Frank Kameny's Long Fight Against the Government That Fired Him

In 1957 the United States was racing the Soviet Union into space, and it needed astronomers. Franklin Edward Kameny had one of the best credentials a young scientist could have: a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard, earned in 1956, after service as an Army soldier in Europe during the Second World War. That year he went to work for the Army Map Service in Washington, where mapping the Earth precisely had suddenly become a matter of missile guidance and national survival. Within months he was called in by investigators from the Civil Service Commission, asked about his sexuality, and fired. He was barred from federal employment. That autumn, while the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit, the government decided it could do without him. Kameny never worked as an astronomer again. He spent the rest of his life making the government regret what it had done, and he lived long enough to hear it say so.

In short: Frank Kameny was fired from a federal job in 1957 because he was gay. Instead of hiding, he took his case to the Supreme Court in 1961, co-founded one of the first militant gay rights groups, picketed the White House in 1965, coined "Gay is Good," ran for Congress and helped persuade psychiatrists to stop calling homosexuality an illness. In 2009 the government formally apologized to him. His life is a lesson in refusing to accept a verdict as final.

The firing and the petition

Kameny's firing was not unusual. Since 1953, Executive Order 10450 had treated "sexual perversion" as grounds for removing federal workers as security risks, and thousands of people lost their jobs under it in what historians now call the Lavender Scare. Most of them resigned quietly, moved away, changed careers and never spoke of it. That was the expected response, and the system depended on it.

Kameny did not respond as expected. He appealed within the Civil Service Commission and lost. He went to federal court and lost again. Then, with no lawyer, he wrote his own petition to the Supreme Court, filed in 1960, asking it to hear his case.

The petition is remarkable for its tone. Kameny did not plead for sympathy or argue that he had been wrongly suspected. He argued that the government's policy was itself wrong: that his private life had nothing to do with his ability to do his job, that the government's view of homosexuals was based on prejudice rather than fact, and that in his view the policy, not he, was immoral. It was among the first times anyone had asked the nation's highest court to hold that discrimination against gay people violated their rights. In March 1961 the Court declined to hear it. A denial of review is not a ruling; it simply means the case goes no further. For Kameny, it was the end of the legal road and the start of a different one.

Building a movement in Washington

Later in 1961, Kameny and a fellow activist, Jack Nichols, founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, taking the name of an earlier group in Los Angeles but giving it a sharper edge. The older homophile groups of the 1950s had largely focused on education and support and often deferred to psychiatrists and other experts. Kameny wanted something different. He wanted gay people to speak for themselves, to demand rights rather than ask for tolerance, and to direct their energy at the government that was persecuting them.

The Washington group did exactly that. It wrote letters to members of Congress, to the Civil Service Commission and to the Pentagon. It challenged the security clearance system that kept gay people out of defence work. It helped individual workers facing dismissal, advising them on how to answer investigators and when to refuse to answer. Kameny became an expert in the paperwork of persecution, and many people who faced security hearings in the 1960s and 1970s had him in their corner.

Kameny was a scientist, and he applied a scientist's skepticism to the claims made about gay people. If psychiatrists said homosexuality was a disease, he wanted to see the evidence. When he looked, he found that most of it came from studying patients who were already in therapy, which is a bit like concluding that everyone has a cold by visiting a doctor's waiting room. He began arguing, years before most activists did, that the medical establishment's view had to be confronted head-on rather than accommodated.

The pickets of 1965

On April 17, 1965, a small group of men and women walked in a line in front of the White House carrying signs protesting the federal government's treatment of gay people. Kameny was among the organizers. It was one of the first public demonstrations for gay rights in the country's history.

The pickets were deliberately respectable. Kameny insisted on a dress code: suits and ties for men, dresses for women. The signs were neatly lettered. The point, as he saw it, was to show the public and the press that the people being purged were ordinary, competent professionals asking for fair treatment. Over the following months, the group also picketed the Civil Service Commission, the State Department and the Pentagon, and in July 1965 Kameny helped launch the annual Independence Hall picket in Philadelphia.

You can see in those pickets a tension that ran through the movement for decades. The dress code made the protests palatable, and it was effective at a time when most Americans had never knowingly met a gay person. It also excluded people who did not or could not look the part. After Stonewall in 1969, younger activists rejected that formality, and Kameny, to his credit, adapted. He was a stubborn man, but he recognized that the energy of the new generation was carrying the movement further than his careful lines had.

Gay is Good

In 1968, inspired by the phrase "Black is beautiful," Kameny coined the slogan "Gay is Good." It sounds simple now. At the time it was radical, because the entire structure of discrimination, from the security purges to the psychiatric manuals, rested on the premise that being gay was bad: a sin, a crime, an illness. The slogan did not ask for tolerance of a defect. It denied that there was a defect at all.

That idea drove his most consequential campaign. With other activists, Kameny pressed the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. They disrupted meetings, demanded panels, and confronted psychiatrists with the weak evidence behind the diagnosis. In 1972 Kameny appeared on a panel at the association's convention alongside a gay psychiatrist who spoke in disguise, using a pseudonym, because he would have lost his career if identified. In December 1973 the association's board voted to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic manual. Kameny later described it as the day millions of people were cured at once.

