Frank Kameny and the Lavender Scare

Later in nineteen fifty-seven, Franklin Kameny received a letter from the United States Civil Service Commission informing him that his employment as an astronomer with the Army Map Service was terminated. The reason given was that he was a homosexual, and homosexuality was classified as a security risk.

Kameny had a Harvard doctorate in astronomy. He had served in the Army in the Second World War. He had done his job without incident. None of that mattered.

He was not alone. The State Department, the Defense Department, and federal agencies across Washington had been quietly purging gay and lesbian employees since the early nineteen fifties, a campaign historians have since called the Lavender Scare. It ran parallel to McCarthyism, sharing its logic: the argument was not that gay employees had done anything disloyal, but that their sexuality made them vulnerable to blackmail, and therefore to foreign intelligence recruitment. Hundreds were fired. Careers ended. Some people died.

Unlike most of them, Kameny fought back. He appealed his case through every available channel and eventually petitioned the Supreme Court directly. The Court declined to hear it in nineteen sixty-one. He kept going.

In nineteen sixty-one he cofounded the Mattachine Society of Washington, one of the first organizations to use the language of civil rights rather than the language of psychiatric treatment when discussing homosexuality. In nineteen sixty-five he organized the first gay rights picket of a federal building, demonstrating outside the White House.

In two thousand nine, the Obama administration issued Kameny a formal apology on behalf of the federal government.

In two thousand ten, the District of Columbia named the street in front of the building where Kameny had been interrogated Frank Kameny Way.

He had lived to see it. He died in twenty eleven.