Frank Kameny is Good

Hi Everyone,

To kick off our first post I thought it'd be appropriate to talk about one of the Founding Fathers of our movement, Dr. Frank Kameny. A terrific interview with Dr. Kameny is in featured in the current issue of the Advocate: http://www.advocate.com/currentstory1_w.asp?id=46138

Some of our peers out there might be asking who is Frank Kameny and why is he considered one of our Founding Fathers? In 1961, eight years before the Stonewall rebellion in 1969, Dr. Kameny founded the Mattachine Society of Washington DC with gay activist Jack Nichols. While most of the other gay and lesbian groups at the time opted for a more quiet and low-key way of organizing---that is, by hiding, Dr. Kameny championed a more aggressive approach by confronting elected officials. He helped organize the first Gay Rights protests in front of the White House in 1965, coined the slogan "Gay is Good," and under his leadership the Mattachine Society surged to the forefront of the Gay & Lesbian Movement (then called the Homophile Movement).

Amongst his numerous achievements he fought to remove discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation from federal employment, a battle which was accomplished in 1975, became the first openly-gay person to run for Congress in 1971, and was instrumental in getting the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality form its list of mental disorders in 1973. Along with the Daughters of Bilitis, and the Mattachine Society of NY, Kameny's group also picketed the Pentagon, US Civil Service Commission, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in the years before Stonewall.

Later on, Dr. Kameny co-founded the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, was the first openly-gay municipal employee, and wrote a bill that repealed Washington DC's sodomy law, which was enacted in 1993. Recently in 2006 Dr. Kameny donated his collection of more than 70,0000 letters, documents, and memorabilia of the history of the GLBT Movement to the US Library of Congress, and Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Frank Kameny's activism led the way for the militarism that would characterize the movement in the years after Stonewall. He is truly one of the greatest men in our community and and example of how the courage of one individual can change the course of history.

To find out more about Dr. Kameny, please visit:

http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/kameny_f.html

http://www.kamenypapers.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_E._Kameny

http://www.planetout.com/news/history/archive/19991220.html