Top Quotes: “The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America” — Eric Cervini

Introduction

“It began, as usual, in a public restroom. For ten years, Laud Humphreys of Oklahoma had been an Episcopal priest, but now he watched the silent choreography of the men. As always, the ritual of a men’s room, or “tearoom,” functioned somewhat like a game: positioning, signaling, contracting, payoff. Standing, looking, touching, fellatio.

“Like the smell of urine, fear pervades the atmosphere of the tearooms, making furtive every stage of the interaction,” Humphreys later wrote. But if all went well, the ritual concluded with an adjustment of the pants and a zip of the fly. A shoulder pat, a hand wave, or a quiet “Thanks.” Nobody hurt, nobody offended.

In 1966, as a doctoral student in sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Humphreys had initiated his research in the city’s public park restrooms. Married with two children, he developed a novel method to conceal his identity as a researcher and earn the trust of the “sexual deviants.” He adopted the role of the “watch-queen,” or a “voyeur-lookout” who guarded the men from non-participants and police officers. If someone approached, he coughed; if the coast was clear, he nodded.

“By passing as a deviant, I had observed their sexual behavior without disturbing it,” explained the sociologist. Over the course of two years, he observed hundreds of sexual acts, taking notes with a hidden tape recorder.

The next step in his methodology contributed most to the controversy that surrounded the publication of his findings. Humphreys also followed the men to their cars, recorded their license plate numbers, and then carried that information to a police station. There, after Humphreys claimed to be performing “market research,” friendly officers gave him the names and addresses of the men.

He waited a year, then changed his dress, hairstyle, and car. He traveled to the men’s homes, rang their doorbells, and said he was a social health researcher. While sitting in their living rooms or drinking beer on their patios, he asked the men about their lives.

Over half of them, he learned, were married to women. The rest, even if they identified as gay, saw tearooms as safe havens. After all, where else could they go to meet others like themselves? In midcentury America, gay bars were perilous places. The police could raid them at any moment. Patrons risked being identified by coworkers, neighbors, or even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At home, roommates or landlords were watching. Sometimes, police officers used telephoto lenses or high-powered binoculars to catch acts of sodomy or lewd con-duct.

The names, addresses, and occupations of those arrested for homosexual activity often appeared in the next day’s newspaper, which exposed their deviancy to families and employers. “Six Arrested in Perversion Case Here,” read one typical headline. A seaman, twenty-five, of McAllister Street; an auto agency clerk, twenty-seven, of Clay Street; a musician, thirty-six, of Taylor Street, a drama coach, twenty-three, of Seventh Avenue; a photo refinisher, forty-three, of Laurel Street.

After World War I, homosexual arrests — including those for sodomy, dancing, kissing, or holding hands — occurred at the rate of one every ten minutes, each hour, each day, for fifteen years. In sum, one million citizens found themselves persecuted by the American state for sexual deviation.

Men unable to risk identification had only the public restroom, a space both public and private.”

“The sociologist also noticed something curious about the men he observed. When interviewed in their homes, those who visited tearooms tended to project a high level of morality. A “breastplate of righteousness,” Humphreys called it. Compared to a control group, tearoom participants lived in clean homes, drove nice cars, went to church, and supported the efforts of the local Vice Squad. They were conservative; they did not attend civil rights demonstrations. By embracing respectability, Humphreys concluded, these men shielded themselves and others from the humiliation of the tearoom.

With the publication of Humphreys’s research, journalists and fellow sociologists leapt to denounce the former priest. He had deceived the tearoom-goers and made them vulnerable to prosecution, they argued. Washington University’s chancellor, upset that Humphreys had not reported the men to the police, revoked his research grant and teaching contract. Humphreys eventually repudiated the dishonest elements of his methodology, and at a 1974 sociology conference, while his wife sat in the audience, he announced that he was a gay man.

Sociology professors now teach Humphreys’s book Tearoom Trade as an example of unethical research, ignoring his findings about the men who exited the tearoom before enshrouding themselves in cloaks of propriety. Mean-while, stories of gay liberation in America often begin with a June 1969 uprising, instantaneous and transformative, outside a bar in Greenwich Village.

