For two hours during a muggy afternoon on August 28, 1965, Paul Clark, a security officer at the US State Department, hid himself behind a pillar at Foggy Bottom, as State Department headquarters was metonymically called, and snapped photos. His subjects were a small group of conservatively dressed men and a few women, members of the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, who were promenading in an elongated oval, silently picketing on the sidewalk in front of the imposing State building. Paul Clark sent the photos he took to an agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they became FBI records, showing the demonstrators carrying signs with confrontational messages such as “15 Million American Homosexuals Protest Treatment by State Department,” “State Department Refuses Replies to Our Letters—Afraid of Us?,” “Discrimination Against Homosexuals Is as Immoral as Discrimination Against Negroes and Jews,” and “The State Department—the Last Bastion of McCarthyism!” The sign carried by the leader of the group, Frank Kameny, declared peremptorily, “Equal Opportunity for ALL—ALL Means ALL!”1
Kameny was a slight man with a voice nasal and booming. He had a rapid-fire speaking style and an accent that immediately marked him as a New Yorker. He was not gifted with obvious charisma. But his vision and his words were brilliant, and they took the gay and lesbian rights movement further than any of the early homophiles could have even imagined it might go. Kameny had been a child prodigy and dreamed of becoming an astronomer from the time he was six years old. He entered Queens College in 1940 at the age of fifteen. His education was interrupted by World War II when he was drafted and sent to Germany as an army mortar crewman, but after the war he went through Harvard on scholarships and fellowships and in 1956 got a PhD in Astronomy. When Kameny was hired the following year for a civilian job with the Army Map Service, an agency of the Department of Defense, he kept secret a disturbing incident that he’d hoped he’d put behind him. Soon after receiving his PhD, he’d gone to San Francisco to deliver a paper at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. On August 29, 1956, he found himself in the men’s room of the San Francisco bus terminal, where, he later claimed, without invitation or solicitation on his part and without sexual response, a man touched his penis. Though Kameny was “immediately repelled and terminated the contact,” he testified, two plainclothes policemen, in a sting that was common in the era, were watching through a ventilation grillwork, and he was arrested.2
At the police station, Kameny was advised by an officer that if he pled guilty, the matter would be quickly dismissed; but if he pled not guilty, he would have to go through a complicated rigmarole that would delay his return home. At the arraignment the next morning, he took the officer’s advice. He was fined $50 and given six months’ probation. And he was led to believe that at the end of his probation, the episode would be expunged from his record.3 But in Washington, DC, only a few months after taking the job with the Army Map Service, he had a second problem. He was stopped by policemen as he walked late at night in Lafayette Park, a notorious homosexual cruising area, and he was taken by them to the police station.4 To his relief, he was not charged and was released that same night. But his relief did not last long.
A short time after the incident, Kameny was sent on assignment to Hawaii. Almost as soon as he arrived, he received a call from his superior ordering him to fly back to Washington. Kameny must have known then that he was in trouble, but he put on an air of brashness that would become characteristic of him. At Army Map Service headquarters he was ushered into a small room where two Civil Service Commission investigators were waiting for him. “Information has come to the attention of the US Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual,” one of them told him without preliminaries and asked if it were true.5 “That’s none of your business,” Kameny replied despite his alarm. He admitted to nothing and reiterated over and over, “That question is irrelevant to my job performance.” A month later he received a letter from his superior informing him that he was fired on the grounds of homosexuality.
He was thirty-two years old, he’d spent his whole life training for a career in science, and now he was unemployed. Dismissed from a job at which he hadn’t worked long enough to accumulate a nest egg, he was reduced to living on frankfurters and mashed potatoes. He moved to a cramped, dingy apartment with a bathtub in the center of the room, only a few feet away from his bed,6 and he had to stave off his landlord’s efforts to evict him for nonpayment of rent.7 Kameny let himself wallow in shock only briefly. He got a $600 loan using his car as collateral, which allowed him to pay off his debts as he made appeals all over Washington—to the Department of Defense, the White House, Congress—complaining about his firing and asking to be reinstated. Washington, DC, homosexuals who’d been fired during the McCarthy era and its aftermath usually sneaked off into the night or committed suicide rather than call attention to their “disgrace.” Kameny would not go quietly. To him, the real disgrace was the injustice perpetrated by the Army Map Service and the Civil Service Commission. But not only were his appeals ignored; he was also informed that his security clearance was revoked.
