those funding levels may not have been determined by city agencies.
“As for specific funding levels for programs that may impact the LGBTQ community, such as individual health programs through the Department of Health, it is too soon in the budget process to determine potential adjustments on individual programs run though city agencies,” Gleick said.
But Bowles said several of the programs funded in the mayor’s budget proposal that are not LGBTQ specific will be supportive of LGBTQ programs. Among them, he said, is the budget’s proposal for an increase of $350,000 in funding for senior villages operated by local nonprofit organizations that help support seniors. Asked if that type of program could help LGBTQ seniors, Bowles said, “Absolutely – that’s definitely a vehicle for LGBTQ senior services.”
He said among the programs the increased funding for the mayor’s LGBTQ Affairs office will support is its ongoing cultural competency training for D.C. government employees. He said he and other office staff members conduct the trainings about LGBTQ-related issues at city departments and agencies.
Bowser herself suggested during an April 19 press conference that local businesses, including LGBTQ businesses and organizations, could benefit from a newly launched city “Pop-Up Permit Program” that greatly shortens the time it takes to open a business in vacant storefront buildings in the downtown area.
Bowser and Nina Albert, D.C. Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, suggested the new expedited city program for approving permits to open shops and small businesses in vacant storefront spaces could come into play next year when D.C. hosts World Pride, one of the word’s largest LGBTQ events.
“While we know that all special events are important, there is an especially big one coming to Washington, D.C. next year,” Bowser said at the press conference. “And to that point, we proposed a $5.25 million investment to support World Pride 2025,” she said, adding, “It’s going to be pretty great. And so, we’re already thinking about how we can include D.C. entrepreneurs, how we’re going to include artists, how we’re going to celebrate across all eight wards of our city as well,” she said.
Among those attending the press conference were officials of D.C.’s Capital Pride Alliance, which will play a lead role in organizing World Pride 2025 events.
Maryland
Health care for Marylanders with HIV is facing huge cuts this summer
Providers poised to lose three-quarters of funding
BY MEREDITH COHN | By the end of June, health care providers in Maryland will lose nearly three-quarters of the funding they use to find and treat thousands of people with HIV.
Advocates and providers say they had been warned there would be less money by the Maryland Department of Health, but were stunned at the size of the drop — from about $17.9 million this fiscal year to $5.3 million the next. The deep cuts are less than three months away.
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
Ed Bailey brings Secret Garden to Project GLOW festival
Washington Improv Theatre hosts ‘The Queeries’
Drag Underground returns
White House Correspondents’ Dinner set for Saturday
Calendar: April 26-May 2
State Department releases annual human rights report
Argentina government dismisses transgender public sector employees
Joe Vogel campaign holds ‘Big Gay Canvass Kickoff’
Catching up with the asexuals and aromantics of D.C.
Smithsonian staff concerned about future of LGBTQ programming amid GOP scrutiny
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State Department3 days agoState Department releases annual human rights report
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South America1 day agoArgentina government dismisses transgender public sector employees
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Maryland5 days agoJoe Vogel campaign holds ‘Big Gay Canvass Kickoff’
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District of Columbia1 day agoCatching up with the asexuals and aromantics of D.C.