- Born
- 21 May 1925New York City, USA
- Died
- 11 October 2011Washington, D.C., USA · aged 86
Frank Kameny
An astronomer whose dismissal helped turn the fight against anti-gay discrimination into a civil rights campaign.
Frank Kameny was born in New York City in 1925. He served in the Second World War and earned a doctorate in astronomy at Harvard. In 1957 the US Army Map Service dismissed him because he was gay, part of the wider purge of gay and lesbian federal employees known as the Lavender Scare.
Kameny challenged his dismissal, petitioning the Supreme Court in 1961. The court declined to hear the case. He then helped found the Mattachine Society of Washington and organised pickets outside the White House in 1965, insisting that gay people should demand equality rather than apologise for themselves.
His slogan “Gay is Good”, adopted in 1968, expressed that change in approach. He also joined the campaign that led the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic classification in 1973. In 1971 he ran openly as a gay candidate for Congress.
The federal government formally apologised for his dismissal in 2009. Kameny died in Washington in 2011, aged 86, on National Coming Out Day. His papers and protest signs preserve the history of a campaign that began well before Stonewall.