Was Franklin Edward Kameny crossed by his stars or favored by them? Growing up in Queens during the Great Depression, he knew at the age of six that he wanted to be an astronomer. By the time he was in his early thirties, he had realized his dream: he received a Ph.D. from Harvard, taught at Georgetown, and, in 1957, started working as an astronomer for the Army Map Service. But he lasted there only a few months: the U.S. government found out that he was homosexual, and he lost not only his job but also his security clearance, which almost all astronomy jobs then required. He spent the rest of his working life goading the government to treat homosexual employees fairly. By the time federal policy changed, in 1975, he had become a lion of the gay-civil-rights movement, which he seems to have relished, but his chance to study the stars had slipped away.
Kameny was square and unromantic—an unlikely combatant for erotic freedom. “Not gifted with obvious charisma” is the polite formulation of one historian of the gay movement. He had no interest in movies, sports, or popular music. By the time he was fifteen, he had concluded that society was wrong to censure homosexuality, but, apart from a little experimentation in summer camp, he postponed acting on his desires for almost a decade and a half. He obscured his orientation when he enlisted to fight in the Second World War and took no advantage of wartime sexual opportunities while serving. Returning home, he enrolled at Harvard, and spent a year of his graduate training at an observatory in Tucson, Arizona, where, on the night of his twenty-ninth birthday, in 1954, he at last made love with a man: he and a young man named Keith drove out into the desert north of the city. There was a full moon, he later recalled, though almanacs show that it was actually waning gibbous.
The romance didn’t outlast Kameny’s stay in the Southwest, and though he claimed throughout his life that he hoped for a steady boyfriend, Keith seems to have been the closest he came. Despite impressively thorough archival research, Eric Cervini, the author of a brisk, clear-eyed new biography, “The Deviant’s War” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is unable to provide Keith’s last name. Kameny, who died in 2011, never disclosed it to interviewers.
After Keith, so many of Kameny’s loves were ephemeral that one suspects he came to prefer it that way. Cervini sets the opening scene of his book in what was known in gay slang as a “tearoom”—a public rest room where men negotiated, transacted, and hid homosexual activity, through a set of conventions that Cervini characterizes as a “silent choreography.” Back when homosexual acts were illegal, tearooms were convenient and discreet—a hookup app avant la lettre—although subject to intervention by the police. “What the covert deviant needs is a sexual machine—collapsible to hip-pocket size, silent in operation,” a sociologist wrote, in the late sixties, to describe the problem that rest-room sex almost solved. Kameny resorted to one in a San Francisco train terminal, in August, 1956, while in town for an astronomy conference. No sooner did he let his genitals be touched, by a six-foot-two blue-eyed man in public relations, however, than both were arrested by police officers spying from behind a ventilation grille. The next morning, Kameny, impatient to return to Washington, D.C., where he was about to start a yearlong teaching assignment at Georgetown, pleaded guilty to lewd conduct and paid a fine of fifty dollars. He expected the charge to be dismissed after six months of good behavior. Instead, it destroyed his career, and gave him his vocation.
Because the arrest occurred at a time before online mug shots, the blow to Kameny’s career took more than a year to land. He finished up at Georgetown, and, at the Army Map Service, set about improving the precision of missile-guidance maps by comparing the moon’s occultations of stars from different points on Earth. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, in October, 1957, prompting America to jump-start a space program of its own, Kameny thought of volunteering to become an astronaut. Later that month, however, the Map Service’s personnel office wrote to him in Hawaii, where he was measuring occultations, and summoned him back to headquarters. There he faced a pair of government investigators. “Information has come to the attention of the U.S. Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual,” one of the investigators said. “What comment, if any, do you care to make?”
Kameny had disclosed his arrest on his job application, but he had listed the charge as disorderly, rather than lewd, conduct. (If he had omitted it altogether, he might never have had any trouble, Douglas M. Charles suggests in his 2015 history, “Hoover’s War on Gays.”) Not yet a champion of gay rights, Kameny claimed that he had let the other man touch him only out of curiosity, and he dodged the question about his orientation. “As a matter of principle one’s private life is his own,” he said. The Map Service fired him. The official reason was that he had falsified a government form.
