Shiftless2
Well-known member
And American hero that almost nobody has ever heard of ....
Frank Kameny was a Harvard-trained astronomer and a World War II combat veteran when, in 1957, the U.S. government fired him from his job with the Army Map Service for a single reason: he was gay. Most people in his position stayed silent and vanished. Kameny did the opposite.
He had fought across Europe as an infantryman and seen frontline combat against the German army. So when the same government he'd risked his life for branded him unfit and unemployable over who he loved, the hypocrisy was not lost on him.
In a 1961 letter to President John F. Kennedy - one of the first times anyone demanded equality for gay Americans from a sitting president - he laid it out plainly:
"In World War II, I willingly fought the Germans, with bullets... In 1961, it has become necessary for me to fight my own government, with words, in order to achieve some of the very same rights, freedoms, and liberties for which I placed my life in jeopardy in 1945."
He carried that fight all the way to the Supreme Court, becoming the first person ever to bring a gay civil rights claim before it. He lost - so he built a movement instead, coining the slogan "Gay Is Good" and organizing some of the first gay rights pickets outside the White House in 1965.
He lived long enough to watch nearly all of it reversed. The ban on gay federal workers fell, homosexuality was struck from the official list of mental illnesses in a fight he personally led, and in 2009 the government that fired him issued a formal apology.
He died in 2011, on National Coming Out Day, at the age of 86. The 4th of July is the perfect day to remember him, and people like him.
SOURCE
Frank Kameny was a Harvard-trained astronomer and a World War II combat veteran when, in 1957, the U.S. government fired him from his job with the Army Map Service for a single reason: he was gay. Most people in his position stayed silent and vanished. Kameny did the opposite.
He had fought across Europe as an infantryman and seen frontline combat against the German army. So when the same government he'd risked his life for branded him unfit and unemployable over who he loved, the hypocrisy was not lost on him.
In a 1961 letter to President John F. Kennedy - one of the first times anyone demanded equality for gay Americans from a sitting president - he laid it out plainly:
"In World War II, I willingly fought the Germans, with bullets... In 1961, it has become necessary for me to fight my own government, with words, in order to achieve some of the very same rights, freedoms, and liberties for which I placed my life in jeopardy in 1945."
He carried that fight all the way to the Supreme Court, becoming the first person ever to bring a gay civil rights claim before it. He lost - so he built a movement instead, coining the slogan "Gay Is Good" and organizing some of the first gay rights pickets outside the White House in 1965.
He lived long enough to watch nearly all of it reversed. The ban on gay federal workers fell, homosexuality was struck from the official list of mental illnesses in a fight he personally led, and in 2009 the government that fired him issued a formal apology.
He died in 2011, on National Coming Out Day, at the age of 86. The 4th of July is the perfect day to remember him, and people like him.
SOURCE