When President Eisenhower had announced that America was starting an aeronautics and space program to compete with Russia’s Sputnik success, Frank Kameny had been sure that he would be chosen to be one of the country’s first astronauts. And now the US government was stripping him of all his fine convictions about who Frank Kameny was and was destined to become. Since childhood, he’d been used to being the smartest person in the room, and his keen intelligence was matched by indomitable will. He was not a man to accept so huge an impediment to the future he’d envisioned for himself. “If society and I differ on something,” he would later say, “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 as long as it doesn’t get in my way. But if it does, there’s going to be a fight, and I’m not going to be the one who backs down.”8
Kameny went to see Byron Scott, a former US congressman from California with a reputation as a liberal. Scott had become a lawyer after losing his reelection bid ten years earlier. Though Kameny had no money, Scott agreed to represent him. But when they lost in both a federal district court and an appeals court, Scott informed him that the case was hopeless.
The injustice Kameny had suffered at the hands of his government galled him. He couldn’t let it go unchallenged. If Byron Scott wouldn’t continue to fight for him, he’d have to figure out how to fight for himself. He asked Scott to tell him, at least, how to file a Supreme Court suit on his own. Kameny reasoned that if he could write a PhD dissertation in Astronomy at Harvard he could certainly write a petition to the Supreme Court. Scott gave him a booklet that outlined the procedure to be followed in order to request a Supreme Court hearing.
Homosexuals are a legitimate minority group, Kameny argued in his Writ of Certiorari. The government’s discrimination against them “was no less illegal and no less odious than discrimination upon religious or racial grounds.” The average homosexual is as well adjusted in personality as the average heterosexual, he declared; and even if the government regards homosexuality as “immoral conduct,” a government employee has a right to practice it without fear, as long as it doesn’t interfere with his ability to do his job. Kameny also told the justices that during World War II he didn’t hesitate to shoot at the Germans, and he did it to help preserve for himself and others “rights and freedoms and liberties.”9 For sixty pages, he argued eloquently not only that he should be reinstated at the Army Map Service but also that prejudice against homosexuals had no rational basis.
The response he received was signed by Earl Warren, a great champion of equal rights for racial minorities and one of the most liberal chief justices in Supreme Court history. It was a curt form letter that said only that SCOTUS declined to hear Kameny’s case. That was the beginning of Frank Kameny’s life as a militant activist for gay and lesbian civil rights.
Gays and lesbians in America have always been as varied in class, ethnicity, tastes, and political sentiments as America is in general. They are a group by virtue of their same-sex sexual preference and their common enemies. Period. Their diversity guaranteed that internecine quarrels and civil wars would start as soon as they began to organize and would continue to this day. Would-be leaders quickly find that leading them as a group is as difficult as the proverbial herding of cats. Divisive and contentious as they’ve been, they’ve never come to wide consensus about who to deem their most important historical leader; and no one gay leader of the past has been widely chronicled as having had the most foresight, the most spirited plans, and the most critical triumphs, without which contemporary LGBT people couldn’t have won their own decisive civil rights victories. But if any one person deserves such credit, it is Frank Kameny.
Kameny didn’t seem much like a militant with his conservative suits and ties, his precise speech, his penchant to intellectual elitism. But in his demand that the root causes of gay problems be attacked and that sweeping change be made, he was utterly radical. In these days of universal Levi’s it’s easy to mistake the costume of Kameny’s era for a conservatism of thought and action and to overlook his pioneering militancy. But his legacy speaks for itself.
There was no homophile organization in Washington, DC, in 1961, but Kameny discovered that in New York there was a Mattachine group. He contacted its leaders to ask if they could help him start a homophile organization in his area, and he received from Mattachine Society New York a list of potential members living in DC. As was common in 1961, almost all the names on the list were aliases—including that of the police sergeant who was head of the Perversion section of the DC Police Department’s Morals Division. The man showed up, undercover, at the Hay Adams Hotel on Lafayette Square, where Kameny had called an organizing meeting for his proposed group.
