ABSTRACT
In October 1957, Franklin E. Kameny’s life was forever changed. Fired from the federal civil service for his homosexuality, that month Kameny began a Herculean struggle with the American establishment that would transform the homophile movement. As historian John D'Emilio has noted, Kameny spearheaded a new period of militancy in the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s. From his base in the nation’s capital, he brought traditional reform movement tactics—publicity, lawsuits, lobbying, public demonstrations— to the homophile movement. As founder and president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, Kameny showed that gays, similar to other minority groups, could stand up for themselves and demand equal rights as “homosexual American citizens.” One of the first gay leaders to proclaim that homosexuality was neither sick nor immoral—a philosophy he eventually refined into the slogan “Gay Is Good”—he persuaded gays and lesbians to move beyond the strategies of 1950s’ self-help groups and to adopt the political strategies of the civil rights movement. A victim of the federal civil service’s antigay purges, Kameny launched the first systematic challenge to the government’s exclusion of gays and lesbians, attacking the Cold War era notion that gay men and lesbians posed a risk to national security. A tireless advocate for other purge victims and a persistent critic of government security officials, he more than any other individual deserves credit for the federal civil service’s 1975 decision to abandon its antigay exclusion policy. As the first gay activist in the United States to take on the federal government, Kameny inaugurated many of the tactics and strategies that have since become standard in the gay and lesbian rights movement.
