Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, November 15

Frank Kameny (Washington Blade/Michael Key)

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Frank Kameny Memorial Service: Washington, D.C. Organizers had originally planned a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Washington Mattachine Society (see Today In History below), complete with a short talk by the Society’s founder, Frank Kameny. But Frank’s passing last month has prompted a change in plans. The planned commemoration will, fittingly, now become a memorial to Frank’s lifelong fight for gay equality. According to a statement released by the organizers:

Friends and allies of Dr. Kameny, and members of the general public, need no invitation to attend this service on Capitol Hill, capacity permitting. This spacious and historic venue was made available through the generous support from leaders of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, allies in LGBT equality and national service.

This historic date – November 15, 2011 – is the half-century anniversary of Dr. Kameny’s co-founding of the Mattachine Society in Washington D.C., considered the earliest “homophile” rights organization established in the Nation’s Capital and among the earliest in the United States. Fifty years ago in 1961, Dr. Kameny also filed the first gay civil rights brief before the U.S. Supreme Court. His original brief is now preserved at the Library of Congress.

The memorial will take place in the Cannon Caucus Room, Room 345 in the Cannon House Office Building beginning at 4:30 p.m. EST. The Cannon House Office Building is located south of the Capital, bounded by Independence Avenue, First Street, New Jersey Avenue, and C Street S.E.

Nigerian Embassy, London

Kiss-In At Nigerian Embassy To Protest Bid to Criminalize Same-Sex Marriage: London. Nigeria’s Same Gender Marriage (Prohibition) Bill seeks to outlaw same-sex marriage. It stipulates three years jail for a person who enters into a same-sex marriage, and five years jail plus fines for anyone who “witnesses, abet and aids” a same-sex marriage. A Kiss-in in front of the Nigerian Embassy in London is being organized by Nigerians in the diaspora. It will take place this afternoon from 4:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Nigeria House, 9 Northumberland Avenue, London Wc2N 5BX.

Frank Kameny (center) marching with members of the Washington Mattachine Society in 1970.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
First Official Meeting of the Washington Mattachine Society: 1961. On this date in history, gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny and several others held the first official meeting of the Washington Mattachine Society. The Washington Mattachines, unlike other Mattachine Societies elsewhere in the country, brought a new, aggressive approach to the fight for gay rights. Frank Kameny later reflected on the society’s founding in an essay he contributed to Eric Marcus’s Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights : 1945-1990 : An Oral History:

Meanwhile, other things were going on with Mattachine. The national structure of Mattachine collapsed in March of that year. The San Francisco Mattachine had cut loose all the other affiliates and wished them well, urging them to change their names and to keep on working. The Denver group became The Neighbors and disappeared. The New York group retained its name and incorporated as a nose-thumbing gesture to San Francisco. It be came the Mattachine Society, Incorporated, of New York versus the Mattachine Society in San Francisco. It was all very petty.

…That following November, on November 15, 1961, we had our first official meeting ofthe Washington Mattachine. I was the organizer and founder. We did all the things that an organization does when it gets going. We took out a back account, got a post-office box, wrote our constitution, elected our officers, set up our meeting structure, and chose a name. I opted against using the Mattachine name, but I was outvoted. I wanted something that was more explicit and expressive, but would’t have used the word gay then. While it was an in-group word, it hadn’t yet gone public.

Now the movement of those days was very unassertive, apologetic, and defensive. I don’t say this critically, and not necessarily derogatorily, but it was a different era. First of all, up to this time, homosexuality had never been publicly discussed. Let me give you an illustration of that. As you’re aware, the question of queers int he government was very much part of the grist of the mill for McCarthy in his hearings in the early 1950s. When McCarthy was riding high, I was still in graduate school at Harvard. I read the Boston Herald every day. I read the New York Times every Sunday. I listened to the radio all the time. I read Time magazine weekly. Yet I did not learn until somewhere around 1958 or 1959 that homosexuality had been a theme of those hearings because it was not widely reported.: the word homosexual was not fit to print or discuss or be heard. Virtually from one end of the decade to the other, outside the medical books, there was nothing anywhere on the subject. It was blanked out, blacked out. It wasn’t there!

Because there was no publicity, there was no way of getting to people. The people in the small movement at that time were only talking to themselves. There was absolutely nothing whatsoever that anybody heard at that time, anywhere that was other than negative! Nothing! We were sick; we were sinners; we were perverts. And so the movement, predictably, in retrospect, did not take strong positions. It gave a hearing to everybody, saying, “As long as it deals with homosexuality, all views must be heard, even those that are the most harshly and viciously condemnatory to homosexuals. We have to defer to the experts.” My answer to that was, “Drivel! We are the experts on ourselves, and we will tell the experts they have nothing to tell us!” Giving all views a fair hearing didn’t suit my personality. And the Mattachine Society of Washington was formed around my personality.

So we at the Washington Mattachine characterized ourselves within the movement as an activist militant organization. Those were very dirty words in those days in the movement, such as it was. You weren’t supposed to be militant. And we were, both in our actions and our goals. Our statement of purposes set out our goals, which were generally to achieve equality for homosexuals and homosexuality against heterosexuals and heterosexuality. Equality was the primary issue.

If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.