The main purpose of Mattachine Society Washington, as far as Frank Kameny was concerned, was to fight for the rights of the “homosexual American citizen,” a phrase he used often. He sought out victims on behalf of whom he and Mattachine might fight. He began with Bruce Scott, a Midwesterner with the face of a British aristocrat. Scott had had an unblemished seventeen-year record as a Labor Department employee, interrupted only by World War II, when he’d served honorably in the military. In 1956, at the height of the McCarthy-era witch hunts, he was called into the office of his supervisor. The file that sat on the supervisor’s desk was from the District of Columbia police, and it had been sent to the supervisor under the 1950s policy that mandated the ferreting out of homosexuals in the government employ.
The file showed that nine years earlier, in 1947, Scott had been arrested in the Lafayette Square men’s room for “loitering”—the Morals Squad code word for hanging out somewhere in the hope of making a homosexual pickup. Denial was pointless. “Yes,” he admitted, “I’m a homosexual. I’ve been one for as long as I can remember. I’m living with a man who is my lover.”1 Under Civil Service Commission policy, the supervisor had no alternative. If Scott didn’t resign, he must fire him.
Five years after Bruce Scott was tossed out of the Labor Department, he read a brief article in the Washington Star. Another man, Frank Kameny, had also been thrown out of government service on the grounds of homosexual behavior, and he’d tried and failed to get his case heard by the Supreme Court. Scott, by then almost fifty years old, had not been able to find a decent job since he lost his Labor Department position. He contacted Kameny to commiserate.
Kameny had already been thinking by then that he would start an organization to fight for the civil rights of homosexuals. Bruce Scott became a founding member. His case would become Mattachine’s first serious battle. “You apply again for a Labor Department job,” Kameny plotted with Scott. “They’ll turn you down on the grounds of your homosexual record, of course. And then we’ll fight them.”
On October 3, 1961, Scott applied for the position of management analyst. He had to take a qualifying exam, which he passed easily. But when an envelope arrived from the Civil Service he already knew there’d be no job offer inside. The letter invited him to a “voluntary interview” for the purposes of establishing his “qualifications and suitability for appointment.”2
With few preliminaries, in a scene very much like the one Kameny had been through, the Civil Service Commission interrogator told Scott, “We have information indicating that you are a homosexual. Do you wish to comment on this matter?” Scott, having been coached by Kameny, responded: “I do not believe the question is pertinent insofar as my job performance is concerned.”
That was the end of the interview. The following May, Bruce Scott was informed by letter that he was “ineligible for federal employment on the grounds of immoral conduct.”3 Now he and Kameny had grounds on which to make a test case.
“Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that I am a homosexual,” Scott’s appeal to the Civil Service Commission said. “But that is not evidence that I conduct myself immorally.” Homosexuality and immoral conduct are not synonymous, he insisted, and he reiterated all of Kameny’s major themes: the sexual nature of an applicant has no relation to his fitness for the position; the Civil Service Commission has no right to ask whether an applicant is heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual; the policy of the Civil Service Commission against homosexuals is discriminatory; the government has no business making itself an arbiter of morality and immorality.
The Civil Service Commission’s Bureau of Personnel Investigations and the board of appeals turned a deaf ear to all of it. “There is convincing evidence that Mr. Scott engaged in homosexual conduct, which is considered contrary to generally recognized and accepted standards of morality,” the board of appeals declared, and upheld the Civil Service Commission’s refusal to consider him for employment.4
Kameny and Scott then went to the new DC chapter of the ACLU and asked for support. The ACLU hadn’t been homosexual-friendly in the past,5 but Kameny and Scott had reason to think that the DC president, attorney David Carliner, might be different. They were right. Carliner had been battling forces of injustice since 1934, when he was fifteen years old and picketed the German Embassy in protest over Hitler’s policies. As a lawyer, he made a career in tackling cases that were unpopular or foolhardy, such as those involving miscegenation laws in the South. Bruce Scott’s case was tailor-made for him. He got to work immediately.
Kameny made sure that the press was informed that homosexuals were fighting back and a suit against the Civil Service Commission was under way. He believed that any publicity was useful, even if reporters weren’t fair. After all, Bruce Scott had found him by reading in the newspaper about his failed Supreme Court appeal. Kameny was particularly anxious that DC’s major paper, the Washington Post, know of Scott’s case. In the 1950s, the Washington Post regularly ran front-page articles with headlines such as “Names of 200 Perverts Listed for Firing by U.S. Agencies,” which reported without agonizing that the “perverts” were being sacked as “unsuited for government work.”6 But something was clearly changing at the Washington Post, too. An editorial that appeared in the Post in April 1963, three months before Scott v. Macy went to court, was headlined “Misplaced Morality.” The Post writer declared that homosexuals can and do lead “useful, successful, and apparently normal lives,” and “to deny them all chance to work for their government is wholly arbitrary and unjust.”7 It was the most unequivocal statement a mainstream Washington paper had yet made supporting the rights of homosexual citizens.