A 1950s tearoom, however, is where this book, a tale of sexual deviants versus their government, begins. The path to equality exists not only because of a riot, but also because of a battle that began in a public restroom. Today, LGBTQ+ Americans march because a scientist named Dr. Frank Kameny once entered a tearoom. A young Harvard-educated astronomer, Kameny listened to classical music and wore three-piece suits. He never liked to talk about his participation in the ritual.

That summer evening, as Kameny stood before a urinal, two police officers hid above him, watching from behind a ventilation grill in the ceiling. They arrested him as he exited the restroom, triggering his personal ruin and the strange series of events that led him and his country to gay liberation.

Pride emerged, slowly yet irrevocably, from a regime of secrecy and shame.”

Origins

“A rational boy striving toward the stars in a straight, structured world, Franklin could not possibly conclude he was a homosexual. But because he accepted the existence of his desires they were objectively there, after all Franklin searched for an alternative, more acceptable explanation for them, and he found one. As a quiet, awkward student surrounded by significantly older classmates, Franklin saw himself still maturing, both physically and socially. His desires, he told himself, were symptoms of an unfortunate but universal phase through which his peers had already progressed. The sexual attraction he felt for boys would, as he matured, be replaced by an attraction to girls.

As the years passed, though, Franklin remained trapped in a state that felt alarmingly less temporary with each nighttime fantasy. He confronted the possibility that his theory was wrong, and reevaluated his position. If he had desires for other boys, and if those desires hurt nobody, how could they possibly be in error? If his condition — however long it lasted — conflicted with society, and if rejecting himself was ipso facto illogical, then he had no choice but to reject society itself.

If society and I differ on something, the fifteen-year-old Franklin concluded, I’m right and society is wrong. And if society rejected him? “Why, society can,” as he later described the realization. “They’ll lose more than I will.” The next year, increasingly confident in the power of his nonconforming mind, Kameny implemented a systematic investigation of his religious beliefs. At the end of that process, he concluded that God did not exist. He became an atheist, and that was that.”

“Since early 1942, army examiners had searched for the appearance-based warning signs in inductees, among them “feminine bodily characteristics,” “effeminacy in dress and manner,” and a “patulous rectum.” But as examiners became overwhelmed by the number of men they had to interview, they increasingly relied on a questionnaire to identify inductees who “failed” and required a more extensive examination by a professional psychiatrist.”

“Kameny received a package. Sent by his mother in New York, the box had miraculously arrived in time. It contained a birthday cake. The package had been in the mail for a month, so when Kameny opened it, he found the cake covered in the most brilliantly colorful array of mold he had ever seen.”

“Faced with such a vibrant gay world, Kameny spent the last year of his PhD dividing his energies, precisely fifty-fifty, between writing his thesis and cruising, even finding a way to do both simultaneously. He always carried, as he would for the rest of his life, a pencil and paper to gay bars. While flirting with a man, he sometimes whipped out his pencil and paper to write down a thought about his dissertation. By the end of the evening, he would have a long list of notes to himself, and the next morning, by the time he said farewell to that night’s conquest, his day of astronomy was already planned.”

“In 1916, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey entered Harvard with a secret. Despite his homosexual desires, the zoologist never entered the gay world of Boston. He remained quiet and conservative, a “shy and lonely young man who had avidly pursued gall wasps instead of girls,” as a colleague later described him.

The blue-eyed, bow-tied scientist did not intend to spark a sexual revolution. In 1938, after eighteen years as a biology professor at Indiana University, the institution selected him to lead its new marriage course. Scientists, Kinsey observed, knew less about human sexual behavior than they did about farm animals. When he began a survey of his students’ sexual practices, it grew to include a national sample. He paid no heed to social norms. Just as he had collected gall wasps, he collected “sexual histories” in every part of the country, from every locale imaginable, including – for methodological reasons only – bars for homosexuals. He analyzed only the results for white men.

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male hit American bookshelves in 1948, the year Frank Kameny entered Harvard. It contained eight hundred pages of bland scientific prose and cost six dollars and fifty cents (nearly seventy in today’s dollars). Its publisher expected to sell only five thousand copies. The New York Times refused to advertise it, but the tome quickly reached number two on its bestseller list, selling over half a million copies.