There in the small conference room, Ron Balin, one of the attendees who worked on Capitol Hill, whispered nervously in Kameny’s ear, “That guy over there is a vice cop.” He was nodding in the direction of Louis Fouchette. The police sergeant was known by sight to many gay men because he’d shaken his penis at them in public restrooms all over downtown DC; and if they responded, they found themselves in handcuffs and under arrest. Kameny kept an eye on Fouchette and spotted a gun and holster under his suit jacket. Not in the mood to be intimidated, Kameny strode over to Fouchette and told him, “I know who you are.” The police sergeant got up and walked quickly out the door. He hadn’t stayed at the meeting long enough to hear much discussion about the new group, but he filed a report anyway, warning the Morals Division of the police department that homosexuals in DC were organizing.10
• • •
Frank Kameny didn’t go to movies, he almost never drank, he had no knowledge of spectator sports, he was uninterested in gossip or the love lives of those around him (he had no ostensible love life himself), he knew nothing of popular music; the one indulgence he allowed himself was classical music that he listened to while driving his car.11 Jack Nichols, who called himself “the second charter member of Mattachine,”12 compared Kameny to a self-propelled locomotive on a strict track, no amusing byways.13 After being fired from the Army Map Service, he never again held a secure paying position. A couple of times in the years that followed he was hired for jobs in which he could use his training as an astronomer, but as soon as a security clearance check was run on him, his arrest record came up and he was fired. He depended mostly on his mother, sister, and friends for support.14 The struggle for equality became his occupation and his life.
It didn’t take him long to conclude that neither Mattachine Society New York nor any of the other homophile organizations that were around in 1961 were models for waging the collective battle he had in mind. He had to invent a new model. His horrific experiences with the federal government had radicalized him.15 What the homophile movement lacked and must develop, Kameny declared every chance he got in the early days, was “strong and definite positions, unequivocally held.”16 His organization’s statement of purpose promised to challenge every federal law that kept homosexuals from full equality. Mattachine Society Washington would “act by any lawful means to secure for homosexuals the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” its constitution announced. Kameny sent copies of the document not only to all the DC papers, but also to President John Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, the entire cabinet, all the Supreme Court justices, and every member of the US Congress. Most of the recipients didn’t deign to acknowledge receipt. A few did. The congressman from Missouri, Paul C. Jones, sent the document back with a handwritten note, angrily scrawled: “I am unalterably opposed to your proposal and cannot see how any person in his right mind can condone the practices which you would justify. Please do not contaminate my mail with such filthy trash.”17 The congressman from Michigan, Charles Chamberlain, was livid. “In all my six years of service in the United States Congress,” he wrote Kameny, “I have not received such a revolting communication.”18
But no one in Washington would escape Mattachine’s “communications.” Mattachine Society Washington published a newsletter, Gazette, which was distributed not only to Mattachine members and the executive and legislative branches of government, but also to the justices of the Supreme Court and Attorney General Robert Kennedy—who did not answer but sent the newsletter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be slipped into its “Mattachine Society Washington” file. Attorney General Kennedy need not have bothered because the FBI was already on Kameny’s mailing list. Every month, J. Edgar Hoover received a copy of the Gazette, which Kameny himself ran off, working far into the night, on a mimeograph machine in the basement where he lived. Hoover sicced one of his agents on him. The FBI agent told Kameny that his boss “took a grave view” of being bombarded with the objectionable newsletter and demanded that he stop sending it immediately. Kameny informed the agent that the First Amendment protected his right to send public officials anything he pleased, as long as it was not threatening; and unless Hoover agreed to stop keeping an FBI file on Mattachine Society Washington, he would continue to be a recipient.19 Hoover received copies of the Mattachine newsletter until his death in 1972.
