Frank Kameny, founder of the Matachine Society died yesterday at the age of 86.
 

This is a man whose name was not familiar to me personally, though I have long heard about the Matachine Society, He was a person of great courage. He brought the first gay anti discrimination suit before the US Supreme Court in 1961. I posted just this short article about him, but there is lots of info out there about him.
Smooches,
Keri

Frank Kameny, Gay Rights Pioneer, Dead at 86

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By JESSICA GRESKO Associated Press
WASHINGTON October 12, 2011 (AP)

Frank Kameny, who was fired from his job as a government astronomer in 1957 for being gay and became a pioneer in the gay rights movement, died Tuesday at his home in Washington. He was 86.
Bob Witeck, a friend of Kameny's for three decades, confirmed his death. Kameny had been in failing health, and a medical examiner said he suffered a heart attack or heart failure, Witeck said.
Witeck said plans for a memorial in November were being discussed.
Kameny told The Associated Press in 2009 that his contributions to the gay rights struggle had only recently begun to sink in. He said at the time he wanted to be remembered most for coming up with the slogan "Gay is Good" in 1968 to counter an onslaught of negativism aimed at gays and lesbians.
Gay rights groups mourned his passing Tuesday, noting that it was National Coming Out Day, when many gay people celebrate coming out and encourage others to have the courage to do the same.
"While so many have been impatient about the pace of progress, there was Frank, insisting we recognize that, in the last two years, he was regularly invited as a guest of honor by the very government that fired him simply for being gay," said a statement by Rea Carey, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
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AP
In this June 1, 2009 file photo, Frank Kameny is seen in his home in Washington. Frank Kameny, who was fired from his job as a government astronomer in 1957 for being homosexual and later became a pioneer in the gay rights movement, died Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2011. He was 86. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File) Close


Joe Solmonese, the president of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement that Kameny "set a path for the modern LGBT civil rights movement."
Kameny had been an astronomer for just five months when he was asked to meet with federal investigators. They told him they had information he was gay, and he was dismissed.
Kameny didn't leave quietly, however. He contested his firing by the U.S. Civil Service Commission by writing letters to the agency, both houses of Congress and eventually the White House.
He sued and lost in lower courts, but pressed on with a lengthy brief in 1961 that is now regarded as the first civil rights claim based on sexual orientation to be brought to the U.S. Supreme Court. Soon after, he co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, which advocated for equal rights for gays and lesbians.
In 1965, Kameny and 10 others became the first to stage a gay rights protest in front of the White House and later at the Pentagon and elsewhere. Many of Kameny's signs as well as buttons and leaflets from that time are now housed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
In the last years of his life, Kameny was increasingly recognized for his work as a gay rights pioneer. He was honored in 2009 during Washington's annual Capital Pride celebration and that same year received a formal apology for being fired solely based on his sexual orientation. The apology came from the successor to the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The office is headed by John Berry, who is openly gay, and Kameny attended his swearing-in.
When gay marriage became legal in the nation's capital in 2010, Kameny was at the first weddings.
"Being gay has become infinitely better than it was," he said earlier this year when documents from his collection of gay rights history went on display for the first time at the Library of Congress. "The fundamental theme underneath all of that is simply equality."

When I lived in the DC area, my ex and I would volunteer for something called Burgundy Crescent, a queer organization that matched volunteers with organizations across the DC-MD-VA area in a variety of roles. I worked helped prep food at a soup kitchen, ushered at a theatre, helped guests at Soldiers' Legal Defense Network banquets, and pruned cherry trees along the Potomac basin, among other things.

One day, our organizer put out a call to us in an email. He wrote that a renowned astronomer and Gay right activist could use some help. Our organizer shared that the astronomer was living alone in DC with an overgrown yard, crappy neighbors who wanted him gone and without of means. He was Dr. Kameny.

A group of 20 of us spent a hot afternoon mowing, cutting down bamboo, cleaning and visiting. Dr. Kameny couldn't have been more surprised or more gracious. And I was so very grateful to be able to give something back to someone who had so bravely sacrificed so much to forward the movement.

I am grateful for Burgundy Crescent and organizations like it. And I will long remember that day at Dr. Kameny's house.

Thank you for posting this, Iamkeri1. It's very important that we know our histories and honor those who led and sacrificed and made the way easier for us.

Here's a CNN article on him - what a legacy
 

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/14/opinio...tml?hpt=hp_bn9

Editor's note: David Carter's last book was "Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution," the basis for the PBS film "Stonewall Uprising." Carter is in his sixth year of research on a biography of Frank Kameny.