Kameny was one of thousands of homosexuals dismissed from federal employment during the Cold War, but Washington had not always been so inhospitable. A park across the street from the White House—in Lafayette Square, where President Donald Trump recently held a photo op, after protesters there were driven out with tear gas—was a gay cruising ground from the late nineteenth century onward. A new government hire of 1933 recalled seeing men with gold-tinted hair dancing cheek to cheek at a party in a former stable behind two town houses on P Street. When government jobs multiplied during the New Deal, gay men flocked to the city, in part because many of them felt more comfortable in workplaces with a substantial number of women, and women, thanks to the impartiality of civil-service exams, had long fared better in the federal workforce than in the private sector. During the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt resisted firing a key foreign-policy strategist at the State Department who had drunkenly propositioned several black train porters.
Roosevelt’s hand was eventually forced, however, by less tolerant politicians and officials, including the head of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover. As the Cold War took hold, conservatives argued that the government, confronted with the Soviet menace, couldn’t afford any internal weakness; closeted homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail, and uncloseted ones, if there were any, would bring the government into disrepute. In 1947, Harry S. Truman ordered the vetting of all federal employees and job applicants. The same year, the U.S. Park Police started its so-called Pervert Elimination Campaign, to stamp out cruising areas in Washington, and the State Department, under pressure from the Senate, began quietly forcing homosexuals to resign, on the ground that they were security risks.
By 1950, the tally of “shady” individuals removed from the State Department, most of them homosexuals, had reached ninety-one, a deputy under-secretary disclosed to Congress that year, in an attempt to counter accusations by Senator Joseph McCarthy that State harbored Communists and homosexuals. The disclosure backfired, however; voters were shocked that there had been so many homosexuals to get rid of in the first place. McCarthy soon dropped the issue—as a middle-aged bachelor, he was wary of being too closely associated with it—but other politicians kept hammering away. “Who could be more dangerous to the United States of America than a pervert?” a Republican senator from Nebraska demanded; he believed that Soviet intelligence agents were likely working their way through a list of homosexuals compiled by Hitler. Truman’s aides warned him that the issue was riling working-class voters, whom the Democrats, then as now, could ill afford to lose. Secretary of State Dean Acheson tried to assure a roomful of newspaper editors that his employees were “clean-living,” pointing out that one had even been the captain of the Princeton football team, but the Senate initiated an investigation anyway—led by a North Carolina Democrat so unfamiliar with the topic of homosexuality that he privately asked one of the lawyers involved, “Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?”
In Senate testimony, the director of the C.I.A. asserted that homosexual men were volatile, easily dominated, cowardly, promiscuous, often effeminate, indiscreet, readily seduced, defiant, gullible, and cliquish. Although homosexuals were often blackmailed for money, no example could be found of one who had been blackmailed into revealing U.S. state secrets. The historian David K. Johnson, in his book “The Lavender Scare” (2004), writes categorically that no such thing ever happened. (In 1957, in Moscow, the K.G.B. did photograph a closeted American journalist in bed with a male Soviet agent, but the journalist confessed to officials at the American Embassy, who helped him slip away to Paris.) In lieu of evidence, the C.I.A. director started talking about Colonel Alfred Redl, an Austrian spymaster before the First World War who sold secrets to Russia. The director claimed that the Russians had been able to compromise Redl by sending him a handsome “newsboy” and then surprising the two in a hotel room. As Cervini writes, the story was “almost entirely, verifiably inaccurate.” Although Redl was indeed homosexual and a double agent, the Russians never procured him a newsboy, and he probably wouldn’t have been much frightened by blackmail; his lover accompanied him to society events in Vienna. His motive for treason was most likely simple greed.
The Senate committee’s final report contended that homosexuals were security risks with “no place in the United States government.” The F.B.I. began checking records of arrests for homosexual activity against federal employment records and forwarding names and fingerprints to the Civil Service Commission and various government agencies. The Bureau’s file on so-called “sex deviates” eventually ran to more than three hundred thousand pages. “Michelangelo might not be able to get a job under such terms,” Senator Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, joked in 1955.
