July 3rd, 2016
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded to both the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare stoked by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist and anti-gay hearings by signing an executive order mandating the firing of all federal employees who were found guilty of “sexual perversion” — government-speak for homosexuality (Apr 27). Untold thousands lost their jobs in the ensuing decades, including one astronomer by the name of Frank Kameny, who was fired in 1957 (see Dec 20). He protested his firing, and argued his case in federal court all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused to hear the case in 1961, making his firing permanent. Kameny went on to become a leading gay-rights activist, and while his efforts extended to opposition to all aspects of discrimination and oppression, the federal employment ban never strayed far from his top concerns. Kameny supported others who had been fired in their efforts to get their jobs back (Jul 1) and organized several protests and meetings at the commission’s Washington, D.C. headquarters throughout the next two decades (Sep 28, Jun 26).
While Kameny’s case was the first legal challenge, it wasn’t the last. Several others followed suit, and in 1969, the U.S. Court of Appeals forced the Civil Service Commission to prove that being gay would directly impact that person’s ability to perform his or her job. (Jul 1). This threw a significant wrench in the Commission’s works. The CSC’s chief counsel warned in 1971 that newer cases “appear to be indefensible and could, if pursued, provide a vehicle for issuance of a legal decisions we could not live with.” In 1973, a federal judge in California, acting on a class action lawsuit rather than the case of an individual, ordered the commission to cease labeling gay people as unfit for federal employment.
The writing was now on the wall: the CSC’s anti-gay policy’s days were numbered. In 1975, the commission finally amended its regulations and ended its ban on employing gays in the federal government. The decision however was not accompanied by a formal announcement. Instead, supervisors were quietly instructed that no one was to be barred for homosexuality. The new guidelines said that current or perspective federal employees could not longer “be found unsuitable based on unsubstantiated conclusions concerning possible embarrassment for the Federal service, a person may be dismissed or found unsuitable where the evidence exists that sexual conduct affects job fitness.” But news of the change did slowly leak out. According to Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price in their book Courting Justice: Gay Men And Lesbians V. The Supreme Court, Frank Kameny learned of the change via a phone call on a Thursday before the Fourth of July weekend. Federal personnel officials “surrendered to me on July 3rd, 1975,” he recalled. “They called me up to tell me they were changing their policies to suit me. And that was the end of it.”
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