(CNN) -- America has lost her greatest leader in the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality: Franklin E. Kameny, universally known as Frank Kameny. It is hard today to understand the courage it took for Kameny simply to fight to get his job back after he was fired from the government's Army Map Service in 1957 for being gay.

It is probably impossible for most people now to imagine the even greater courage it took in 1961 for him to start an organization to fight for 100% equality for homosexuals. But that is exactly what he did after he exhausted all personal avenues of appeal, including writing a stirring brief to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear his case.

While it is true that there was ongoing organized political activity on behalf of American homosexuals starting in 1951 with the founding of the Mattachine Society, that organization abandoned its approach of political activism and chose for its leader a cautious man, Hal Call.

Call advocated what was known in the homophile movement (the name the movement used then) as the "education and research" approach. Gay people had so little self-confidence at that time that they felt their only chance of gaining some tolerance was by asking psychiatrists to say that we were mentally ill and therefore should be pitied and given therapy instead of being incarcerated.
David Carter
David Carter

Before writing his Supreme Court brief, Kameny had sent letters to elected and appointed government officials to try to get his job back. But he had let the lawyers write the briefs for his court cases. When the last court of appeal was the Supreme Court, even his lawyer abandoned him, seeing the cause as hopeless. So Frank wrote his own brief, and he said that doing so forced him to think through all the arguments used by the government to discriminate against homosexuals.

Kameny was extraordinarily intelligent, and the analysis he constructed was brilliant and radical for its time: We were simply another minority, and according to American values, as expressed in our founding documents, not only did we not deserve to be the objects of discrimination, but it was the government's duty to protect us from discrimination. But in 1961, the Supreme Court was not ready to hear this analysis, and it did not take the case.

Kameny's brief has now been published as the e-book "Petition Denied, Revolution Begun: Frank Kameny Petitions the Supreme Court," and it should be considered one of the foundational documents of the gay rights movement, a historic American document in the great line of inspired democratic texts that starts with the Flushing Remonstrance.

After the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, Kameny decided that he could prevail only through organized political activity. Within months of his case being declined, he managed to find enough people to start an organization for homosexual equality, the first of its kind.

It should be noted here that many people have confused his approach with that of the rest of the homophile movement because the name of the organization he founded was the Mattachine Society of Washington. However, Kameny had opposed using "Mattachine" because he wanted a name that was easily identifiable as gay; he was simply outvoted by the rest of the members.

But his approach went far beyond wanting the organization to be open about being open about its purpose. The Mattachine Constitution proclaimed its goal: "To equalize the status and the position of the homosexual with the status and position of the heterosexual by achieving equality under the law, equality of opportunity, and equality in the society of his fellow men, and by eliminating adverse prejudice, both private and official."

Progress was hard slogging for Kameny in the '60s. He and Mattachine Society of Washington co-founder Jack Nichols were passionate about the damage done by the American Psychiatric Association's classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. In the analysis of Kameny and others, gay people at the time were triply condemned as sinners, criminals and mentally ill, and Kameny came to take the position that "we cannot ask for our rights as a minority group ... from a position of inferiority or from a position ... as less than whole human beings. I feel that the entire homophile movement ... is going to stand or fall upon the question of whether or not homosexuality is a sickness and upon our taking a firm stand on it."

It was not, however, until four years after Kameny had founded the Mattachine Society of Washington that he could convince the organization he founded to take the official position that homosexuality is not a mental illness, making it the first gay organization to do so.

Kameny supported the idea of public demonstrations for homosexual rights, which was considered highly radical at the time, and when the first picket by the Mattachine Society of Washington was held in 1965, it did not notify the press for fear that it would be subject to violence or that some bureaucrat would find a way to prevent the demonstration.

But all was not slow progress and opposition. Kameny's fervor and the clarity of his vision had a catalytic effect on the movement. Barbara Gittings, one of the LGBT movement's most important figures, told me that "before I met Frank ... I had a very inchoate idea of how we could solve our problems. ... Frank came along and he had this very strong, very definite philosophy, and it crystallized my thinking. 'Well, yes, of course. If you take the position that Frank has taken, then you get a very clear view of what you have to do, and you don't have to fumble around anymore.' "

Kameny's passion and eloquence were a match for his analytical and political skills. When he was invited to speak by the Mattachine Society of New York, his speech galvanized the local militants who then ran for office and succeeded in getting rid of those leaders who had only supported the "education and research" approach.

