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Rally at Kameny campaign headquarters 1971
Washington Area Spark posted a photo:
Gay rights activist Franklin Kameny holds a rally outside his congressional campaign headquarters at 1307 E Street NW March 20 1971.
The group would later march to the White House in an attempt to deliver a letter to U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.
The letter called upon Nixon to eliminate the Executive Office and Civil Service bans on homosexuals, admit gay people to the Armed Forces, end the denial of security clearances and include gay people in the protections of the equal opportunity and other civil rights laws.
Kameny became the first openly gay candidate for the United States Congress when he ran in the District of Columbia’s first election for a non-voting Congressional delegate.
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 Stonewall Rebellion—generally credited with the start of the gay rights movement.
Kameny was an early gay activist, who 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.
Following his defeat by Democrat Walter E. Fauntroy in the 1971 election, Kameny and his campaign organization created the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Washington, D.C., an organization which continues to lobby government and press the case for equal rights
Kameny died in 2011.
For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsjCQ69wA
Photo by Pete Schmick. The image is courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.
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