Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1965: Gay Rights Advocates Picket the Civil Service Commission

Picketing was a new and controversial tactic for East Coast gay rights activists, but the year 1965 saw them finally shedding their reservations and, in keeping with the times, assuming a more confrontational posture in their demands for equal treatment. The very first public protest, a picket of the Whitehall Army Induction Center in New York City, occurred in 1964 (Sep 19). That tiny protest of only five marchers inspired four East Coast groups — the Daughters of Bilitis of New York, the Janus Society of Philadelphia, and the Mattachine Societies of New York and Washington, D.C. — meeting in Washington under the banner of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO), to embark on a program of direct action to raise public awareness of anti-gay discrimination (Oct 10).

To test the waters, the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. organized their first gay rights protest in front of the White House earlier that year (Apr 17). They had decided not to publicize the hour-long protest ahead of time because they didn’t want to give the police time to invent an excuse to block their demonstration. They were so excited over how well that protest went that they decided to do it again a month later, and this time they invited the press to cover it (May 29). Meanwhile, New York activists also organized another public protest, this time at the United Nations (Apr 18).

But it was the federal government’s ban on employment of gay people that really stuck in Frank Kameny’s crawl. He was the co-founder and president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. (May 21) Eight years earlier, Kameny had been fired from his civilian job by the U.S. Army map service over his homosexuality (Dec 20). Kemeny had been caught up in the same ban against gay federal employees that led to thousands of others to lose their jobs. That ban had been formally in place ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450 in 1953 (Apr 27), just as the Lavender and Red scares were about to down. After Kameny exhausted his appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, he turned his attention to organizing other activists to confront the Civil Service Commission over the discriminatory employment ban. Their earlier efforts to sit down with the Commission to discuss the matter were curtly rebuffed (Sep 28: “It is the established policy of the civil Service commission that homosexuals are not suitable for appointment to or retention in positions in the Federal service. There would be no useful purpose served in meeting with representatives of your Society.”), and all further requests for meetings were stonewalled.

So the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. and the rest of ECHO, with members of Chicago’s newly-formed Mattachine Midwest now joining to group, decided to take it to the streets once again. Eighteen men and seven women, all conservatively dressed — “If you’re asking for equal employment rights, look employable!”, Kameny ordered — carried picket signs demanding an end to the employment ban. According to pamphlets distributed during the protest, their purposes were two-fold:

1. To protest the policies of the Civl Service Commission in totally disqualifying homosexuals from Federal Employment, regardless of ability, training, competence or background — policies which are unjustified, unwise, harmful to the national interest, and immoral.
2. To protest the un-American refusal of the Civil Service Commission to meet with spokesmen for the homosexual community (which, with its fifteen million members, is the nation’s largest minority group after the Negro) to discuss policies and procedures in regard to homosexuals — a meeting with their public officials which citizens in a democracy should be able to expect as a matter of right, not of mere privilege.

The two-hour protest in front of the Civil Service Commission headquarters generated just enough publicity for the CSC to request a meeting in September. Nothing much came from that meeting, but for the first time in history, federal officials were forced to justify their policies directly to the very group that was most affected by them. That meeting was followed by another ten years of letters, phone calls, lawsuits and meetings before the CSC finally capitulated, in a phone call to Kameny personally, in 1975 (Jul 3). Times continued to change, and in 2009, Kameny received a formal apology from the openly gay director of the Office of Personnel Management, the modern-day successor to the Civil Service Commission.

[Sources: Unsigned. “Homosexuals Picket U.S. Civil Service Commission” (): Eastern Mattachine Magazine 10, no. 7 (August 1965): 21-22.

Unsigned. “Homosexuals Picket in Nation’s Capital.” The Ladder 9, no. 10-11 (July-August 1965): 23-25.]