Kameny became adept at tweaking the noses of the authorities to get them to duel. In July 1962, he decided that Mattachine Society Washington would apply to the District of Columbia Superintendent of Licenses and Permits for a “charity” license to enable the group to raise money. His application was explicit: Mattachine Society Washington intended to solicit funds to be spent on helping to procure for the homosexual equal status with his fellow man.20
The moment Superintendent C. T. Nottingham read it, he knew he was in a tough spot. The District of Columbia was under the direct jurisdiction of the US Congress, and there would be hell to pay if he granted the license, since Congress wholeheartedly sanctioned keeping homosexuals in pariah status. But the superintendent of licenses and permits had no legal grounds on which to refuse a license to Mattachine. As long as the organization avowed it would not engage in illegal activity—and raising money for the purpose of seeking civil liberties was not illegal—Nottingham had to grant the license. He did. “Group Aiding Deviates Issued Charity License,” the Washington Star announced.21 Kameny welcomed the stir. It gave him a platform to put civil liberties laws to the test.
Superintendent Nottingham tried to do damage control. He couldn’t deny the license, but he talked tough, hoping to placate the public and especially the legislature. He was keeping an eye on those “deviates,” he told the media. “If the group solicits as much as one dollar,” he said, “I will order them to open their books and records for examination.” And if such an order wasn’t complied with, he promised, he would immediately revoke Mattachine’s permit.22
But Nottingham’s tough talk wasn’t enough to placate Congress. East Texas Democrat John Dowdy, the ranking member of the House committee that oversaw the District of Columbia, already knew of Mattachine through Frank Kameny’s mass mailings to all the congressmen. Dowdy was fuming. He complained on the House floor that licensing Mattachine was like licensing prostitutes. “The acts of these people are banned under the laws of God, the laws of nature, and are in violation of the laws of man!” he declared to his fellow congressmen, and he presented bill HR 5990 to revoke Mattachine’s charity license.23
A few years later, Dowdy would be indicted for accepting a $25,000 bribe in return for sidetracking a Justice Department investigation, and he would do prison time for perjury.24 But in the 1960 election, he’d hyped himself as “a responsible Christian gentleman,”25 and he was out to prove his responsible Christianity by forcing Nottingham to revoke Mattachine’s charity license. To his constituency back in Alto, Texas, he explained in his down-home manner about the “cancerous evil” of an organization like Mattachine that makes a mockery of the old virtues of “honesty, purity, duty, and honor.” It was like “when a man starts by telling you there is no such thing as black or white in determining right from wrong, but only gray. When he gets you to believing that, the next stage is to tell you that black is right and white is wrong.”26
Kameny was invited to appear before the House Subcommittee on the District of Columbia to tell why his organization’s charity license should not be revoked. Nothing short of death could have kept him away. Dressed as usual in a dark suit and well-starched white shirt, oblivious to the brutal August humidity, he coolly reiterated to the congressmen what they would already have known if they’d read the statement of purpose he’d sent each one at Mattachine’s founding: that Mattachine is strictly a civil liberties organization; homosexuals are a minority group, no different, as such, from other minority groups in America; and Mattachine Society Washington is working to achieve for the homosexual minority full equality with their fellow citizens.27 John Dowdy sat glaring at Kameny. When Kameny misspoke, using the phrase “consensual behavior among adults,” Dowdy pounced at the opportunity to tar homosexuals with promiscuity: “How many adults? Five? Fifteen? Fifty? Five hundred?”28 But Kameny was not shakable. “We are NOT a social organization,” he emphasized vehemently, and told his audience that even the group’s constitution made that clear. “It is not a purpose of this organization to act as a social group or as an agency for personal introductions. We abide strictly by this prohibition.”29
Despite Kameny’s impassioned arguments, the House sided with Dowdy, and Mattachine’s “charity license” was revoked. But Mattachine had gained more than it lost. Not all DC newspapers were swayed by the congressman’s fulminations. A surprising editorial in the Washington Post titled “Piety by Fiat” mocked “the oddly inept little bill by that Master of Morality, Rep. Dowdy.”30 Mattachine members were elated. The Washington Post had just helped spread the word about the homophile cause more widely than they could possibly have done. Mattachine established an award for the public official who’d “done the most to advance the cause of homophile organizations.” Congressman Dowdy won hands down.31
