Brainstorming a Movement
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Elements of these fights were conducted by letter, with Kameny’s passionate and cogent rhetoric directed at figures in the media, his fellow gay rights activists, and public officials ranging from little-known bureaucrats to several U.S. presidents.

It was in one of those letters, sent to John F. Kennedy in May 1961, that Kameny described a plan of action for ways in which the federal government should come to the aid of its gay and lesbian citizens. A Harvard-trained astronomer who had worked for the U.S. Army Map Service before being fired in 1957 for charges connected to his homosexuality, he had already experienced the government’s power to destroy lives through its anti-gay civil service policies. In addition to his request that Kennedy help to overturn these discriminatory federal employment rules, Kameny argued for broader changes in the law and its enforcement and for an end to restrictions against gays and lesbians serving in the military or holding security clearances. He also called for “the education of the public and the changing of their primitive attitudes.” Kameny marshaled the two lines of argument from his immediate predecessors in 1950s homophile groups: that gays and lesbians were an oppressed minority group and that anti-gay policies were destructive to individual civil liberties.

Where Kameny differed from these earlier groups was in tactics. Throughout the 1950s, Mattachine Society chapters on the West Coast and in New York City generally pursued a behind-the-scenes program that emphasized convincing doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, and other straight “experts” to advocate on their behalf. The Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW), co-founded by Kameny and Jack Nichols in 1961 (and which, despite its name, was not connected to the larger structure of Mattachine groups), emphasized a more militant approach of direct action in which lesbians and gay men spoke for themselves. Viable tactics included lawsuits, engagement with politicians, police, and the public, and civil rights demonstrations such as the picketing campaigns that Kemeny held at the White House, the Civil Service Commission, and each year in Philadelphia over the July Fourth weekend (the “Annual Reminder”). As Kameny would write to fellow activist Randy Wicker in 1963: “We are NOT an educational organization; we are a civil liberties organization. What we are engaged in never was education, per se, and is … rapidly becoming politics.”

In this vein, Gay Is Good contains letters that discuss Kameny’s 1959 lawsuit over his firing by the federal government (the first suit of its kind, though ultimately rejected for review by the Supreme Court in 1961). Other letters justify the various demonstrations with which he was involved, which were, he stressed, an “attempt to correct the abuses against which we picketed” and not merely “to call attention to ourselves.” Still others display Kameny and the MSW’s complete and public contempt for psychiatry (“the enemy incarnate”) for its insistence that homosexuality was a form of mental illness; detail his 1971 run for Congress, the first congressional campaign by an openly gay candidate; or find him formally soliciting sodomy from D.C.’s chief of police in an attempt to set up a test case. He could work within the system while also plotting its overthrow, as when he participated in a panel on homosexuality at the American Psychiatric Association’s 1971 annual conference while conspiring with D.C. Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists’ Alliance to zap the convention, commandeering a microphone and declaring war on psychiatry. Although his sense of decorum might be considered conservative by later standards—his insistence on a formal dress code and prohibition of all physical contact on picket lines is legendary—the Kameny revealed in these letters is never less than persistent, angry, and audacious.

While Long highlights Kameny’s accomplishments and his central role in the 1960s and early ’70s gay rights movement, Gay Is Good is not a hagiography-in-letters: Kameny’s importance is undeniable, and Long’s smart commentaries do not need to present Kameny as a saint. Kameny’s rhetoric could be so extreme (e.g., comparing government bureaucrats to Hitler) as to render some of his letters counter-productive. He was too savvy to think they would actually persuade their targets, so I suspect they were written mostly to blow off steam. While some letters make clear that he was anti-war, his desire to overturn the restrictions on gays in the military and to present gays and lesbians as “good citizens” led him to attack those in the movement who publicly protested the Vietnam War. And while he strongly supported the black civil rights movement (frequently citing its tactics as inspiration for his own) and the women’s liberation movement, he also appears in some letters not to appreciate the level of oppression suffered by blacks and women.

There’s an unfortunate tendency for us to demand perfection from our leaders and to apply impossible standards to those in the early movement, before Stonewall, who had to contend with levels of repression that we can barely fathom today. This tendency ought not to detract from the importance of the changes in law and government policy that Kameny was demanding—changes that he helped to bring about. One by one, the actions he demanded in his letter to President Ken-nedy came to pass, in no small measure because of his stubborn insistence that they be taken seriously. The thousands of letters in the Kameny archive chronicle the actions he took to make this happen, and Gay Is Good stands as a monument to his achievements.

Philip Clark serves on the board of the Rainbow History Project; he is at work on a book about 1960s gay D.C. publisher H. Lynn Womack.