Kinsey admitted he was “totally unprepared” for what he had discovered. No matter how he recalculated the data, his findings remained the same: homosexuals existed everywhere. Fifty percent of all males admitted to having an erotic response to other males, and 13 percent engaged in primarily homosexual behavior for three years or more. Homosexual activity took place “in every age group, in every social level, in every conceivable occupation, in cities and on farms, and in the most remote areas of the country.” In a society that deemed homosexuality either immoral, a sickness, or both, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male provided evidence that gay sex was, in fact, objectively normal.

Kinsey also found that all men, not just gay men, broke America’s codes of morality. Fifty percent of husbands cheated on their wives. In achieving orgasm – through sodomy, adultery, or fornication, for example – an estimated 95 percent of American males had broken at least one state or federal law that regulated sexual activity.

His downfall began in 1953, when he published a sequel, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Lesbians tended to achieve orgasms more frequently than straight women, he concluded, since the penis was not so important to female pleasure. Accused of “hurling the insult of the century against our mothers, wives, daughters and sisters,” Kinsey lost his funding. By 1956, Kinsey feared losing his Institute for Sex Research.

The guardians of morality could not undo Kinsey’s impact on American public life. “No single event,” TIME explained, “did more for open discussion of sex than the Kinsey Report, which got such matters as homosexuality, masturbation, coitus and orgasm into most papers and family magazines.”

In 1950, a graduate student at Northwestern University wrote an essay lauding Kinsey for illustrating that “hypocrisy has been legislated into the statutes of the various states.” The student, Hugh Hefner, published the first issue of Playboy three years later.

On August 25, 1956, at 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, age sixty-two, died of heart complications. Only four hours later, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time, Dr. Frank Kameny attended the opening session of the American Astronomical Society’s ninety-fifth annual meeting at the University of California, Berkeley.”

“Washington did not become a truly gay city, however, until the New Deal. As the federal bureaucracy expanded in response to the Depression, young men streamed into the District for jobs. The trend continued during World War II, and the population of the Washington area doubled from 700,000 to 1.4 million between 1930 and 1950. The city scrambled to accommodate its population boom by building rooming houses and apartments, which further removed men and women from the watchful eye of their families and placed them in spaces dominated by other young, single tenants. There, parties could be private. Many young men had roommates, and nobody asked questions about two men living together.

The gay bars of 1950 Washington were peculiar places. After Prohibition ended, Congress, which directly controlled the capital’s laws, technically outlawed all bars, and only restaurants could attain liquor licenses in the District of Columbia. The law also required patrons to remain seated as they consumed alcohol. If patrons wanted to change seats, a server would move their drinks for them. All such establishments closed at midnight on Saturdays and Sundays.”

“The Washington police in the 1950s commonly assaulted or arrested those who cross-dressed, especially drag queens of color. (Drag shows primarily took place in straight bars, rather than gay bars, which did not dare draw attention to themselves.) As one Black drag queen later remembered, the police “liked to just jump out on you and [making thumping sound] do you any way-tear your clothes off, take your wig off.” After repeatedly resisting police brutality, she eventually left Washington, fearing that the police, if she fought back once more, would kill her.

But the authorities tolerated the white bars of downtown gay Washington. As long as their patrons followed the rules – no standing, no dancing, no drag – they could exist in the spaces they had created for themselves, a world in the shadow of the White House.

Kameny felt safe in this world, and in time, he felt powerful, too. As he visited the bars each night, the astronomer gathered an immense quantity of social data, and with so much information on gay Washington, he became its expert.

Saturdays at midnight, gay men and women flooded out of the closing bars and into private homes, bringing their own beer and, ideally, dates.”

“He became a clearinghouse of information on social events, and bargoers began asking him the same question each Saturday: where was that night’s party? His phone rang endlessly. “I just sat home as the gatherer and dispenser of information until I decided to pick myself up and go to one of them,” he later recalled.

Kameny’s network expanded across the East Coast. During his first year in Washington, he discovered the gay summer resort of Cherry Grove on New York’s Fire Island. He began inviting his growing Washington network, and his vacation group snowballed to include thirty homosexuals – from Washington, Philadelphia, and New York – in two mammoth cottages.

