Signs of Progress

It was also a time when someone like Kameny -- an astronomer for the Army Map Service, who fought in the front lines during World War II and earned his PhD from Harvard -- could be and was fired in 1957 for being gay. Executive Order 10450, signed by President Eisenhower in April 1953, mandated that "sexual perversion" -- "That meant us," says Kameny, green eyes narrowing -- was grounds for firing a federal employee and for barring the hiring of a homosexual.

Incredulous, Kameny fought the dismissal, eventually petitioning the Supreme Court. In a 61-page brief he wrote himself ("The court had a major footnote in their response objecting to its length," he says), Kameny called the government's anti-homosexual policies "a stench in the nostrils of decent people." The high court refused to hear his case in 1961.

Shortly after, he formed the Mattachine Society of Washington, the country's first "civil-liberties, social action organization dedicated to improving the status of the homosexual citizen through a vigorous program of action," according to a Mattachine brochure in his attic.

"If society and I differ on something, I'm willing to give the matter a second look. If we still differ, then I am right and society is wrong; and society can go its way so long as it does not get in my way," Kameny said back then, according to the book "Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America." "But if it does, there's going to be a fight. And I'm not going to be the one who backs down. That has been an underlying premise of the conduct of my life."

From 1965 to 1969, in what became a yearly Fourth of July protest in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Kameny led the picket line in a three-piece suit. The protesters -- the women in dresses and heels, the men in jackets and ties -- looking so polished that passersby thought they were actors pretending to be homosexuals.

For nearly half a century, Kameny made regular news within gay activist circles -- Kameny did this, Kameny did that. But the name Franklin E. Kameny is not as recognizable as Harvey Milk, the slain San Francisco city supervisor, or Larry Kramer, the writer and AIDS activist. In his formal, buttoned-up manner, Kameny projects the stereotypical air of a Washington busybody (and, as a member of the Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia, he's very much a city history buff). He never again worked as an astronomer -- his passion since age 6 -- but for decades worked as a "self-characterized paralegal." In the course of the 1960s, '70s, '80s and into the early '90s, he became, not by choice but by circumstance, the authority to whom gays seeking security clearances turned.

Through it all, Kameny, a self-described "pack rat" and proud of it, has stored documents, posters, letters, fliers, articles.

He is regarded as the first openly gay person to seek public office, running in 1971 for the District's nonvoting seat in the House of Representatives. ("Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight," his supporters chanted as they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue the day before the election.)

Kameny, together with the Mattachines, confronted the American Psychiatric Association and won the battle to get homosexuality delisted as a mental illness in 1973. On the national stage and especially on the local stage, he fought anti-sodomy laws for decades. "The District's sodomy law was repealed effective on Sept. 11, 1993," he says, "and that concluded a 30-year 1-month 4-day 11-hour effort on my part.

"The one thing that I want to be remembered for, if only one," he says, "is that in 1968, inspired by the slogan 'Black Is Beautiful,' I coined the term 'Gay Is Good.' "

In last month's gay pride parade in Washington, where colorful and creatively designed posters read "I {heart} my gay son," "Lesbian of Faith" and "Let us tie the knot," Kameny was greeted, with hugs or kisses or handshakes or salutes, by all of the District's elected officials who participated, including David Catania and Jim Graham, the District's two openly gay council members.

To the ruling class of gays in Washington, Kameny is a one-man institution -- patriarch, ambassador and also field general, taking on all manner of lawmakers, clerics and pundits who opposed gay rights.

He lives alone. On Fridays he stops by Lambda Rising to get his copy of the Washington Blade. He never misses an episode of cable TV's "Queer as Folk" and "Six Feet Under" (the latter features the off-and-on relationship of two gay men) and keeps himself occupied with meetings and events for organizations such as the Gay and Lesbian Activist Alliance and his neighborhood association. He has no family, except for his 77-year-old sister, Edna, who lives in Long Island. He has remained -- except for a love affair with a man named Keith in what he refers to as the "golden summer of 1954" -- steadfastly single. (But don't think for a minute that he wants your help or needs your sympathy, because he's taking "quite good care" of himself, thank you.)

In May, some of Kameny's friends and admirers threw him a lavish 80th-birthday party with 160 guests at David Greggory, a downtown restaurant. The walls were decorated with Kameny's picket posters.

Charles Francis, a public relations consultant and co-chair of the Republican Unity Coalition, organized the birthday party, and hopes Kameny's collection will someday have a place in the Smithsonian's American History Museum -- Kameny's posters, he says, should be displayed alongside those of the suffragettes.

"Those posters, we all knew, are more than just posters. They have a chi force, a presence," Francis says. "They have an importance, not just as a gay thing but as an American thing. So I told Frank, 'Let's use your posters in the party.' Those posters are so powerful because gays had never spoken out publicly before, had never stepped forward lawfully and constructively into the public square."

"Frank is the closest thing we have to the philosopher king of the gay rights movement. He represents the continuum of knowledge in the history of the movement itself," says Dudley Clendinen, co-author of "Out for Good." He was asked to formally introduce Kameny at the party, and described him as "part Galileo, part Thomas Jefferson, part Brad Pitt, part Mr. Magoo."

"He is someone who stood for what he believed to be right -- against law, organized religion, medical authority and the tide of public opinion all his adult life. It has been almost half a century," Clendinen says, weeks after the party. "The battles against the ps ychiatrists and the sodomy laws have been won. Church doctrine is changing and public opinion has changed enormously. Kameny hasn't changed, but the culture has, and he is one of the reasons."