Nor was Mattachine Society Washington thwarted in its fund-raising by the Dowdy incident. Kameny discovered that a charity license was unnecessary for organizations that raised no more than $1,500 a year, which was far more than Mattachine had been raising. He claimed the last word by writing to the Washington Post to announce, “We will actively continue to solicit funds.”32
• • •
April 28, 1963: Kameny and five other white men stood among 250,000 other people, mostly black, at Martin Luther King’s March on Washington and held up signs that identified them as members of the Mattachine Society—an act less brave than it might seem since few would have known what “Mattachine” was.33 (The men didn’t realize, of course, that the march had been organized by Bayard Rustin, King’s chief strategist, who was, like them, a homosexual and who, like Frank Kameny, had been arrested in California in the fifties on a homosexual morals charge.34) Mattachine member Jack Nichols, the twenty-five-year-old bohemian son of an FBI agent who’d threatened Nichols’s life for putting his job in jeopardy, looked around at the crowd that stretched as far as he could see and wondered aloud, “Why aren’t we gays having civil rights marches, too?”35
When an article appeared in the New York Times about Cuba’s establishment of labor camps for homosexuals, Jack Nichols modified his idea: Mattachine could have a picket. In front of the White House. Protesting both Cuba’s misdeeds toward homosexuals and America’s, too. It took only awhile for Kameny to jump on the idea. Mattachine would organize homosexuals to play “Tweaking the Lion’s Tail, or Constructive Fun and Games with Your Government,” as he characterized it in the title of one of his talks.“And if nobody listens,” he told Mattachine members, “we haven’t lost anything. If somebody listens, we’ve gained.”36 During the next four years, Mattachine picketed the White House, the State Department, the Civil Service Commission, the Pentagon, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, demanding that the US government acknowledge that homosexuals, as American citizens, deserved the same civil rights that all American citizens are guaranteed. Small though the number of picketers were, Don Slater, still writing for ONE magazine on the other side of the continent, very optimistically hailed the DC pickets as revolutionary, the end of “homosexual timidity and passivity, which have gained homosexuals almost nothing.”37
• • •
Frank Kameny’s single-minded focus came with downsides. He was prickly and snappish, and he did not suffer fools gladly. He was authoritarian, too. The president of Mattachine Society New York, Dick Leitsch, referred to him as a “führer.”38 Others complained that he “barked orders,”39 and that he “had to control every bit of minutiae in the world.”40 He even kept tight control on his picketers’ grooming. Men had to wear suits and ties and well-polished dress shoes, and their hair had to be cut short; women’s hair must not be cut too short, and they had to wear skirts and stylish ladies’ shoes, preferably with high heels—no matter that butch garb may have been their sartorial preference, or that they would have to march for two hours carrying picket signs. “If you’re asking for equal employment rights, look employable,” Kameny insisted.
But his conventional dress belied his unconventional rhetoric. On July 22, 1964, he was invited to speak at a public meeting in New York City. Coincidentally, it was the most violent night of a Harlem riot that had been going on since July 16, after an off-duty white police lieutenant shot and killed a black fifteen-year-old who’d lunged at him with a knife. While six hundred Harlem stores were being looted and a thousand rioters battled riot police in full gear, Frank Kameny, dressed in a business suit, was addressing an audience of homosexuals at Freedom House. His subject was “Civil Liberties: A Progress Report.”
His authoritative podium style was more emotional than usual, perhaps because another kind of civil liberties drama was going on eighty-five blocks away. He told his audience that he scorned the homophile’s useless attempts to “educate” the public about homosexuality. “Negroes tried for ninety years to achieve their purposes by ‘educating’ the public out of its prejudices,” he declared. Their achievements during all that time “were nothing compared to those of the past ten years,” when they became “vigorous” in their “social actions.”41 He also scorned, he said, the “social service” function of homophile organizations. “We can refer homosexuals to lawyers, we can find jobs for those who have lost jobs or have been denied them because of homosexuality, and we can assist them in other ways”—but such services “accomplished nothing of lasting value,” and the homophiles’ struggles would go on literally without end unless they adopted a more militantly activist strategy.42 Kameny was exhorting his listeners to learn from the black example. Homosexuals needed to stop pushing the Sisyphean rock up the hill, and start throwing rocks, metaphorically at least.
