The editor of a new book of letters written by the late Frank Kameny said that LGBTs today enjoy many rights because of the gay rights pioneer's work, and called him more influential that slain San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Michael G. Long's Gay Is Good: The Life and Letters of Gay Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny (Syracuse University Press) was published last year. Long, who identifies as a straight ally, wrote the book to make Kameny better known to a new generation of gays and lesbians.
Long does make the startling claim that Kameny had much greater impact on the national LGBT movement than Milk, the first gay person elected to office in California, especially on policy issues, such as denouncing the federal government for excluding homosexuals from employment and security clearances, getting rid of homosexuality as a mental disorder, as well as organizing marches for gay rights at the White House and other public institutions long before New York City's Stonewall riots in 1969.
In 1971, Kameny became the first openly gay candidate for Congress when he campaigned for the District of Columbia's nonvoting delegate seat. He lost badly. However, Kameny disliked the delegate at the time, a conservative anti-gay minister, and wanted to unseat him. Kameny could be abrasive, and he possessed none of Milk's political charm and willingness to compromise, Long said.
Having begun his research in 2012, Long, 51, never met Kameny, who died October 11, 2011 (National Coming Out Day) at age 86. Kameny left all his papers and correspondence to the Library of Congress, which accepted the gift.
Over the years, Kameny wrote thousands of letters. Long claims that you can trace the history of the early homophile movement through his letters. Long focused on Kameny's most creative and activist period from 1958 to 1975. Kameny's estate gave Long permission to use the letters.
"We see Kameny's transformation from victim of the law to voice of the law, when he becomes active in the human rights commission," Long said in a telephone interview with the Bay Area Reporter . "In his early letters he sounds desperate and pathetic while later he is prophetic, setting policies, and dictating what he wants to happen."
Long, a professor of religious studies and peace and conflict studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, is interested in the connection between gay equality and the civil rights movement. He saw Kameny as an essential figure in this intersection and wanted to explore him further.
"I realized how much Kameny had been influenced by Martin Luther King and as I started reading his letters I became hooked, not only because of the quality of their substance, but his breadth of interest, which included politics, religion, psychology, sports, and science," he said.
Kameny isn't as well known as other gay rights pioneers such as Milk. Long speculates that "the LGBT movement has never had a significant public leader, like the civil rights movement had in King, and it was always a diffuse movement, still true today. Also, Kameny did not have the national platform, huge national constituency, or interest of the mainstream media that King had."
Long noted that Kameny was not diplomatic, either to friends or strangers, when it came to substantive issues and LGBT rights.
"He was a bull in the china closet, which was why he probably accomplished so much yet also alienated people. He wore people down, because he was so brilliant and relentless. He was respected in the movement, but not many saw him as a movement leader to cozy up to due to his autocratic personality," Long said.
Long believes Kameny's greatest accomplishment was informing civil society from the U.S. Supreme Court to religious institutions that "Gay is Good." He created the slogan before Stonewall, inspired by Stokely Carmichael's phrase, "Black is Beautiful," in an attempt to reflect what he had been trying to accomplish in his work as well as help the rest of us understand that homosexuality is moral and healthy.
"If you want to see Kameny's legacy, read his petition to the Supreme Court that homosexuals are a minority group who faced discrimination like people of color and who deserved first-class citizenship like people of color," which he wrote as part of his unsuccessful case to be reinstated to his government astronomer job after being fired once his bosses discovered he was gay, Long said.
Long's favorite letters are the ones Kameny wrote to religious personalities in which, despite being an atheist, he used religious sources to critique them (such as the Senate chaplain), taking their own ideology and theology and turning it against them.
Kameny was criticized by his enemies for being shrill, taking positions threatening to civil society, characterizing him as marginal. But he was also criticized by the early homophile movement for wanting to politicize it by holding marches and rallies. Homophile leaders disagreed with Kameny's tactic of picketing the White House and Civil Service Commission as being too radical and unendearing to mainstream America. (In 2009, the Smithsonian Institute requested and was given those historic picket signs).
The FBI put him under surveillance and Kameny responded by making sure director J. Edgar Hoover was put on the mailing list of all D.C. Mattachine Society publications. Even the early militants who came out of Stonewall critiqued Kameny as being too mainstream by getting into government institutions and wanting to access their full power, rather than jettisoning them.
Long credits Kameny with changing government policy, which finally vindicated him during the Obama administration. Kameny was not bitter and praised the government for its evolution.
"Kameny was the leader of the LGBT movement that they never thought they had," Long said. "I still believe no one was more important in the early gay movement and left a greater legacy than Kameny. He wanted and succeeded in building a national network of politicized LGBT members bent on change. It is a shame we don't know his name better."
Long's uncle and aunt were kicked out of the military for engaging in homosexual sex, which struck him as indecent, and unjust.
"As a scholar I looked for projects to redeem their lives and ours in the process, to make us more loving, just and accepting, so others won't have to undergo the same struggles, pains, and devastating moments. I want to pick projects that will leave good legacies for my two sons and working on Kameny has been one of those projects I believe will make my sons proud."