Michael G. Long - Gay Is Good: The Life and Letters of Gay Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny

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First Paperback Edition 2019

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-1113-4 (paperback)

978-0-8156-1043-4 (cloth)

978-0-8156-5291-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Kameny, Frank, 19252011.

Gay is good : the life and letters of gay rights pioneer Franklin Kameny / edited by Michael G. Long. First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-1043-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8156-5291-5 (ebook)

1. Kameny, Frank, 19252011Correspondence. 2. Gay menUnited StatesCorrespondence. 3. Political activistsUnited StatesCorrespondence. 4. Gay rightsUnited States. 5. GaysUnited States. I. Long, Michael G. II. Title.

HQ75.8.K35A4 2014

Manufactured in the United States of America

that the law of good be,

published with grant by
Figure Foundation

Gay is good.

Franklin E. Kameny

Michael G. Long is an associate professor of religious studies and peace and conflict studies at Elizabethtown College and is the author or editor of several books on civil rights, religion and politics, and peacemaking in mid-century America, including Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life after Baseball (Syracuse University Press); Martin Luther King, Jr., Homosexuality, and the Early Gay Rights Movement (Palgrave Macmillan); I Must Resist: Bayard Rustins Life in Letters (City Lights); Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall (Amistad/Harper Collins); and First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson (Times Books). Another of Longs books, Christian Peace and Nonviolence, focuses on international peacemaking efforts by Christian activists and scholars. Longs work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, USA Today, CNN, Book Forum, Ebony/Jet, and many other newspapers and journals. Long blogs for the Huffington Post and has appeared on C-Span and NPR. His speaking engagements have taken him from the National Archives in Washington, DC, to the Schomberg Center of the New York Public Library in Harlem, and to the City Club of San Diego. Long holds a PhD from Emory University in Atlanta and resides in Highland Park, Pennsylvania.

Contents

Illustrations

Following page 168

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the following individuals and institutions: Frank Kameny, who, with encouragement from Charles Francis, generously donated his papers to the Library of Congress; the Estate of Dr. Franklin E. Kameny; Charles Francis and Bob Witech of the Kameny Papers Project; Randy Wicker; Andrew Tobias; Syracuse University Press, especially Jennika Baines, Mona Hamlin, Kay Steinmetz, and Kelly Lynne Balenske; copy editor Jessica LeTourneur; the staff at the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress; Tal Nadan and Philip Heslip of the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library; Thomas Lisanti of the Permissions and Reproduction Services of the New York Public Library; Stacey Chandler and Stephen Plotkin of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; archivists at the presidential libraries of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan; the staff at High Library of Elizabethtown College, especially Sylvia Morra and Louise Hyder-Darlington; Kathleen Murphy; Michael Key of the Washington Blade; Elizabethtown College, especially Dean Fletcher McClellan, for financial support, and Carol Ouimet; first-rate anonymous reviewers of the manuscript; independent researcher Marc LaRocque; freelance writer and editor Elaine Tinari Benedetti; the cool kidsJackson Griffith Long and Nathaniel Finn Long; and their strong mom, Karin Frederiksen Long. Special thanks to my dear friend Sharon Herr for proofreading the manuscript and preparing it for delivery.

Introduction

Making Society Change

Gay rights pioneer Franklin Kameny was pleased as he sat down to type a letter on June 3, 1972. Dear Mother, he wrote. The past two weeks have been among the most gratifying I have experienced in a very long time, and I thought Id share them with you.

Stacks upon stacks of papers surrounded him as he typed in the small office in his redbrick home in northwest Washingtonnews clippings, letters, and articles. His black metal files overflowed, and space was at a premium. But however cluttered his office was, Kameny himself was crystal-clear as he reflected on the approach he had adopted in his longtime crusade. Some 32 years ago, he typed, I told you that if society and I differ on anything, I will give society a second chance to convince me. If it fails, then I am right and society is wrong, and if society gets in my way, it will be society which will change, not I. That was so alien to your entire approach to life that you responded with disdain. It has been a guiding principle of my life. Society was wrong. I am making society change.

This book is the story of Franklin Kamenys pioneering efforts to help change society so gay men and lesbians could at last enjoy their constitutional right to pursue happiness without harassment or discrimination. An old black typewriter was his preferred weapon as he battled for civil rights and liberties for homosexuals. Kameny shot off hundreds of thousands of words, many of them dripping with sheer contempt for the anti-gay attitudes and policies he was targeting. He typed feverishly day and night, and sometimes into the early hours of the next morning, and then he typed some more, striving in letter after letter to win first-class citizenship for men and women long characterized as sick, immoral, and sinful.

By wielding letters as his favorite weapon, Kameny could and did gain entre into places that would otherwise have been closed to himsome of the most powerful offices in Washington, DC, and across the country. He sneaked into these guarded offices through the open mailbox, and once safely inside he landed with a thud on the stately desks, shouting at the top of his lungs for justice long denied. With an eye toward changing the social fabric, Kameny wrote to many of the leading personalities and institutions in both political and civil societyto Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Ann Landers and Johnny Carson, the American Psychiatric Association and the Department of Defenseand usually more than once. If his first letter to a policy- or opinion-maker did not prompt a satisfactory reply, he sent another and then another. No one in the early gay rights movement came close to Kameny in producing the quantity of letters he composed in his relentless campaign for equality.