Lesbians who joined a homophile organization in the 1960s were most likely to choose Daughters of Bilitis because other homophile groups seemed focused on men’s problems such as ending police entrapment in restrooms. As Eva Freund, who did join Mattachine Society Washington, complained even of that group, “We lesbians couldn’t understand why the guys were in bathrooms having sex in the first place.”43 Lesbian presence in the other Mattachines—New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Boston, Chicago—was negligible,44 as it was in homophile groups such as the Society for Individual Rights in San Francisco and the tiny Athenaeum in Miami. But Frank Kameny was anxious to recruit lesbians for Mattachine. He understood long before “gay and lesbian” became a common phrase why it was good for the movement to bill itself as cogender: In a practical sense, it helped defuse the enemy’s obsession with homosexual male promiscuity. In a principled sense, since Mattachine Society Washington’s only raison d’etre under Kameny’s design was to fight for first-class citizenship for all homosexuals, why would lesbians not be welcome?45 There were ten marchers in the first Mattachine picket in front of the White House,46 seven men and three women. Because Mattachine had so few women members, and Kameny believed female visibility was important for the cause, he encouraged a heterosexual and a bisexual woman to march along with Lilli Vincenz, the lone lesbian.47
Kameny planned the picket to coincide not only with the height of the tourist season, but also with a major anti–Vietnam War demonstration to protest the bombing in Southeast Asia—which, as he guessed, would attract an additional fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand people to DC. On April 17, 1965, the day before Easter Sunday, tourists who came to gaze at the White House stared in astonishment at the unaccustomed sight of homosexuals carrying signs: “Cuba’s Government Persecutes Homosexuals: U.S. Government Beat Them To It,” “U.S., Cuba, Russia: United to Persecute Homosexuals”; “U.S. Claims No Second Class Citizens: What About Homosexuals?”
Incredulous tourists snapped pictures. Paul Kuntzler, one of the picketers, was especially worried about the press photographers. Thirty of them, having finished with the antiwar protest across from Lafayette Park, passed near the Mattachine demonstrators at the White House. He would lose his job if his picture appeared in the newspapers as a homosexual. As he walked the picket oval, Kuntzler hid behind his poster and Lilli Vincenz, whom cameras caught marching in front of him, her head held high.48
Lilli Vincenz was a wholesome-looking young woman with a radiant smile. The editor of The Ladder, Barbara Gittings, said she looked like “every mother’s dream daughter” and was thrilled to put her on the cover of the January 1966 issue.49 Vincenz grew up in Nazi Germany and was brought to America in 1949, when she was twelve years old. Gifted in languages, she received a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1960 and then entered a PhD program supported by a fellowship. But by then, she was too anxious about who she was to focus on studying. It wasn’t easy in those days for a middle-class young woman to explore her sexuality. At Columbia University’s counseling center she’d been given the recently published Voyage from Lesbos: The Psychoanalysis of a Female Homosexual, by Dr. Richard Robertiello, a book about his success in “curing” a woman of her lesbianism. Vincenz was not sure what she wanted to do with her life, but she knew she had no interest in being “cured.” She quit graduate school and joined the Women’s Army Corps when some lesbians she encountered told her that the army was a “hotbed of gay people.”
Her stint was brief. After she admitted to a heterosexual roommate that she was a lesbian, the roommate snitched. The next day, at work at Walter Reed Army Hospital in DC, where she was training as a neuropsychiatric technician, she was called off the ward. “We have information that you have engaged in homosexual behavior,” her commanding officer told her. She’d been a star pupil in the neuropsychiatric training program, but she was given an administrative discharge anyway.50
Vincenz joined Mattachine a year after it was founded. Mattachine bylaws demanded that members assume a pseudonym, for their own protection, and she became Lilli Hansen.51 Kameny, who’d been seeking lesbian members, was delighted with this bright, well-educated, personable young woman. He took her under his wing and made sure she was put on Mattachine’s executive board. The admiration was mutual. Vincenz was awed by Kameny’s clear-sightedness and the “bullet-proof arguments” he made for their cause.52 But Kameny expected the same tethered-to-earth rationality and dedication from his disciples. When Jack Nichols took a leave from Mattachine to pursue a romance, Kameny was furious and complained that he “left the helm to go on a postadolescent spree.”53 Vincenz did not disappoint in that way. She took inconsequential jobs—a typist for a printing company, an editorial secretary for a trade association—in order to pay the rent and buy food, but her real work was Mattachine. It was impossible for her to refuse when Kameny asked her to become the editor of a new monthly magazine, the Homosexual Citizen.