Many homosexuals in federal employment resigned once detected; a number committed suicide. Kameny, however, waited to be fired and then wrote a twelve-page appeal. Not quite denying his homosexuality or quite owning up to it, he simply insisted that what he had been accused of doing in San Francisco had “no logical, rational connection with reliability, or with the ability to preserve proper security.” He solicited testimonials from friends and colleagues, as well as a letter certifying his heterosexuality from a prominent psychiatrist, whom he had duped by inventing a girlfriend. Cervini has discovered a draft of a letter Kameny wrote to the psychiatrist—on the same piece of paper as a draft of a birthday note to Keith.
The Army Map Service rejected Kameny’s appeal, and the Civil Service Commission, for good measure, banned him from any federal employment for three years. Kameny appealed the commission’s ban, was rejected, appealed the rejection, and was rejected again. His lie and his perseverance suggest a rule-follower in agony at finding himself on the wrong side of the rules for the first time. As a strategy for recovering a job, showing up unannounced at the office to ask why one was fired, as Kameny did more than once, is unlikely to succeed, but demands for justice have often looked initially like pointless self-sabotage; “She does not know how to bend before her troubles,” the Theban elders tsk-tsked about Antigone. Kameny may have been in the right, but in 1957 he was far from able to articulate that right; he was still in the closet.
In the spring of 1958, he pursued jobs in academia and private industry, but he was, as he wrote a few years later, “in the peculiarly ironic position of being in excessively great demand (as an astronomer at the commencement of the Space Age) and yet totally unable to get a job because of security problems.” In September, he was arrested near a men’s room in Lafayette Square; curiosity was no longer a convincing explanation, if it ever had been. A few days later, he wrote to the chair of the Civil Service Commission, calling him “guilty of gross immorality and grossly unethical conduct” and arguing that the commission, by pronouncing on a citizen’s morals, had violated the freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment. Toward the end of the year, Kameny contacted the chair again to say that his unemployment compensation was about to run out, and, rather than take a job outside his field, he was going on a hunger strike. “Enjoy your Christmas dinner,” he wrote.
Kameny didn’t, in fact, starve himself, but in early 1959 his food budget was twenty cents a day, and he ate frankfurters and mashed potatoes, on the days he ate at all. When his landlord tried to evict him, a judge referred him to the Salvation Army, which gave him eleven dollars’ worth of groceries.
In June, 1959, with the help of a sympathetic lawyer, Kameny sued the Secretary of the Army. He worried that the case, which he allowed his name to be attached to openly, would scupper his chances of a job, but in September he was hired by a manufacturer of devices that tested paints and coatings (one of his specialties as an astronomer had been applying the reflective surface on a telescope’s focussing mirror). His lawsuit was dismissed, but Kameny did not give up, and, as he prepared an appeal, he approached the New York chapter of the Mattachine Society, an organization concerned with gay rights.
The Mattachine Society had been founded in California, around 1950, and was originally quite radical. Its founders theorized that homosexuals—they preferred the term “homophiles,” as sounding less medical—constituted a distinct social minority, who needed to embrace their group identity. The society retreated from activism during the Red Scare, and, by the time Kameny got in touch, its leaders were encouraging assimilation into the mainstream. “To keep quiet is not necessarily to deny the truth,” one of them had written.
Kameny told the Mattachine Society that he and his lawyer were going to strike a bold new line in their appeal, arguing that homosexuality was “moral in a positive sense.” It had occurred to Kameny that, when it came to security clearance, a homosexual who was open could not be blackmailed. As he explained to the Mattachines, “A homosexual who is willing, should the necessity arise, to stand up on his own two legs before the world, as he is, and to defend his right to live his life as he chooses, can get and retain a clearance.” Kameny himself wasn’t yet such a person—his mother didn’t learn he was homosexual until 1966—but he had figured out that he would have a better case if he were. It may sound odd to say that a person reached a new level of emotional and sexual honesty as a by-product of legal maneuvering, but in Kameny’s case that seems to be what happened.