Judge George L. Hart, who heard Scott’s case in the district court, was not as sympathetic. He agreed with the Civil Service Commission attorneys’ arguments that Scott had no legal right to employment, and that the commission officers did have a right to exercise their “discretion and judgment” to disqualify him. Bruce Scott had no case, Judge Hart decreed.8
Bruce Scott was discouraged. He’d been unemployed or underemployed for eight years, and it appeared he would never be able to make a living in Washington. He wanted to go back to Chicago, where he’d been raised. Illinois had gotten rid of its sodomy law in 1961, and he had reason to hope that there he could find a suitable job; but Kameny urged him to stay in DC and continue to fight.
Kameny’s single-mindedness, which drove him to expend most of Mattachine’s resources on battling the government, was not sitting well with members of his organization. He’d been founder and president since 1961, but a revolt was brewing. At the next election, several members ran against him—including, ironically, Bruce Scott, who’d served as both secretary and vice president. Kameny lost, though not to Scott. People had been unhappy about Kameny’s insistence that Mattachine must not water down its focus on civil rights by being a “service” organization. Another charter member, Bob King,9 had had thousands of leaflets printed on venereal disease prevention, and he organized Mattachine members to distribute them in bars, restrooms, theaters, anywhere gay men cruised. Such an action was far more useful than tilting at government windmills, many of Mattachine’s members thought.10 In 1965, Frank Kameny was out, and Bob King was in as president of Mattachine Society Washington.
Kameny was too focused on his fight for civil rights to bear a long grudge against either Bruce Scott or Mattachine. He pushed Scott to take his case to a US Court of Appeals.
• • •
George Hart, the district court judge who’d ruled that Scott had no case, was known in Washington as “an outspoken conservative with impeccable Republican credentials.”11 Kameny and Scott couldn’t have been surprised that he would not rule against a government agency in favor of a homosexual. But they were surely surprised at their great good luck in finding themselves in the appeals court of Chief Judge David Bazelon, who was George Hart’s polar opposite. Bazelon was well known for his decisions that championed the poor, the mentally ill, the underdog of various stripes, and for his view that it was a judge’s duty to speak out on social issues. Now, opining about Scott v. Macy, he peered down from the bench over his half-glasses and declared to the federal attorneys for the Civil Service Commission that their charges against Bruce Scott were vague. Moreover, the government had to justify imposing disqualification for “immoral conduct.” If there was no nexus between private conduct and job performance, conduct was irrelevant12—precisely what Kameny had been arguing since he himself was fired from the Army Map Service in 1957. The appeals court found in favor of Bruce Scott by a 2-to-1 decision (Warren Burger, who would become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1969, was the dissenting vote), and declared that he must be considered eligible for federal employment. The Washington Post, now firmly in the corner of the homosexual, applauded the decision.13
When, two years later, the recalcitrant Civil Service Commission still had not declared him eligible for government employment, Scott filed a second appeal. The CSC would not give in. Bazelon’s court had criticized the commission for its “vague charges”; so now it produced several specific charges against Scott. He did not meet the suitability and fitness standards for federal employment because he’d been arrested in 1947, and again in 1951, for “loitering”; and on top of that, he had “stood mute when a neighbor characterized him as a homosexual”; and when he’d been interrogated by the Civil Service Commission about whether he was a homosexual, instead of answering the question directly, he only said that his sexuality was not pertinent to his job performance.14
Scott’s second appeal was heard in October 1967. Eleven months later, the court issued its verdict, which was an affirmation of the 1965 decision, with an additional opinion that US citizens had a right to privacy and did not have to answer questions about their sexuality. The Civil Service Commission had no grounds to refuse to consider Scott as an eligible applicant for employment. By that time, though, Scott, thoroughly discouraged by the pokey turning of the wheels of justice, had given up on trying to make a living in DC and returned to Chicago, where he immediately got a job with the State of Illinois.
The “Macy” of Scott v. Macy was John W. Macy Jr., who’d been the head of the Commission on Equal Opportunity in Hiring until President Kennedy promoted him in 1961 to chairman of the United States Civil Service Commission. Macy had a long and honored career as a devoted public servant, from the 1950s, when he worked in the Eisenhower administration, to his retirement in 1981 as the head of FEMA under President Carter. As the chairman of the Civil Service Commission, Macy was hugely influential. He kept a file of twenty thousand highly qualified Americans, and he had the ear of the White House when he made recommendations for presidential appointments and top civil service jobs. Lyndon Johnson called him “my talent scout” and “the best there is.”
Macy, an avid liberal, was wholehearted in his support of the goals of LBJ’s Great Society, particularly the goal of eliminating from American society the terrible demons of racial inequality and social injustice. He decreed that “affirmative attention” be given to attracting “Negroes and Spanish Americans and Puerto Ricans and Orientals and other minority group members to join us in the work of government,”15 and he fought discrimination in federal hiring against women and the disabled, too. “The yeast in the dough of civil rights dissent and protest is the individual’s desire to count for something, to explore his full potential as a human being. The stirrings are being felt in large groupings of minorities. Our society needs new patterns of participation, to make possible the constructive use of their abilities and personal attributes,” Macy proclaimed.16 Frank Kameny could not have said it better himself.
But when Macy spoke of the government making constructive use of those who had been stifled in the past, he most certainly did not mean homosexuals. Kameny had been trying to meet with him since August 1962, precisely to tell him that homosexuals, who were one of the “large groupings of minorities,” also desired to count for something, to explore their full potential as human beings, to contribute their abilities and personal attributes to government service. Macy’s first response to Kameny’s request for a meeting was a curt letter saying that to meet with Kameny “would serve no useful purpose” because homosexuals were not suitable employees for federal civil service.
