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Openly gay Kameny runs for D.C. Delegate: 1971
Washington Area Spark posted a photo:
Franklin E. Kameny is shown in a March 19, 1971 photograph while campaigning as an openly gay man for Washington, D.C.’s non-voting congressional delegate.
Kameny used his candidacy for D.C. Delegate to raise the issue of discrimination against what we now call LGBTQ people.
The election winner, Walter Fauntroy, drew 65,000 votes. Kameny came in fourth with 1,800 votes.
Kameny was fired from his job at the Army Map Service in 1957 after he was arrested in Lafayette Park—then a gay male cruising location. The Civil Service fired him as a “sexual pervert.”
Kameny unlike others who hid their heads in shame, fought the dismissal. He lost, but went on to become one of the founders of the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C.—an early gay rights group.
He brought a militancy to the nascent gay rights movement in the years before the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion.
Kameny, together with others, organized picket lines at the White House, Civil Service Commission and Pentagon in 1965.
Kameny was one of the leaders among those who campaigned to overturn the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a “sickness.”
He and other advocates succeeded in 1973 when the trustees of the APA removed the designation. Dissident psychiatrists petitioned the issue to the membership but the trustees’ decision was upheld 20,000-3,800—a resounding victory for Kameny and the other advocates.
Kameny died in 2011.
For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmHCoVvx
The photographer is unknown. The image is an Associated Press photograph housed in the D.C. Library Washington Star Collection.
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