Once elected, the militants promptly succeeded in ending police entrapment in New York City and began a court case to challenge the use of the state's liquor laws to make gay bars de facto illegal. These actions lay the foundations for the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, which in turn gave birth to the gay liberation phase of the gay civil rights movement. Now the movement had finally caught up with Kameny ... and mushroomed.

In the meantime, Kameny and his fellow pre-Stonewall activists continued their relentless fight against government discrimination: opposing every effort by the government to fire and harass lesbian and gay employees, embarrassing the government by showing how inane, stupid and cruel their regulations were, and outsmarting them.

By 1968, Kameny had gotten the national movement to adapt as its official slogan "Gay Is Good," a far cry from Hal Call's opposition even to the open use of the word "homosexuality." Kameny fought as relentlessly as a honey badger, with the result that even the federal government began to give up. He recalled how, just before the July 3, 1975, announcement by the U.S. Civil Service Commission of its reversal of its ban on the employment of gay people, he got a phone call from a "fairly high government official who told me that 'The government has decided to change its policies to suit you.' "

In 1973, Kameny probably achieved his single greatest policy victory when the fight he led succeeded in getting the American Psychiatric Association to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness. As he said, "In one fell swoop, 15 million gay people were cured!"

He did all this without caring for himself. He lived in poverty his entire adult life, after having enjoyed a good income as a scientist with a Harvard Ph.D. He never quit fighting, and he never quit caring. Long after the movement had become sizable in the 1980s, Kameny maintained a help line in his own home so that gay people in trouble could call him.

He did more than any other one individual to make the gay civil rights movement possible, ending the classification of gay people as mentally ill and laying the foundation for the overturn of sodomy laws. And he led the fight for gay people to be able to serve in the military by, for example, creating the Leonard Matlovich case, the first case that got national media attention about the issue of gay people being able to serve in the military. There is no doubt in my mind that he is the greatest activist in the history of the movement for equality for gay people.

This brings me to one final consideration, which is to ask why, if Kameny was such a great American, such a successful civil rights activist, most of the readers of this column will be hearing his name for the first time. When I was a youth in conservative Jesup, Georgia, in the 1960s, we were given "Soul on Ice" to read. The black civil rights movement was discussed in our classrooms. We knew the names of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, and we were taught about Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. the Board of Education.

Today, our youth are seeing gay issues discussed in the news, but how are they to understand these issues if they are not taught in social studies and history classes? The stark truth is that one of the reasons that our movement is not taught is simply homophobia.

The movement for gay civil rights has changed the modern world, much for the better. It is high time that this history be taught in our schools. Leaving that history out of today's classrooms is as ludicrous as not discussing the suffragist, feminist or black civil rights movements. All of these are important parts of American history, of civil rights history, and of human rights history. American schoolchildren need to learn the name of Frank Kameny as surely as they learn the names of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Malcolm X. But this won't happen unless the LGBT movement makes this a demand.

I hope we do. Our children need this, and Kameny's life deserves it.

Thank you Iamkeri and SNH for your posts. I grew up on the West coast. Before the internet, the way I learned about Queer history was via LGBTQ bookstores, LGBTQ journalism and activist.

I learned of Frank Kameny via a lecture, discussion done by Harry Hay. Harry was another early Queer activist. One of the founders of the Matachine (sp?) Society. He too is gone now. I am grateful for those that came before us and stood up and said "No more!"

"To equalize the status and the position of the homosexual with the status and position of the heterosexual by achieving equality under the law, equality of opportunity, and equality in the society of his fellow men, and by eliminating adverse prejudice, both private and official."

OH! MY! GOD!!! Thise words took my breath away. He visualized the totaI l package right from the beginning. I am so sad that I never met this man .. never even knew his name, yet I owe him everything. Those of you who are younger have no idea what it was like in the "old days" I started high School in 1961 (and had no idea I was gay), yet Frank Kameny was already on the front lines fighting for my (and your) future rights.

Thank you thank you to this great hero.
Smooches,
Keri

I feel immensely grateful that I did get to meet him and give something back. Thank you for posting this, Keri. I'm so glad you did. And thank you for what you wrote about your history and memory of him. It is so good to know and recognize.

"OH! MY! GOD!!! Thise words took my breath away. He visualized the totaI l package right from the beginning. I am so sad that I never met this man .. never even knew his name, yet I owe him everything. Those of you who are younger have no idea what it was like in the "old days" I started high School in 1961 (and had no idea I was gay), yet Frank Kameny was already on the front lines fighting for my (and your) future rights. "

I had the privilege of spending some time with Frank and Harry Hay as well as several of my elders in the movement...........

RIP Frank, Harry, those not named..........