Through Mattachine, Kameny renewed his requests for a meeting in 1963 and again in 1964.17 The answer he got, on US Civil Service Commission stationery, was no. Kameny dubbed John Macy “the federal equivalent of Governors [George] Wallace, [Ross] Barnett, and [Orval] Faubus,” the obstructionists of Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, respectively, who fought fiercely against racial integration. Like them, Macy was refusing to meet with “Homosexual American citizens” (a descriptor Kameny kept repeating like a mantra) to hear their legitimate grievances.18
Kameny again wrote John Macy after Mattachine members picketed the White House in April 1965, and asked that Macy change the commission’s policy on homosexuals. In May Macy responded that the Civil Service Commission had, in fact, recently reconsidered the policy—and decided “to retain it unaltered.”19
Kameny wrote back: “No homosexual citizens as such participated in the deliberations, as citizens in this country have a right to expect in matters affecting them!” No answer. He wrote Macy again to say that Mattachine Society Washington would be picketing in front of Macy’s bailiwick on June 26, 1965; but, he said, it was not too late to call off the picket. All Macy had to do was agree to a meeting. Finally, Mattachine did receive an answer: “A meeting would serve no useful purpose,” Macy reiterated his refrain on June 23.20
Though Kameny was no longer president of Mattachine, he was able to get twenty-five members to join the picket—a respectable number, two and a half times as many as those present at the first White House picket. For two hours on the afternoon of Saturday, June 26, 1965, seventeen men and eight women, dressed for balmy early-summer weather—the men in light suits, the women in sleeveless blouses and cotton skirts—marched in an oval in front of Civil Service Commission headquarters proclaiming “ ‘Fair Employment’ Applies to Homosexuals Too,” “Government Should Combat Prejudice—Not Submit to It,” and “Sexual Preference Is Irrelevant to Federal Employment.” They were led by Lilli Vincenz and her bold, black-lettered picket sign, designed to tweak Chairman Macy’s nose with the reminder that the civil service was already infiltrated by homosexuals, and not even his pusillanimous policies could keep them out: “A Quarter Million Homosexual Federal Employees Protest Civil Service Commission Policy,” her sign said.21 To every passerby who would take it, the picketers distributed a three-page leaflet, “Why Homosexuals Are Picketing the United States Civil Service Commission,” which complained of the commission’s “un-American refusal” to meet with them.
Then Kameny went home and wrote a follow-up letter, again requesting a meeting with John Macy. Nothing. He sent another letter on August 15. This time he received a response from Macy saying that the Civil Service Commission’s general counsel, Lawrence Meloy, and the director of the Civil Service Commission’s Bureau of Personnel Investigations, Kimbell Johnson, would meet with a few Mattachine representatives. (Perhaps they’d hoped to pry out some of the names of the quarter million homosexual federal employees?) On August 28, Kameny, Jack Nichols, Lilli Vincenz, and Barbara Gittings stepped foot, as known homosexuals, into the halls of commission headquarters. They brought a married straight woman with them, too, the same one who was in the first Mattachine White House picket—to corroborate that not all heterosexuals felt contempt for homosexuals or would be uncomfortable working with them.22 Johnson and Meloy listened for an hour and a half as the small contingent, Kameny leading the way, made their argument:23 federal employment should be based on relevant background, training, on-the-job conduct, and nothing else—certainly not on off-the-job private sexual acts. “Morality and immorality are not the concern of the government and are not relevant to employment!” Kameny reiterated passionately.
“All the homosexuals I’ve come in contact with have been arrested for soliciting or they’ve been child molesters. What I can’t stand is those people who take a youngster home, get him drunk, and seduce him,” Meloy said flatly.24
“We don’t condone things like that. We’re not trying to make that legal. That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about!” Kameny told him. It wasn’t easy for Kameny to be patient with such ignorance.
When Meloy instructed the group to submit a formal written statement of their position—which they’d already presented verbally at great length—it felt like a stalling tactic.
But they’d leave nothing undone. In December Mattachine submitted a seventeen-page statement titled “Federal Employment of Homosexual American Citizens,” along with documents supporting Mattachine’s position from the ACLU and the San Francisco Council on Religion and the Homosexual. For good measure, they stuck into the envelope the Mattachine leaflet, “Why Homosexuals Are Picketing the United States Civil Service Commission.”
