Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1961: First Meeting To Discuss Organizing a New Kind of Gay Rights Organization

It was against the law to be a gay government employee. If you worked for the federal government and they even so much as suspected you to be gay, you were out of a job. Most of those who were fired or forced to resign simply disappeared. But when the Army map service fired Frank Kameny (Dec 20), he fought back, just as you might expect a World War II veteran who saw action in the Battle of the Bulge would do. He appealed his firing though the Civil Service, and when he exhausted that channel, he sued the government. He lost the suit and its appeal. When his lawyers told him the case was hopeless and they wouldn’t go any further, Kameny taught himself how to file his own petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. His petition shows his combative nature; he called the government’s ban on employing gay people a “stench in the nostrils of decent people, an offense against morality, an abandonment of reason, an affront to human dignity, an improper restraint upon proper freedom and liberty, a disgrace to any civilized society, and a violation of all that this nation stands for.” The Supreme Court denied his petition without comment (as was customary).

Somewhere along the way, Kameny became not just some guy fighting to get his job back, but a fully assertive gay rights activist, the likes of whom no one had seen before. In 1960, Kameny met Jack Nichols (Mar 16), and the two decided to start a grassroots movement to advance the civil rights of gay people. They contacted leaders of the Mattachine Society of New York, who gave them advice on how to set up a group in D.C. along with a list of potential members living in the area. As was customary at the time, almost all of the names on the list were aliases, including one particular alias for a police sergeant from the D.C. Police Department’s Morals Division.

On August 1, 1961, just five months after the Supreme Court rejection, Kameny and Nichols called a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C. Before the meeting got under way, one of the attendees who worked on Capitol Hill whispered to Kameny, “That guy over there is a vice cop.” Kameny noticed that “that guy,” Sergeant Louis Fouchette, had a gun and holster under his suit jacket. Kameny walked over to Fouchette and announced, “I know who you are.” His cover blown, Fouchette got up and left before he was able to glean much information about this new group. Nevertheless, he filed a report with the department, and the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. was already on the government’s radar before it was officially launched.

Fouchette’s presence was a chilling reminder of just how much work still lay ahead. In subsequent planning meetings before the group’s official launch, the they decided to require everyone in the group except Kameny to adopt an alias. This way, if the police or FBI obtained a membership list or meeting minutes, members who were government employees would escape exposure and avoid losing their jobs. Kameny was exempt from this requirement because he had already lost his job and was blacklisted from further employment. Besides, once you put your name on a Supreme Court writ, you’re about as out as you could possibly be.

Aliases aside, Kameny was determined that the new group would be nothing like anything that had been established before. Until now, homophile groups had mostly limited their activities to hosting discussion groups, often featuring straight “experts” to explain to homosexuals the “problems” of homosexuality. Homophobic messages were so prevalent in society and so thoroughly internalized by many leaders in the homophile movement, that the very idea that gay people might be advocates for themselves was denounced as crazy, radical, and dangerous. The thinking went this way: if we could educate straight people, with straight “experts” being the face of that educational effort (no matter what implicit prejudices those “experts” themselves may hold), then a more educated public would become a less prejudiced public.

Kameny rejected that ideal. He saw the gay community’s situation in the 1960s as similar to that of the African-American community in the 1920s. He had studied the civil rights movement closely — for example, he often cited the Supreme Court decision in Alabama v. NAACP as justification for not turning over membership lists to government authorities — and he saw the need for new kind of organization using direct action to advance the cause of civil rights for gay people. His new organization would be “what the NCAAP is to the Negro.” As he explained to New York activist Randy Wicker two years later:

For us, education is not really what we are seeking to do. As the Negro found out, simple presentation fo truth does not eliminate prejudice. It never has. That is what education is. We are seeking to eliminate prejudice. … We are NOT and educational organization; we are a civil liberties organization. What we are engaged in never was education, per se, and is … rapidly becoming politics.

[Additional Sources: Lillian Faderman. The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015): 132-133.

Michael G. Long (ed.) Gay Is Good: The Life and Letters of Gay Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014): 20-21.]