Kameny’s new appeal was rejected, too, and, in the fall of 1960, after his lawyer bowed out, the New York Mattachines donated fifty dollars to help him take his case to the Supreme Court. By then, he was arguing that discrimination against homosexuals was as unsound as discrimination on the basis of race or religion. The Court declined to hear Kameny’s arguments, but the support of the Mattachine Society seems to have made a strong impression on him. Solidarity among homosexuals was then a fairly new phenomenon. Indeed, the near-ubiquity of betrayal may be the hardest aspect of Kameny’s world for a reader today to appreciate. A new lover could turn out to be a plainclothes officer; an old lover could become an informant. “Everybody was squealing on everybody else,” one person who lived through the era said. Not even the Mattachine Society was free of treachery and schism. Soon after Kameny became involved, the New York and the San Francisco branches, which had been squabbling over finances, parted ways, and Cervini has discovered that, in the San Francisco branch alone, at least three members were F.B.I. informants—including the chairman.
Perhaps it was the loneliness of Kameny’s crusade until then that enabled him to see past the movement’s infighting to its potential as a political weapon. He became involved in discussions to open a Mattachine offshoot in Washington. At one meeting, a friend whispered in his ear that the man sitting next to him was a police sergeant, infamous for an entrapment six years before that was so aggressive—he had followed his target from the men’s room of a movie theatre to its balcony and asked if he “wanted to take it”—that a judge threw out the case.
Despite the police attention, the Mattachine Society of Washington was founded, late in 1961, with Kameny as its first president. It had a bolder mission than the New York and California branches: the pursuit of equal rights for homosexuals was written into its constitution. The constitution also stipulated that socializing was not a purpose of the organization; Kameny no doubt had a hand in that clause, too.
The F.B.I. soon got wind of the new group, thanks to a blond nineteen-year-old who claimed to have been the lover of one of its members, and who, according to an F.B.I. memo, said “that he was angry with the homosexual element in this town and that this is his way of getting even with them.” Much of the granularity of Cervini’s account comes from F.B.I. files, rather than from what survives of Kameny’s papers or the society’s archives—a testament both to the garrulity of informers and to the Mattachines’ extreme caution about anything that might incriminate members. Because it was tricky to rally people to a cause that they could lose their jobs for supporting, the society’s membership list was confidential, and its members adopted pseudonyms as bland as grocery-store bread—Ellen Keene, Russell Brenner. (Your homophile name, I have decided, is the first name of your earliest same-sex crush plus the last name of your kindergarten teacher. This makes mine Christophe Osby.)
Only Kameny regularly used his own name. It was on a 1962 letter denouncing federal policy toward homosexuals as “archaic, unrealistic, and inconsistent with basic American principles”—which was sent to the President, the Vice-President, every Cabinet official, every Justice on the Supreme Court, and every member of the House and the Senate. “Please do not contaminate my mail with such filthy trash,” a Missouri congressman wrote back, but the letter sparked meetings with a black congressman from Pennsylvania and an assistant to a white one from New York, who became allies. The society never had any black members, despite efforts at recruitment, but an alliance with a black politician must have seemed intuitive to Kameny, who was inspired by the civil-rights movement.
A newspaper finally identified Kameny as homosexual in 1963, after he became the first openly gay man to testify before Congress. The testimony did not go smoothly. After it emerged that the names on the Washington Mattachine Society’s fund-raising license were pseudonyms, a congressman from Alabama accused Kameny of fraud. Kameny did manage to get his radical valorization of homosexuality on the record: “Homosexual acts—when performed voluntarily by consenting adults—are moral in a positive and real sense.” But he also made the political blunder of admitting, with heedlessly unremitting logic, that he saw nothing wrong with group sex. “You can have a dinner party for two and have a dinner party for fifty as long as it is carried out in an orderly fashion,” he said.
Kameny prized orderliness. He kept the Mattachine Society of Washington under his thumb by enforcing a complex system of procedural rules. When the society mooted political demonstrations, he declared himself opposed to “off-the-cuffness and spontaneity.” When he helped organize the society’s first picket of the White House, in April, 1965, he stage-managed it in a way that maximized respectability—the men in suits and ties and the women in dresses. As far as Cervini could determine, only one newspaper, the Washington Afro-American, reported on the protest, but the picket was a milestone: the first by a homosexual organization in the nation’s capital. Kameny followed up with more at various locations in Washington and one in Philadelphia, which became an annual event. Kameny eventually specified even the number of staples (ten) that should be used to fasten each protest sign to its wooden pole, and he turned away would-be marchers dressed informally. “Picketing is not an occasion for an assertion of personality,” he said, but the buttoned-down protests he arranged perfectly reflected his.