Two months later, Mattachine received a response—“a masterful stroke of illogic,” Kameny called John Macy’s long letter.25 Macy rejected, first of all, Mattachine’s most salient argument that homosexuals were a minority group comparable to racial or religious minorities. “Homosexual” isn’t even a noun, Macy said, so the word can’t refer to a person. It’s an adjective and refers simply to deviate sexual behavior: and those who engage in such behavior are not suitable for civil service employment. Macy then listed the reasons why the government would not hire such people:
• the revulsion of other employees by homosexual conduct and the consequent disruption of service efficiency
• the apprehension caused other employees of homosexual advances, solicitations, or assaults
• the unavoidable subjection of the sexual deviate to erotic stimulation through on-the-job use of common toilets, showers, and living facilities
• the offense to members of the public who are required to deal with a known or admitted sexual deviate to transact Government business
• the hazard that the prestige and authority of a Government position will be used to foster homosexual activity, particularly among the youth
• the use of Government funds and authority in furtherance of conduct offensive both to the mores and the laws of our society26
Kameny declared himself doubly disgusted by the letter because John Macy had fervently vowed that as the head of the Civil Service Commission he would wage a “renewed attack upon prejudice itself, with the goal of eradicating every vestige of it from the federal service.” That goal, Macy had pronounced in no uncertain terms, meant nothing less than “full acceptance of minority associates.”27 The duplicity of Macy’s pronouncement renewed Kameny’s outraged resolve to fight until the Civil Service Commission and all the other federal entities—the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the White House, the Supreme Court—admitted that homosexuals were indeed among those “minority associates.”
Clifford Norton, for fifteen years a budget analyst for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had spent the evening of October 22, 1963, in a DC gay bar. He left about midnight and drove to Lafayette Square, where he pulled up to the curb and made eye contact with a young man by the name of Madison Monroe Procter. Procter ambled over to Norton’s car, and Norton invited him in. They drove once around the square.
“Do you want to come to my apartment?” Norton asked.
“Drive me to my car, where you picked me up, and then I’ll follow you,” Procter said.
They were unaware that two Morals Squad officers had observed them, and now they, too, were following Norton’s car to his home in southwest Washington.
Procter and Norton had gotten out of their cars and were walking together toward Norton’s apartment house when the policemen pulled up in their unmarked car, jumped out, and told the two men they were under arrest. They were taken down to the police station, and each was led by an officer into a little room where he was interrogated for two hours about his sex history. Procter said under grilling that Norton had put his hand on Procter’s leg as they drove around Lafayette Square.
Under grilling, Norton admitted that he worked for NASA. The interrogating policemen reported the information they’d extracted to the head of the Morals Squad, Lieutenant Roy Blick, who’d been a main force in witch hunting DC homosexuals since 1950. Blick released Madison Monroe Procter but telephoned NASA security chief Bart Fugler to say that Clifford Norton, a NASA employee, had been arrested for homosexual conduct.
Fugler arrived at the station at three o’clock in the morning. Blick showed him Norton’s arrest record, and then let him listen incognito while Norton was interrogated for another twenty minutes. Norton continued to deny he’d made homosexual advances to Procter; and finally, he was told he would be released without being charged, though he was given a traffic ticket because he’d been driving forty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five-mile zone when the Morals Squad officers followed him.
But the ticket was the least of Norton’s troubles. As he was about to leave the station, Fugler identified himself as the NASA Security Chief and ordered Norton to come with him. He was taken to a second-floor office of a deserted NASA building, where another NASA officer was already waiting for them. They questioned Norton until six in the morning. Exhausted by then (but not enough to spill all his beans), he admitted that he’d engaged in mutual masturbation with other males in high school and college, that he sometimes had homosexual desires when he drank, that a couple of times he blacked out after drinking and “suspected [he] might have engaged in some sort of homosexual activity,” that he’d experienced a blackout when he met Procter and he remembered only that he’d invited him up for a drink. His interrogators produced a written statement that Procter had given the Morals Squad officer: “It would take an idiot not to be able to figure out that he wanted to have a sex act on me,” Procter had said under questioning.
“Procter is a liar. I never made indecent advances on him,” Norton insisted. “I never knowingly engaged in any homosexual activity during my entire adult life!” His denials did him no good. Fugler and the other NASA officer concluded that Norton did make advances to Procter, which amounted to “immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct,” and that, based on his earlier admissions to them, they were convinced that Norton possessed “traits and character which render him unsuitable for further government employment.”28 He was fired from NASA, and both a civil service appeals examiner and the board of appeals and review upheld the firing.
Still reeling from shock, Norton remembered that the year before, he’d read in the Washington Star that Frank Kameny, president of Mattachine, had challenged Congressman Dowdy’s attempt to revoke the homophile organization’s license to raise money in order to fight for homosexual rights. Norton found Kameny’s telephone number in the DC phone book, and he called.
