Latest news with #Kameny
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why is Dupont Circle important to DC's LGBTQ community? A look back
WASHINGTON - U.S. Park Police and DC Police confirmed on Friday that Dupont Circle would be closed for what may be the largest pride festival in the District's history, drawing criticism from DC leaders and the LGBTQ community. But why is Dupont Circle important in DC's Pride history? The backstory The first Pride festival was a block party organized by LGBT bookstore Lambda Rising in 1975, then located three blocks north of Dupont Circle on 20th and S St NW. The store closed in 2010, after 35 years of business. By 1981, a parade was added as part of the annual festivities, starting at Meridian Hill Park and ending at Dupont Circle. Parade routes in the 90s traveled along P Street through Dupont Circle before traveling south to Freedom Plaza. Dig deeper The larger Dupont Circle neighborhood has long been considered one of D.C. prominent gay neighborhoods. Every Halloween since 1986, a High Heel Drag Queen Race takes place on 17th Street, two blocks away from Dupont Circle. The race made headlines in 1991 when police arrested six men at the unpermitted event, using what many called "excessive force" to break up the revelry. An investigation into the officers followed, as well as an apology from D.C.'s then Mayor Sharon Pratt. Big picture view D.C. has a deep history of gay rights activism throughout the last six decades. In 1965, the DC chapter of the Mattachine Society picketed for gay rights in front of the White House – four years before the Stonewall Riots in New York City. Dr. Frank Kameny, a federal employee who was fired from his job for suspected homosexuality in 1957, served co-founded the Mattachine Society and organized the first of many White House pickets in the summer of 1965. Kameny told FOX 5 DC in a 1991 interview that D.C. had a "repressive kind of atmosphere" in the early 60s. "The vice squad had been set up … to, in effect, hunt down gays and create occasions for arresting us so that we could be thrown out of the civil service, out of civil service jobs, because at that point simply being gay was a disqualifier for federal employment," said Kameny. But Kameny also described the 60s as a "wonderful time to be doing anything and exciting and stimulating." "Nothing had been done and everything had remained to be done and we went out and did it. And we could, and we accomplished things," said Kameny. "Nowadays the road has a few more rocks. Watch more archival footage from D.C.'s Pride history on FOX LOCAL. The Source This story includes information from the National Park Service and previous FOX 5 DC reporting.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trailblazing gay rights activist honored for turning his firing from Army into lifelong mission
Lawmakers and activists gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court on Wednesday to commemorate the 100th birthday of the late LGBTQ rights pioneer Frank Kameny. The building was shrouded in scaffolding — a work in progress — and the words 'EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW' were barely visible through a haze of mesh. More than 60 years earlier, decision-makers in the same courthouse denied Kameny's request to challenge his termination from the Army Map Service, which had fired him in 1957 because of his sexual orientation. For most, if they had the courage to petition the high court in the first place, that denial would've been the end of it. For Kameny, it ignited a storied career that would take him from picketing with fewer than a dozen people outside the White House in 1965 to shaking the hand of President Barack Obama in the Oval Office in 2009. Kameny's decades of activism changed the lives of countless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Americans, but even so, today's LGBTQ advocates fear his name is being lost to history. 'We're the only minority community worldwide that's not taught its history at home, public school or religious institution,' said one of the organizer's of Wednesday's event, Malcolm Lazin, the founder and executive director of Equality Forum. 'It's hugely important that people recognize Frank Kameny as the founder of the movement. … We would not be where we are today without Frank Kameny.' After having fought for the United States in World War II, Kameny earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics at Harvard University in 1956. That took him once again to the Army, this time in its Map Service, where he would build astronomy maps to guide U.S. missiles. But when the Civil Service Commission discovered a previous arrest for 'lewd conduct,' he was asked whether he was 'a homosexual' and then fired under President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450, which listed 'sexual perversion' as grounds for revoking a security clearance. It was 1957, and Kameny, then just 32, would never work for the U.S. government again. 'Frank really saw the injustice of it,' said Randy Wicker, 87, a lifelong activist and friend of Kameny's. 'He believed in the promise of fair and equal in American society.' After he lost two federal court battles, Kameny filed his petition with the nation's highest court despite having no legal experience. In his petition, he did something revolutionary: He didn't deny he was gay; instead, he challenged long-held social beliefs that there was something inherently wrong with same-sex attraction. 