Franklin Kameny: October Portrait of the Month

Franklin Kameny, Washington, DC, 1991

Pioneer gay rights activist Franklin Kameny was born in New York City in 1925. After being fired from his post as an astronomer with the Army Map Service in 1957, he filed the first civil rights claim based on sexual orientation and took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kameny is credited with bringing a new aggressiveness to the struggle for equal rights for gay citizens. He coined the slogan “Gay is Good” for gay activism. Kameny and Jack Nichols co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington in late 1957, which fought gay discrimination in the federal government, including protesting security clearance denials, job restrictions, and firings. In 1963, the group started a campaign to overturn sodomy laws and to renounce the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

In April 1965, Kameny and Nichols staged the first public demonstration by gays and lesbians in front of the White House. Joined by the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society’s picketing spread to the Pentagon, the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. In 1971, Kameny ran in the District of Columbia’s first election for a non-voting delegate to Congress, making him the earliest openly gay candidate for U.S. Congress. Later in the 1970s, he reached another milestone by becoming the first openly gay appointee of the Human Rights Commission in Washington.

In 2006, the Library of Congress acquired Kameny’s documents, which chronicled his life and leadership. A year later his picket signs from the 1965 White House protest were included at the National Museum of American History’s Treasures of American History exhibition. Kameny suffered heart disease in his later years, and on October 11, 2011, National Coming Out Day, he died at his home in Washington.