Clifford Norton, who’d been fired from a job, was in a different situation from Bruce Scott, who was a job applicant; Norton’s would be another important test case. Kameny worked with ACLU lawyers Glenn Graves and John Karr to build the case. Like Scott v. Macy, it ended up in the US Court of Appeals; and luck and coincidence were once more on the homophiles’ side. The chief judge appointed to hear Norton v. Macy was again David Bazelon. “There is sufficient evidence that Norton made homosexual advances to Procter,” Bazelon wrote in the majority opinion on Norton v. Macy. But, he wanted to know, how did that have any bearing on his performance as a budget analyst? “Who is the Civil Service Commission to make Olympian pronouncements about morality and immorality?” he scolded Macy and his subordinates. “Immorality covers a multitude of sins,” he went on, expressing outrage at government hypocrisy. “Indeed, it may be doubted whether there are in the entire Civil Service many persons so saintly as never to have done any act which is disapproved by the ‘prevailing mores of our society,’ ” he told the Civil Service Commission.29
Immediately after Judge Bazelon’s court found in favor of Norton, the Civil Service Commission petitioned for rehearing. It was by now 1969. Clifford Norton had been fighting his case for six years. He could not get a job in Washington. While he awaited resolution of his case, he went to the other end of the continent and worked in Los Angeles until he was let go when the firm had to make cuts for economic reasons. He took a bus back across the country, stopping off in various places like Cincinnati to look for work. He found none. “I’m down to my last $4,” he wrote Frank Kameny in July, while he was still waiting to hear whether the Civil Service Commission would be granted a rehearing.30
Coincidentally, the day after Kameny received Norton’s letter he received another from a former coworker of Norton’s at NASA saying that everyone in their office had been disturbed by his firing, and they all agreed that Norton had been a “well-liked and efficient worker.”31 Let the Civil Service Commission appeal their loss all the way to the Supreme Court, Kameny wrote Norton to cheer him—he and Norton could now provide concrete evidence about how well Norton fit in at NASA.32
But not many had Kameny’s stomach for unlimited battle. Norton was tired of the fight. He wrote Kameny to say he was worried that the Washington newspapers would use his name in reporting his victory over the Civil Service Commission. His brother, who worked in DC, might see the newspapers and tell his family that he was a homosexual.33
Kameny was furious. The year before, in 1968, he’d coined the slogan “Gay Is Good,” which he would come to think of as his biggest contribution to the gay movement—even bigger than his victories over the federal government—because it had the power to make gays and lesbians strong. Norton’s win over the Civil Service Commission had already made him a poster boy for the gay rights struggle. Kameny couldn’t let him indulge in sniveling timidity. “You have fought the very government of the United States and won,” he lectured Norton in a letter, fairly banging out his annoyance on the typewriter keys. “You have bearded the lion in his den. And you’re still running from your family???!!! [sic] God knows, man—you stood up to the world and said, ‘I am right and you are wrong’; and the world has said back to you (after a fight): ‘Yes, you are right and we were wrong.’ And you’re still running from your family???!!! [sic] If I were you just now, impoverished and all, I’d be holding my head up in pride and looking anyone [sic] straight in the eye and saying, ‘I’m a Homosexual and so what! Accept me on MY [sic] terms or you don’t get me, and you’ll lose more than I will.’ And that includes your family. The closet is getting very stuffy. Come out. The fresh air and the sunshine are invigorating.”34
Norton wrote thanking him for his advice, though his letter suggests he felt sorry for himself still. No word yet on whether the Civil Service Commission would be granted a rehearing. He’d settled for the time being in Boston and was eking out a little living, doing part-time work as a telephone solicitor.35 The agony of his wait was alleviated somewhat by friends; he was staying with one of them in a fourteen-room restored town house in the gentrified South End.
But in a few months, Norton would be able to buy such a place for himself if he wished. The Civil Service Commission did petition for a rehearing; it was denied on October 20, 1969;36 finally, the commission agreed to pay Norton $100,000 for wrongful termination and to provide him with a lifetime pension.37
And that was not the greatest victory of Norton v. Macy. As a direct result of losing this case in 1969 and the Scott v. Macy case the year before, the Civil Service Commission came to understand that it needed to give up on refusing to hire homosexual applicants and witch hunting homosexual employees. On December 21, 1973, the commission issued a bulletin to provide a guideline to all the agencies over which it had jurisdiction: “You may not find a person unsuitable for federal employment merely because that person is a homosexual or has engaged in homosexual acts; nor may such exclusion be based on a conclusion that a homosexual person might bring the public service into public contempt.” The statement was a direct refutation of Chairman Macy’s 1966 declarations that “homosexual” is not a noun, and that homosexuals should be barred from federal employment because their presence would offend the public.
In 1975 the guideline was formally codified in the Civil Service Commission’s Regulations Relating to Suitability Disqualification.38 A quarter-century-old policy of federal persecution of gay people who worked for, or hoped to work for, the US government, had come to an end. Frank Kameny, grandiose and bellicose, declared in inimitable Kameny style, “The US government surrendered to me on July 3, 1975.”
On August 27, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, was holding a televised press conference. He was surrounded by reporters—a couple dozen men in suits and ties seated at desks with microphones, who raised their hands respectfully to be called on by the secretary: “Under what conditions would the US stop bombing North Vietnam?” they asked him, and “What hopes do you hold for French president Charles de Gaulle’s attempts to settle the Vietnam conflict?” “Mr. Secretary, I understand that tomorrow a self-described ‘minority group’ will be picketing State Department headquarters. Would you care to comment on the personnel policies at issue?” one reporter called out from the back of the room.
Rusk smirked. “Well, you’ve been very gentle,” he said, meaning that the reporter had not used the damning word for which he himself refused to substitute a less-offensive synonym: “Yes, I understand that we are being picketed by a group of homosexuals.” Chuckles and guffaws. Rusk had been apprised of the picket a few days earlier, when Kameny informed the State Department that Mattachine Society Washington would be willing to cancel plans to protest if the secretary of state would meet with members of the group to discuss routine firing of State Department employees who were found to be homosexual. Rusk did not dignify the request with an answer. “The policy of the department is that we do not employ homosexuals,” he reiterated for members of the press. “If we discover homosexuals in our department, we discharge them. This has to do with problems of blackmail and problems of personal instability and all sorts of things. So I don’t think we can give any comfort to those who might be tempted to picket us tomorrow,” Rusk concluded39 before he turned to a question from the front of the room: “Is it true that Hanoi has rebuffed a US peace proposal?”