This mattered enormously for the government's case. The security rationale for firing gay workers had leaned on the idea that they were mentally unstable. Once the medical profession stopped saying that, the rationale had one less leg. In 1975 the Civil Service Commission changed its rules so that being gay was no longer by itself grounds for excluding someone from most federal employment.

Running for Congress

In 1971, when the District of Columbia was given a nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives, Kameny ran in the first election for the seat. He was the first openly gay candidate for Congress in American history. He lost badly, as he expected to. But the campaign gave him a platform, built a network of volunteers that became the Gay Activists Alliance of Washington, and showed that a gay candidate could stand in public and talk about policy without the sky falling.

It is worth pausing on the strategic choice. A losing campaign is not a waste if it builds something that lasts. Many of the openly LGBTQ officials now serving in city councils, state legislatures and Congress owe something to the people who ran first, lost, and made the next candidate seem less unusual.

The apology

Kameny spent the rest of his life in Washington, advising, agitating and writing letters, often sharp ones, to officials of both parties. He served on the District's Human Rights Commission. He kept his papers, thousands of documents tracing decades of struggle, and gave them to the Library of Congress. Some of the picket signs from 1965 went to the Smithsonian.

In 2009, John Berry, the openly gay director of the Office of Personnel Management, the successor agency to the Civil Service Commission that had fired Kameny, formally apologized to him on behalf of the federal government. The agency that had ended his career fifty-two years earlier said, in effect, that he had been right and the government had been wrong. Kameny was in his eighties.

Frank Kameny died on October 11, 2011, which happened to be National Coming Out Day. His house in Washington was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A street near Dupont Circle bears his name.

The case against him, and why it lost

It is fair to ask what the government's defenders thought they were doing. In the 1950s, officials argued that gay workers were vulnerable to blackmail by foreign agents, and they pointed to a few real espionage cases involving compromising secrets. They also believed, sincerely in many cases, the medical consensus of the day that homosexuality was a pathology.

Kameny's answer was that the government had created the very risk it feared: the secret was dangerous only because the government punished it. Take away the punishment and you take away the leverage. Decades later, when security agencies stopped treating sexual orientation as disqualifying, they found exactly that. The other half of the case, the medical half, collapsed when the evidence was examined.

What made Kameny effective was not that he was always gracious. By most accounts he was not. It was that he was right on the facts, he kept the records, and he never stopped. Sometimes that is the whole recipe.

How he argued, and why it worked

It is worth looking closely at Kameny's method, because it was unusual for his time and remains useful now.

First, he refused the defensive crouch. Most people fired in the purges argued, if they argued at all, that they were not gay or that the evidence against them was weak. Kameny conceded the fact and attacked the rule. That is a harder argument to make, and it usually loses in the short run. But it is the only argument that can win for everyone, because it changes the question from whether one person was treated unfairly to whether the policy itself is unjust.

Second, he used the government's own language. He wrote in the formal, procedural style of the agencies he was fighting, citing regulations, demanding written reasons, insisting on hearings. Officials who expected an emotional appeal found themselves facing a scientist who had read the rules more carefully than they had. Federal courts were beginning to require that firings be connected to job performance; a 1969 appeals court ruling, in a case involving a NASA employee, said exactly that. Kameny's insistence on that connection, case after case, helped build the record those rulings relied on.

Third, he treated expertise as something to be tested, not deferred to. The psychiatric consensus of the 1950s was the strongest card the government held. Kameny did not try to win an argument about psychiatry on psychiatry's terms. He asked what the evidence was, how it had been gathered and whether it supported the conclusion. When the answer was that it did not, he said so in public until others agreed. That approach can be misused, and plenty of people now attack well-supported science by pretending to ask the same questions. The difference is that Kameny was asking about evidence that was actually weak and pointing to evidence that was actually stronger, and the profession, after examining the question, agreed with him.

Fourth, he never stopped. Kameny's career as an activist lasted half a century. He was writing letters to officials in the 2000s about issues he had first raised in the 1950s. Movements often celebrate their dramatic moments, but much of what Kameny won came from sheer persistence: the follow-up letter, the second appeal, the meeting with the official who had ignored him the first time.

None of this made him easy to work with. He could be imperious and quarrelsome, and he clashed with allies as often as opponents. Movements need people like that, though they rarely enjoy them. The useful question about a difficult ally is not whether they are pleasant but whether they are right and whether they will still be there next year.

What you can do

Kameny's tools were letters, pickets, a petition, a campaign and a filing cabinet. All of them are still available.

• Write to the people who decide. Enter your address at find your representatives to find your representative, senators and state legislators, with phone numbers, contact forms and recent votes. A specific, well-informed letter about a specific bill still gets read.
• Use the comment process. Federal agencies must take public comments before many rules become final. The public comment page lists rules open for comment right now, grouped by issue, and explains how to write a comment.
• Join a group or start one. Kameny's organization started with a handful of people. The organizations directory lists LGBTQ+, civil rights and legal aid groups in every state.
• Learn from the street. The protest and resistance topic page gathers reporting on how people are organizing now, from pickets to mass marches.
• Keep your records. If you are part of a fight, save the letters, flyers and minutes. Kameny's filing cabinet became a national archive, and somebody will want to know how you did it.