It was impossible, too, for her to express any editorial philosophy but his. Every cover of the Homosexual Citizen announced the magazine’s serious focus on “News of Civil Liberties and Social Rights.” The articles were about battles with psychoanalysts who wanted to cure homosexuality, police who harassed homosexuals under the sodomy laws, ministers who preached “antihomosexualism,” the government that denied homosexuals security clearances, the military that witch hunted and punished homosexuals. Kameny liked to boast that the Homosexual Citizen was activist, militant, and radical.54
But it lasted only seventeen months. Vincenz had made the acquaintance of a lesbian astrologer, and, thinking to offer the Homosexual Citizen’s readers a little relief from the usual sober fare, she solicited from the woman an article titled, “Astrology and the Homosexual.” Kameny was not amused. He’d been furious when Dick Leitsch—whether out of mischief or a slip of the tongue—once introduced him to an audience as “a Harvard PhD in Astrology.” Kameny wouldn’t permit the piece to run, and Vincenz stepped down as editor.55
But Vincenz’s work with and for Kameny didn’t cease. Despite his pique over the astrology affair, he realized that Mattachine needed lesbian representation, and Vincenz, with her fresh-faced looks and poise, was a great asset. Though she was unhappy that Kameny couldn’t loosen up, she never stopped being awed by his brilliance. She continued to devote herself to the movement as Kameny ran it, and he continued to utilize her for the movement’s sake. In February 1967 he and Jack Nichols appeared on a call-in television program, Controversy, hosted by a local personality, Dennis Richards. The deceptively mild-looking Richards verbally assaulted the two men, screaming that all homosexuals are sick, child molesters, effeminate, sex obsessed. Kameny calmly corrected him. Nichols took the high ground, quoting Thomas Jefferson about “fighting tyranny over the mind of man.” But Richards went ballistic. He pounded his on-set desk, yelling, “Get off my stage! Out of my studio, you vicious, perverted, lecherous people! You make me want to vomit!” His hysteria was disturbing even to the viewers. One called in to ask if he was overreacting because he was himself homosexual. Richards looked apoplectic. “No! I’m not! They are!” he shouted, jabbing his finger in the direction of Kameny and Nichols.56
Maybe the frenzied performance was good for ratings? Three weeks later, the producer phoned Kameny: Would he and Nichols appear again? By then, Kameny was appearing on TV more than he was watching it,57 but he wouldn’t give up a single opportunity to present his case for civil rights to a television audience, even if he had to go through a madman to do it. He agreed to another appearance; but this time he and Nichols brought along with them Lilli Vincenz—ladylike and neatly coifed, wearing a nice dress and high heels. She sat between Kameny and Nichols, which cleverly defused the incendiary image of a gay male couple and the sexual things they did. Maybe Richards’s producer had admonished him to behave better this time, but he knew, too, that he couldn’t credibly characterize Vincenz as a “vicious pervert.” He gave the three Mattachine members space to make the arguments he’d earlier squelched.58
Barbara Gittings was another crucial find for Kameny. She met him at a conference of the recently founded East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) soon after she became editor of the Daughters of Bilitis’s monthly magazine, The Ladder.59 ECHO, born in the winter of 1962–63, was the brainchild of Frank Kameny and Mattachine Society Washington. After Hal Call killed off Mattachine’s national structure in 1961, the various groups around the country became independent entities; but Kameny believed the revolution might come quicker if they coordinated their battles against their common enemies. To start, in December 1962 he brought together in his living room representatives from New York and Washington Mattachines and announced that Donald Webster Cory, author of the much-revered The Homosexual in America, was coming to Philadelphia to give a lecture in January.60 People from all the East Coast homophile groups, Kameny guessed, would be there. He proposed organizing them into a coalition: East Coast Homophile Organizations, they’d call it.61