Saturday, August 28, two o’clock in the afternoon: Mattachine pickets were there, just as promised. So were the AP and UPI wire services, which Frank Kameny had alerted, as well as reporters from CBS-TV, the Kansas City Star, the French News Agency, and a host of other media representatives40 who learned of the picket from Rusk’s comments in response to the reporter’s question at the news conference. (It would not have been unlike Frank Kameny to have planted the reporter in the back of the room precisely for the purpose of getting the word out about the planned picket to a broader swath of print and television journalists.) As homosexuals picketed Foggy Bottom, television cameras caught them holding up neatly printed, bold-lettered signs—the perfect medium to get a message across, succinctly and instantaneously, to television viewers. The sign on which the cameras focused longest said:
Kameny, sounding intelligent and looking very presentable, was also captured by CBS-TV’s cameras. “Every American citizen has a right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal merits as an individual,” he declared. Secretary Rusk had opened up for Kameny access to publicity venues that were priceless. Large numbers of people, straight and gay, in Nebraska and Alabama and Texas, who may not have known before that American homosexuals were making a demand to be treated like full-fledged American citizens, learned about it sitting in their living rooms and watching the nightly news.
But despite the nationwide coverage of the picketers’ grievances, the secretary of state still did not deign to communicate with them. Mattachine’s answer was to thumb its collective nose at Secretary Rusk. Kameny and a couple of other members of the group penned two circulars titled “How to Handle a Federal Interrogation” and “What to Do If You Are Arrested.” They intended it for distribution everywhere that homosexuals congregated in DC, but first they invaded Foggy Bottom, walking up and down the halls to plaster the circulars all over State Department bulletin boards. They stuffed copies in holders, too, on which they wrote in red letters, “Take One!”41
• • •
Frank Kameny had been voted out as president of Mattachine; and almost to a person, members of the organization that he’d founded thought him arrogant and exhausting; but no one could deny that he was a dynamic, bold, and brainy tactician. As Eva Freund, one of Mattachine’s few lesbians, observed, “Kameny was the only person I ever encountered who had an overarching perspective, who saw how all the pieces fit together, who knew the things you had to do to make social change happen.”42 Without an official title, he continued to be the group’s chief strategist; and members continued to follow him into his various remarkable exploits.
He next waged a war of bombardment on the Justice Department’s attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Assistant Attorney General Walter Yeagley, barraging them with Mattachine literature, notifying them whenever Mattachine planned to picket. He could have saved his envelopes and stamps. The Justice Department was keeping a file of the collected letters of Franklin Kameny—copies of all the correspondence he’d sent to US government officials.
But finally, astoundingly, it was the Justice Department that sent a letter to Kameny, informing him that he and Mattachine were being given a ninety-minute appointment. On January 25, 1966, they were to meet with Assistant Attorney General Yeagley in the Division of Internal Security. Yeagley’s primary duties since the McCarthy years had been to flush out Communists and subversives. With common sense and chutzpah, Kameny took the offensive at the meeting. “The notion of homosexuals as a security risk is nothing but the creation of armchair theoreticians operating in ivory towers,” he lectured Yeagley. “It’s the government policies that are creating the real problems. The so-called ‘problem’ of homosexuals as a security risk is nonexistent! There are no instances whatsoever of homosexuals having been blackmailed to turn over American state secrets.”43
The assistant attorney general let Kameny talk for most of the ninety minutes, but it’s unclear why. In fact, it’s unclear why Yeagley even agreed to a meeting—unless it was to see up close these people who were cluttering up official mailboxes and creating a nuisance in front of public buildings. Kameny and the other Mattachine representatives learned from Yeagley only that the security clearance program was decentralized—and the Department of Justice had no direct responsibility for it. The Civil Service Commission was in charge of clearances for federal employees, based (as Mattachine already knew) on “suitability” standards; and the Department of Defense “set the tone” for clearances for employees in private industry that contracted with federal agencies.
The Department of Defense became the next target on Kameny’s list. In May 1967 thirty-one-year-old Benning Wentworth, namesake and descendent of the first royal governor of New Hampshire,44 received an official notification titled “Statement of reasons by the Defense Department for proposed revocation of security clearance.” For seven years, Wentworth, an air force veteran and electronics technician, had had a clearance that permitted him to work with “secret” materials at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, a company which contracted with the federal government. Now the Defense Department was proposing the clearance be taken from him because “1. He has committed certain specified acts of sexual perversion over a specified period of time with a John Jerry Gaffney; and 2. Because of these acts, he is subject to blackmail.”45
Gaffney, an eighteen-year-old high school senior when he met Wentworth in 1964, later enlisted in the air force, and in a crisis of panic admitted to both an air force chaplain and a psychiatrist that he had had sexual relations with men. Both his confessors informed the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, as they were required to do; and that triggered an interrogation of Gaffney. Investigators seized several of his “suspicious” belongings, including an address book in which they found Wentworth’s telephone number and a jotting about their encounter. Thus began Wentworth’s troubles, including long hours of questioning by security officers of the Department of Defense about the most intimate details of his sex life.46
By now frequent newspaper articles about Frank Kameny and his appearances on television had made his name familiar to anyone who was paying attention. Wentworth found him easily in the DC phone book, where Kameny let himself be listed for just this purpose. Yes, certainly, he would act as personal counsel to Wentworth.