'Petitioner asserts, flatly, unequivocally, and absolutely uncompromisingly, that homosexuality … is not only not immoral,' Kameny wrote, 'but that, for those choosing voluntarily to engage in homosexual acts, such acts are moral in a real and positive sense, and are good, right, and desirable, socially and personally.' Even though his petition was denied, it would be the defining moment of Kameny's life. The focus and surgical exactitude that qualified him to guide a missile through the stars would from then on be applied to guiding an unwilling society to the idea that gay Americans were, in every way, deserving of equal rights and respect under the law. 'Frank Kameny didn't necessarily set out to be an activist,' said Jim Obergefell, the named plaintiff in the Supreme Court's 2015 landmark same-sex marriage ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges. 'Frank Kameny saw injustice. He was experiencing unfair treatment, and he reached that point where he was no longer willing to accept it, and he took action, and it was a scary thing for him to do to start these, these marches in public, to demand equality and fairness.' In 1961, the year the high court rejected his petition, Kameny and fellow activist Jack Nichols founded the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations in the country. At a time when homosexual acts were punished by law and homophobia was the norm, Kameny proclaimed his identity in the streets, even in front of the White House and other government buildings. He also persuaded other gays and lesbians to picket along with him and demand equal rights. That culminated in the Annual Reminder demonstrations outside Philadelphia's Independence Hall, which started in 1965 and continued until 1969. Kameny enforced a strict dress code for participants at the demonstrations to create an air of respectability. 'It was 100 degrees, 100 literally; it was July the Fourth. Boiling hot,' Wicker said. 'Frank insisted we all wear coats and ties and that women all wear dresses and we act as 'ordinary Americans.'' Longtime LGBTQ activist Martha Shelley, who also participated in the pickets, similarly loathed the dress code: 'I hated having to put on a dress or skirt and march around with these pre-printed picket signs and be respectable,' she a 1969 letter, Kameny defended the policy: 'As I have pointed out before, if a 'hippie' dressed as such, and a man in a suit, shirt, and tie get up before an average audience and present the same identical message, the suited man will be listened to and his message accepted by far more people than in the case of the hippie. That is NOT as it should be, but it is as it IS.' Even after activists voted in 1970 to replace the Annual Reminder pickets with a demonstration in New York City that would eventually become the annual NYC Pride march, Kameny showed up — notably, not in a suit and tie — to join the procession. 'In that march up Sixth Avenue for the first Christopher Street Liberation Day … I was moved to a feeling of pride, exhilaration, and accomplishment, a feeling that this crowd of five thousand was a direct lineal descendent of our ten frightened people in front of the White House five years ago!' Kameny said in an interview for the 1975 book 'The Gay Crusaders,' by Wicker and fellow activist Kay Tobin. Kameny knew the nascent gay movement would stand or fall on the issue of whether homosexuality was treated as a curable illness. That would require convincing the entire medical establishment — and challenging gay people's own perceptions of themselves. Charles Kaiser, author of the queer history book 'The Gay Metropolis,' said during the early days of Kameny's activism that 'the medical profession is as unanimous about homosexuality as it is about cancer.' 'In other words, if you have it, you have to get rid of it,' Kaiser added. When the American Psychiatric Association first published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly referred to as the DSM, in 1952, homosexuality was listed among its disorders — and it would stay that way for more than two decades. So-called treatments included chemical castration, lobotomy and electroshock therapy. Homosexuality's status as a mental disorder was the consensus of the medical community at the time and what many gays and lesbians believed about themselves. For Kameny, the entire movement rested on first dispelling that myth. 'IF society calls homosexuality a sickness (and it does),' Kameny wrote in 1962 to Mattachine New York's Dick Leitsch, 'then the entire validity of our entire position, of our demands for equality, of everything for which we stand rests upon our responding to that sickness with a denial.' But so entrenched was the myth that even a decade later, only one gay psychiatrist was willing to join Kameny and his collaborator, Barbara Gittings, on a panel at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association's annual convention. Even then, the psychiatrist — known then as Dr. Henry Anonymous but later revealed to be Dr. John Fryer — insisted on wearing a mask to say the words 'I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.' By the following year, after years of work by Kameny, Gittings and others, the American Psychiatric Association would remove homosexuality from its list of disorders. 'We all have to emulate Frank's fearlessness and determination to make sure that scientific truth triumphs over all kinds of bigotry, especially religious bigotry,' Kaiser said, 'He made the science more powerful than the prejudice in his own lifetime, and we all have to go on fighting to do that.' Before he died in 2011 at age 86, Kameny got to witness many of the seeds he planted bloom. Multiple states and his home municipality, Washington, would legalize same-sex marriage; he would stand alongside Obama in the Oval Office in 2009 as he signed a memo extending benefits to same-sex partners of executive branch employees; and, as a combat veteran, he would be in the room when Obama relegated the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy to the history books. 