ECHO held its first conference August 31–September 1, 1963, at the Drake Hotel in Philadelphia. (Public venues were so unused to hosting meetings of “homophiles” that they were unfamiliar even with the term. The sign in the lobby of the Drake Hotel announced a meeting of the “East Coast Hemophilia Organizations.”62) The conference theme was “Homosexuality: Time for Reappraisal.” Things did not go well. One of Kameny’s main refrains from the beginning had been that homophiles were addicted to listening to “experts” and “authorities” about their mental health and moral acceptability. They needed to stop. “We, homosexuals, are the experts on ourselves,” he reiterated, “and we need to be telling the experts that they have nothing whatsoever to tell homosexuals. We should be the ones telling them!” But the program planners of the first ECHO conference seem not to have heard Kameny’s message.63
Fifty-year-old Dr. Albert Ellis arrived at the conference sporting on his arm a woman half his age64—intending perhaps to model normal behavior for his audience. The ECHO audience surely knew what to expect from Dr. Ellis because he’d spoken often at Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis conventions in the past, and the homophile magazines looked to him as their premier expert. The cover of the April 1955 issue of ONE, for instance, announced as its main feature his article “Are Homosexuals Neurotic?” (The answer was a predictable “Yes.”) Ellis’s banquet speech contained no surprises. He was writing a new book, tellingly titled, Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cures, and his banquet speech was a foretaste. The gist of his message, which he repeated often to the packed room of homosexuals, was that the exclusive homosexual is a psychopath. Everyone in the banquet hall politely sat there, listening for an entire hour as the doctor rebuked them for their sexuality.65
Barbara Gittings sat in silence, too, remembering that was the way it always had been at the homophile conferences she’d attended: People from the law, the ministry, and the mental health professions were always invited to those conferences, and they accepted and almost always said nasty things. Yet the homophile leadership kept bringing them back because, as Barbara Gittings understood it, “It was necessary to have people of respectability who were willing to come and address our meetings instead of ignoring us. It made us feel like that gave us some respectability too. And so we’d sit there not saying anything, and we’d applaud when they finished, and we’d go off to the social hour.”66
But something was beginning to change. At the end of Ellis’s banquet talk, a lesbian rose to her feet and called out, “Any homosexual who would come to you for treatment, Dr. Ellis, would have to be a psychopath.”67 Others in the audience dared think that too, though not many yet dared say it.
The next day, Gittings’s partner, Kay Tobin, happened to be in the Drake’s lobby where she saw a small knot of conference attendees listening to a man holding forth informally. She joined the group. It was Frank Kameny. Tobin had never heard someone speak so eloquently about what gay people needed to be doing to get their rights; she ran to find Gittings. “You’ve got to hear this guy,” she told her, grabbing her arm, leading her to the lobby where he was still speaking to attentive listeners.68 He was the next presenter on the conference program, too. The title of his talk was “The Homosexual and the U.S. Government,” but he commented first, referring back to Ellis’s banquet speech, that it was ludicrous to worry about what caused homosexuality. “I don’t hear the NAACP worrying about which chromosome and gene produced a black skin,” Kameny said as his audience tittered with relief and applauded loudly.
For Gittings, having been again subjected at the banquet to the old insults, Frank Kameny’s talk was transporting. As he spoke she realized she’d never before heard a coherent philosophy of what a homosexual movement should be. She’d never before heard anyone so firm and uncompromising in defense of the homosexual, so insistent that homosexuality was as good as heterosexuality, and that the homosexual deserved all the rights granted to the heterosexual. His speech pulled her from the funk she’d been in since listening to Albert Ellis and, she believed, transformed her instantly into a militant ready to fight for homosexual civil rights. Gittings had been made editor of The Ladder just a few months before the 1963 ECHO conference, and Kameny became one of the few men who were not professional “experts” whose writing appeared in the pages of that lesbian magazine.
Gittings’s admiration for Kameny was returned. They shared a single-mindedness and dedication to their cause; they shared the conviction that they were right and the world must be made to see it; they even shared personal tastes such as love of classical music. Gittings became an indispensable partner of Kameny’s victories. Never given to modesty, Kameny liked to think of himself as the Father of the gay civil rights movement; eventually he would call Barbara Gittings its Mother.