“Look, I barely knew this kid Gaffney,” Wentworth told Kameny quickly. “We had a brief half-hour encounter involving no sexual activity.”47
“Okay,” Kameny said, “but this is what our tactic has to be: First of all, it’s strategically advisable to allow into the record that you’re a homosexual and that you’ve never denied it. The admission will make it clear that you’re in no way subject to blackmail. Secondly, instead of keeping the accusation against you secret, we’re going to tell the whole world.”
Barbara Gittings had by now lost her position as editor of The Ladder and had more time to assist in Mattachine Society Washington’s civil liberties battles. Frank Kameny was thrilled. With her calm and cool speech and proper demeanor, she helped defuse the fevered associations between homosexuality and wildly illicit sex that lodged in the minds of those who upheld Defense Department policy. Kameny asked her to act as cocounsel for Benning Wentworth. He and Gittings wrote to the Security Clearance Review Office of the Defense Department, requesting that Wentworth be given a hearing. It was scheduled for November 24, 1967. At that hearing, Gittings and Kameny agreed, they’d admonish the Defense Department lawyers, “We do not come here as amateur lawyers, trying to act as professionals. We come as professional human beings, trying to teach our Defense Department to be the same.”48
“We simply invited all the press services, all the major newspaper columnists and national magazines of importance, and the radio and TV networks, too, to attend the hearing and to report and broadcast freely,” Kameny gleefully reported to Don Slater, who was then publishing the homophile magazine Tangents in Los Angeles. The press conference Kameny and Gittings arranged was held one hour before the hearing, immediately outside the hearing room doors. The purpose of the gathering was for Wentworth to announce to the press that he was indeed an active homosexual; and because his homosexuality was no secret, he could never be blackmailed for it. Barbara Gittings, wearing a big “Equality for Homosexuals” button on the collar of her neat dress, told the reporters—appropriating the rhetoric that was used against homosexuals and applying it to Wentworth’s accusers: “We consider the very existence of this case to be part of the government’s improper, unethical, and immoral effort to enter into the field of private morality.”49
The media came out in full force because Wentworth’s declaration and his public challenge to the Department of Defense were certainly news: never before had homosexuals whose security clearances were being revoked desired to spread the word about their trouble. Though some editors attached hostile headlines to the resultant articles, such as “Deviate, 31, Confesses in Bid to Retain Job,”50 the public was also informed of Kameny’s most crucial point of defense: Wentworth’s willing admission to homosexuality made him immune to blackmail threats. Associated Press reporters stayed through every minute of the seven-and-a-half hours of the hearing. “They took many pictures,” Kameny wrote Don Slater with satisfaction.51
As personal counsel, Kameny had the opportunity to feed leading questions to the slight and usually shy, but now defiant, Wentworth, who’d been coached well by Kameny and Gittings. “Do you know that under the law you are subject to criminal prosecution for having allegedly committed a homosexual act?” Kameny asked Wentworth who, though he was sitting on the witness stand with all eyes upon him, managed to control his nervousness enough to look composed. Wentworth was normally soft-spoken, but as instructed by his counsel, he answered loudly, “I would welcome a criminal prosecution because it would provide me with an opportunity, working with the ACLU and the Mattachine Society, to bring a Supreme Court test case and have the sodomy law struck down once and for all.”
“Do you keep your homosexuality a secret? Do your fellow workers and supervisors know?” Kameny asked. “Everyone I work with knows,” Wentworth answered. “When my security clearance was revoked, there was an article about it in the New York Times. A lot of my coworkers told me they saw it, and those who didn’t see it heard about it. If anything, they seem to be going out of their way to be nice to me. It’s a big company and I’ve had no adverse response whatsoever. Not even from my supervisors. And now the whole world will know because I’ve just had a news conference announcing even on radio and television that I’m a homosexual.”
“What about your family?” Kameny asked, again a question on which he and Gittings had coached Wentworth, who answered unflappably, “They’re fine with it. Right after the New York Times article came out, I received two unsolicited letters, one from my mother and one from an aunt. They both said they were proud of me to be fighting for my rights. My mother said she was expecting me for Christmas dinner.”
“So there’s no fear whatsoever of adverse familial consequences,” Kameny emphasized, reiterating for the fifth or sixth time that if everyone already knows that Wentworth is a homosexual, no one could blackmail him to turn over state secrets.52
Another major argument that the Defense Department used to bar homosexuals from security clearance was that they were emotionally unstable individuals whose sexuality was a manifestation of their severe neurosis. Defense Department attorneys called as an expert witness Dr. Charles Socarides, a Freudian psychoanalyst who had made a considerable reputation by curing, as he claimed, over seventy-five homosexuals. The attorneys’ questions under direct examination allowed Socarides to coolly confirm that homosexuality was a sick adaptation to an unfortunate family constellation, that homosexuals were mentally unsound and unpredictable, that he’d never encountered a healthy homosexual, and that by their very nature, homosexuals were poor security risks.