'He was so thrilled that [Obama and Vice President Joe Biden] knew him by name when he entered,' Wicker said. 'They apologized to him for having been excluded from working for the government.' But according to Wicker, Kameny would grapple for the rest of his life with that initial injustice — so much that he would never allow himself to let down his guard. 'He was a very sad person, because his situation turned him into a fanatic. When I visited him down in Washington, he listened to 'The 700 Club' every morning,' Wicker said, referring to the evangelical talk show then hosted by the virulently anti-gay televangelist Pat Robertson. When he asked Kameny why he would listen to 'those crazy people,' Wicker recalled, Kameny said: 'Well, you got to know what the enemy's saying and doing.' As in Kameny's time, thousands of federal workers are being fired or pushed out because of perceived conflicts of ideology. Transgender service members are also being expelled from the military, regardless of the merits of their service. 'Frank Kameny fought a courageous battle with the federal government to secure the respect, dignity, and equality that every LGBTQ American deserves,' Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., told NBC News in a statement. 'Frank didn't live to realize our dream of full equal rights for LGBTQ Americans, but it's our responsibility to pick up the mantle in this fight as we honor his legacy as a pioneer for gay equality.' The America that radicalized Kameny is, in some ways, not so different from the America where beneficiaries of his work — the first out gay U.S. senator (Baldwin), a plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case (Obergefell) and nearly 100 LGBTQ rights activists — gathered Wednesday. A web page celebrating Kameny's residence on the National Register of Historical Places was quietly erased from the National Park Service website this year. Reached for comment, the Park Service said it was implementing President Donald Trump's executive order targeting 'gender ideology extremism.' More than a decade after his death, Kameny's work is still being erased from the government through executive order. 'When any of our history is erased or denied,' Obergefell said, 'the whole entire nation suffers, because the only way we can actually become a more perfect union is by understanding where we've been.' Kameny was no lawyer, yet he took on the Supreme Court. He was no psychiatrist, but he helped revolutionize the way the medical community viewed homosexuality. And he wasn't initially an activist. He was a fired scientist who saw injustice, and that was enough to sustain him for 65 years of frustration and progress. 'The power comes from the people,' Shelley said of Kameny's work and legacy. 'Change comes from the bottom. It always has.' After Wednesday's event, organizers announced that city officials in Philadelphia and Washington had declared May 21 'Frank Kameny Day' in their cities. This article was originally published on
NBC News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Trailblazing gay rights activist honored for turning his firing from Army into lifelong mission
After he lost two federal court battles, Kameny filed his petition with the nation's highest court despite having no legal experience. In his petition, he did something revolutionary: He didn't deny he was gay; instead, he challenged long-held social beliefs that there was something inherently wrong with same-sex attraction. 'Petitioner asserts, flatly, unequivocally, and absolutely uncompromisingly, that homosexuality … is not only not immoral,' Kameny wrote, 'but that, for those choosing voluntarily to engage in homosexual acts, such acts are moral in a real and positive sense, and are good, right, and desirable, socially and personally.' Even though his petition was denied, it would be the defining moment of Kameny's life. The focus and surgical exactitude that qualified him to guide a missile through the stars would from then on be applied to guiding an unwilling society to the idea that gay Americans were, in every way, deserving of equal rights and respect under the law. 'Frank Kameny didn't necessarily set out to be an activist,' said Jim Obergefell, the named plaintiff in the Supreme Court's 2015 landmark same-sex marriage ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges. 'Frank Kameny saw injustice. He was experiencing unfair treatment, and he reached that point where he was no longer willing to accept it, and he took action, and it was a scary thing for him to do to start these, these marches in public, to demand equality and fairness.' From pickets to pride marches In 1961, the year the high court rejected his petition, Kameny and fellow activist Jack Nichols founded the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations in the country. At a time when homosexual acts were punished by law and homophobia was the norm, Kameny proclaimed his identity in the streets, even in front of the White House and other government buildings. He also persuaded other gays and lesbians to picket along with him and demand equal rights. That culminated in the Annual Reminder demonstrations outside Philadelphia's Independence Hall, which started in 1965 and continued until 1969. Kameny enforced a strict dress code for participants at the demonstrations to create an air of respectability. 'It was 100 degrees, 100 literally; it was July the Fourth. Boiling hot,' Wicker said. 'Frank insisted we all wear coats and ties and that women all wear dresses and we act as 'ordinary Americans.'' Longtime LGBTQ activist Martha Shelley, who also participated in the pickets, similarly loathed the dress code: 'I hated having to put on a dress or skirt and march around with these pre-printed picket signs and be respectable,' she recalled.
