Aldo Ponterosso's Report - Gay is Good
If society and I differ on anything, I will give society a second chance to convince me. If it fails, then I am right and society is wrong, and if society gets in my way, it will be society which will change, not I.
- Franklin E. Kameny to his mother, Rae Kameny, June 3, 1972
On August 29th 1956, Franklin E. Kameny was arrested on charges of 'lewd and indecent acts' at a bus station in San Francisco. Two plainclothes police officers had spotted the budding thirty-one-year-old astronomer being groped by another man inside the men's room. As was common for those homosexuals unlucky enough to be caught, Kameny agreed to accept the charges, earning himself a $50 fine, six-months probation and an expunged criminal record for his trouble. As a freshly minted Harvard PhD at the beginning of a promising career, Kameny was only too pleased to forget his unfortunate run-in with the law.
Yet the law was not so eager to forget Kameny. Social upheaval rarely begins in the bathroom stalls of a bus station but Kameny's arrest set in motion a series of events that led to his becoming one of the leading voices of the American gay rights movement. In 1957, Kameny was fired from his new job with the Army Map Service (AMS) after the nature of his earlier arrest became known to the Federal government. He begged to be considered as an individual, not 'as a faceless statistic,' but as the Department of State's Bureau of Security explained: 'the homosexual is automatically a security risk because of the social and emotional pressures to which he is subject from society.'1 An attractive career and any chance of re-employment by the Federal government or associated contractors had been wrenched away from Kameny. Society had been given its second chance, now it was time for it to change.
Over the next twenty years, Kameny wrote hundreds of thousands of words in support of gay rights. In his bid to change society, he wrote to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, elected officials, doctors, newspapers and even Playboy (psychiatrists were apt to promise cures for homosexuality in the magazine's forums). Kameny's prolific writing reaped considerable victories for the homosexual community. In 1973, he successfully campaigned to have homosexuality de-listed from the American Psychiatric Association's manual of mental health disorders. Two years later, his efforts saw the Civil Service Commission lift its ban on employing homosexuals. By 1993, the District of Columbia's vacuous sodomy laws had been repealed.
Franklin Kameny to President Richard Nixon, March 20th, 1971, Box 155 Franklin Kameny Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Of course, Kameny was not alone in his fight for civil liberties. There were many active gay rights groups scattered across the country, especially after the Stonewall riots in 1969. Yet Kameny's voice was unique amongst the gay rights movement for its moderate tone. A committed patriot who had fought at the Battle of the Bulge, Kameny did not want to revolutionise America so much as see it evolve. To Kameny, homosexuals were a legitimate minority group, comprising some 10% of the U.S. population. The federal government had no more grounds to discriminate against them than it did African Americans or Latinos.
"Kameny for Congress" 6th March, 1971. Box 154, Franklin Kameny Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Kameny died five years ago. His death certificate is one more piece of paper amongst the hundreds of thousands of pieces that make up the Kameny Papers at the Library of Congress. Yet as I remove this final part of Kameny's story from Box 154, I'm struck by what this collection has achieved. Without these boxes, it's conceivable that I'd be writing this report in an America where I don't have the right to get married; an America where homosexuals are treated as second-class citizens and love is at a premium, attainable only for those couples with a different set of genitals between their legs; an America where Gay is not Good.
Royal Holloway's generous Travel Award allowed me to immerse myself in the life and work of Kameny. The research I've done at the Library of Congress has been both professionally and personally rewarding. As a budding historian, working first-hand with an array of primary sources allowed me to hone my research skills and lay the groundwork for writing a longer essay on Kameny's achievements. As a direct beneficiary of his work, reading through the Kameny Papers was hugely gratifying. My thanks goes out to the University and Santander for funding this expedition, Adam Goodheart for sparking my interest in the history of gay rights and Charles Francis, for generously donating the Kameny Files to the Library of Congress.
[1] John Hanes Jr., of the Department of State's Bureau of Security and Consular affairs to Franklin E. Kameny, November 7, 1960, quoted in Gay is Good, ed., Michael G. Long (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 10-11.