Kameny and Gittings had their turn with Dr. Socarides in cross-examination. During the three hours of their questioning, Socarides’s composure morphed to irritation and then agitation as it became clear that first Kameny and then Gittings were leading him into traps and knocking down his claims. They made his theories look so much like quackery that some weeks later Kameny was formally notified by the Defense Department that Dr. Socarides’s name had been taken off the department’s list of expert witnesses. But despite the logic of Kameny’s and Gittings’s arguments about an out homosexual being blackmail-proof, despite the bumbling ineptitude of the expert witness, the Security Clearance Review Office elected not to reinstate Benning Wentworth’s clearance.
Wentworth appealed, and Kameny and Gittings again acted as cocounsel. The three showed up at the preliminary to the appeal hearing wearing “Gay Is Good” buttons and ready to rumble. “We don’t come into this case as repentant and rehabilitated. We come wearing our slogans and holding our heads high, and refusing to tolerate any transgression of our rights and privileges,” Kameny declared. At the actual hearing a week later, he argued that standards of “morality” were evolving. He granted, “for the sake of argument,” that some people still consider homosexuality to be immoral. But so what? “A man has a right in this country to be unpopular; he has a right to be unrespectable, disreputable, disgraceful, infamous, notorious, if he so wishes, without adverse consequences of any kind from his government.” It was the government that was the monster and needed to be reformed, he insisted. He was surely remembering his own sad history when he spoke vehemently of the horrible injustices perpetrated on a man like Benning Wentworth, “who has lived for years an honorable, honest, productive, useful life, respected—and properly so—by those around him, relied upon, given responsibilities and trusts, which he has consistently shouldered and met,” only to find himself called “irresponsible, untrustworthy, unstable, reckless, having poor judgment and integrity—all because in his personal, private life he is unconventional.”
Kameny concluded with a Shylock speech that aimed to convey the humanity of the homosexual and the terrible inhumanity of the government’s persecution of him. “We have our own sensitivities; we have our feelings; we are human beings. You walk roughshod over those feelings and sensitivities, with hobnailed boots, as if we were somehow less than human—which is, of course, precisely the way all too many of you think of us . . . You callously destroy people, needlessly, and then forget about them.”53 But still the Department of Defense would not budge.
• • •
Kameny had by now conceived a clever tactic: “There are more of us than there are [government] lawyers to cope with our cases, and we’ll swamp them and the courts with a tide of litigation,” he declared.54 He encouraged not only Benning Wentworth, but also Otto Ulrich and Richard Gayer, two other homosexuals whose security clearances had been revoked, to appeal to the district court. The trio was lucky enough to get as their judge a man who was, like Judge David Bazelon, a staunch supporter of civil rights. In 1972 Judge John H. Pratt—having just ruled that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare must withhold federal funds from 213 school districts that had failed to desegregate—now turned his attention to Benning Wentworth v. Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense; and he ordered that Wentworth’s security clearance be restored.55
Still, Defense Department lawyers would not concede wrong. Their next gambit was to appeal to the federal court. Wentworth’s case was reviewed on that level in 1973. Senior Circuit judge Charles Fahy gave the majority opinion. He censured the Defense Department for the “shocking array of questions” that Wentworth had to endure when he was grilled by security officers six years earlier. He characterized their interrogation as “a wide-ranging fishing expedition, concerning the most intimate details of Mr. Wentworth’s sex life.” The entire administrative proceedings were tainted, the judge said, because Wentworth’s questioners had flagrantly violated his First Amendment right to privacy. “Such unreasonable encroachments are indicative of the Defense Department’s ill-defined approach to the problem,” he scolded them. Moreover—Judge Fahy told Defense Department lawyers, reiterating co-counsels Kameny and Gittings’s reproaches—they’d failed to establish a nexus between Mr. Wentworth’s homosexuality and his ability to safeguard the nation’s secrets. Therefore, the judge concluded, Benning Wentworth’s security clearance had been erroneously revoked. And the Defense Department must rectify the error.56
• • •
Frank Kameny never, to the end of his life, stopped being indignant about what had been done to him as a young PhD working for the Army Map Service and dreaming he might become an astronaut. But his various victories over the federal government had done much to modify its cavalier and cruel treatment of gays and lesbians. Those victories must have given him great political satisfaction as well as considerable personal satisfaction. His personal satisfaction was surely made even sweeter in 2009, two years before his death, when he received an official letter from John Berry, director of the US Office of Personnel Management, the governmental organization that had morphed out of the Civil Service Commission in 1978. Berry apologized to Kameny for the Civil Service Commission’s “shameful action” fifty-two years earlier when it fired Kameny. “With the fervent passion of a true patriot, you did not resign yourself to your fate or quietly endure this wrong,” Berry wrote. The US government’s eventual repudiation of its discriminatory policies was “due in large part to your determination and hard work,” he added. He concluded by asking Frank Kameny to “please accept the gratitude and appreciation of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management for the work you have done to fight discrimination and protect the merit-based civil service system.”57
Kameny, sometimes a man of surprisingly few words, wrote back: “Apology accepted.”