Would it have furthered the cause if Kameny had left a couple of buttons unfastened now and then? Cervini includes in his biography several lives that ran parallel to Kameny’s, and that of a younger gay activist who went by the homophile pseudonym Randy Wicker is instructive. Wicker was much bolder much sooner. He talked on the radio about being a homosexual in 1962, and, in 1963, told the New York Post Magazine that he liked cruising. F.B.I. files suggest that Wicker was vowing to picket the White House two years before Kameny did, and at least one member of the homophile movement wondered if Wicker was going to upstage them. Kameny doesn’t seem to have minded. He mailed Wicker six dollars for a cassette tape of his radio broadcast, and, after their paths crossed, spent the night with him. “You, as a personality, are a large morsel to swallow all at once,” he wrote to him, afterward. The day after Kameny first picketed the White House, Wicker led a march on the United Nations headquarters, in New York. Kameny’s rigor complemented, rather than clashed with, Wicker’s louder style.
Even after Kameny’s own legal case had come to a dead end, he continued to believe that the courts could be an avenue for reform. He became a charter member of the Washington-area affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, and continually funnelled into the organization’s docket cases of homosexuals who had been discharged from federal employment. His collaborator in this work was Barbara Gittings, the first president of the New York branch of the Daughters of Bilitis, a homophile women’s group. Neither Gittings nor Kameny was a lawyer; their work consisted of supporting those who had lost jobs as they exhausted their administrative appeals. In advance of one hearing, Kameny and Gittings sent the Department of Defense a copy of Kafka’s “The Trial.”
Shepherding the cases may have given Kameny a sense of purpose he had trouble finding elsewhere. He never held a job long, and after a few years he lost control of the Washington Mattachines, when a faction became frustrated with his persnickety, imperious style. “Break up Kameny Hall,” they wrote in an open letter. “I loved him dearly, but he was like a terrible father,” one of the members said, when Cervini interviewed her about Kameny. Despite the injury to his pride, Kameny did not relent in his activism, though his mother wished he would, for the sake of his career. “Though you may have a cause which you think you should emphasize, you must face up to facts and think of your own good first,” she warned. In his later years, he survived on financial support from her, supplemented by occasional speaking fees.
There were glimpses, during the administrative hearings, of how change was going to arrive. “Start with society,” a somewhat sympathetic Defense Department official advised Kameny in 1962. “There may come a day, gentlemen, when the homosexual in our society is not considered as an outcast, guilty of criminal behavior and an object of derision,” another official said, in 1967. Kameny was a martinet about respectability not merely out of fussiness but because he understood that appearances and openness were crucial to winning hearts and minds. Not only would openness eliminate concerns about blackmail but—at a time when the government claimed that disgust toward homosexuals was so widespread that their mere presence in federal jobs could impair “the efficiency of the service”—it might also remove the stigma of homosexuality itself. By stepping into the light when homosexuality was so taboo that most people knew little about it, Kameny and other homophiles got the chance to change minds.
And minds did change. By 1968, the Civil Service Commission was hazarding in its annual report that “as long as he behaved himself on the job and did satisfactory work, Michelangelo would probably be permitted to paint a post office ceiling.” That year, Kameny, inspired by the Black Power slogan “Black is beautiful,” compressed his assertion of homosexuality’s worth into the maxim “Gay is good.” Things accelerated after the Stonewall riots, of late June, 1969. “If you don’t change, you’re going to be left behind,” a longtime comrade told Kameny a few days later, after he had told two women at the homophile picket in Philadelphia to stop holding hands. It was true that Kameny’s movement was about to outstrip him; that fall, a regional conference of gay activist groups voted to replace the annual picket in Philadelphia with a New York march commemorating the Stonewall riots. But Kameny did change, shedding some of his respectability and becoming a rank-and-file member of the new movement. He joined the Washington chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, a somewhat anarchic group, and pushed its members to file lawsuits. In 1970, at the first of the annual Stonewall marches, he showed up in short sleeves, no tie. “I’ve never been that happy,” he later said. ♦