Acting as a travel agent for the group, he made airplane reservations, which inevitably resulted in very gay flights. Kameny once convinced an airline captain to allow his party, which filled the entire plane, to consume the liquor they had brought on board in blatant violation of FAA regulations. At the end of the journey, one passenger snatched the bewildered flight attendant’s hat from her head. The group began passing it around the plane. Each passenger placed a donation into it, thanking her for serving their raucous group. “I don’t think the hostess will ever forget us,” Kameny later remarked.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, learned the astronomer’s name. Kameny explained his manic party-going and social organizing as an attempt to compensate for the experiences he missed during his time in the closet. “Lost time syndrome,” he called it. And though Kameny provided an undeniable service to his community, he did not mind the clout, the feeling of being the undeniable expert on gay Washington, that came with it.

Georgetown University did not invite Kameny to return for the fall semester of 1957. The decision apparently had nothing to do with his robust gay life. “I personally feel my tenure was not extended primarily because on my application I stated that I had no professed religion,” Kameny later told investigators.”

The Incident

“Kameny had two responses prepared. “Under the laws of this country,” he began, “any sexual activity whatever, of any description at all is illegal on the part of an unmarried person,” said Kameny. Indeed, all premarital sexual activity, gay or straight, remained illegal in the District of Columbia. As Kinsey had revealed, nearly all Americans were guilty of violating some sexual regulation – fornication, sodomy, adultery.”

“According to the Russians, Colonel Alfred Red of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had slightly graying blond hair and a “greasy” outward appearance. He spoke “sugar-sweetly, softly.”

Beginning in 1901, Red worked as a high official in Austria’s Evidenzbureau, where he single-handedly built its counterespionage program. He had more access to classified information than perhaps anyone else in the empire.

In Vienna, Redl’s homosexuality was an open secret. He often appeared at society events with his longtime “nephew,” and he maintained several other affairs. He had no reason to be fearful of exposure, since even the emperor’s brother enjoyed cross-dressing and the occasional army officer.

RedI closely guarded his work as a double agent, however. During his service in the Evidenzbureau, he offered Austrian war plans to the Italian military attaché in exchange for cash. An Italian intelligence officer later recalled it “required no effort” to recruit him. Redl simply mailed envelopes full of Austrian secrets and received thousands of kronen in return.

He then began sending military plans to the Russians, too. Red became fabulously wealthy, lavishing gifts on his lovers and driving two of the empire’s most expensive automobiles. For years, no one seemed to question how he afforded such extravagances on his government salary.

In May 1913, after Austrian counterintelligence officials intercepted a Russian letter containing six thousand kronen, they staked out the Vienna post office to identify its recipient. They were appalled to discover Redl.

The army wanted to keep the matter quiet, since public knowledge of treachery at such a high level would have been a profound humiliation. After following him to his hotel, Redl’s own protégé handed him a pistol. Army officials always maintained that Red voluntarily took his life.

News of the colonel leaked, fact became intertwined with fiction, and the myth of the homosexual traitor came into being. A Berlin newspaper described Redl’s “homosexual pleasure palace, filled with perversities.” The Austrian Army needed a scapegoat for the 1.3 million casualties in that first year of World War I, so it blamed Redi and the larger, more insidious “homosexual organization” that protected him within the military.”

“McCarthy would later recuse himself from hearings on the issue of homosexuals in the government. At forty-one, the senator was unmarried, and the issue raised questions about his own sexuality.”

“Of all the intelligence available to the CIA, its director chose to rest his case against homosexuals on the forty-year-old story of Colonel Redl. In Hillenkoetter’s retelling, Redi had been an “honest” man who found himself in an imperial army with unforgiving policies against homosexuality. The Russians hired a young newsboy, who “became very intimate” with Redl. Next, they broke into the colonel’s room and caught him in an “act of perversion.” After threatening to expose him, the Russians gained copies of the Austrian war plans prior to the outbreak of violence.

And so a single urban legend, the telling of which was almost entirely, verifiably inaccurate (in fact, a 1907 Russian diplomatic cable had falsely labeled Redi “a lover of women”) became the primary piece of evidence that guided federal employment policy toward homosexuals for decades to come.

The CIA director then explained the “general theory as to why we should not employ homosexuals or other moral perverts in positions of trust.” He gave thirteen reasons to the senators.

1. Homosexuals experience emotions “as strong and in fact actually stronger” than heterosexual emotions.
2. Homosexuals are susceptible “to domination by aggressive personalities.
3. Homosexuals have “psychopathic tendencies which affect the soundness of their judgment, physical cowardice, susceptibility to pressure, and general instability, thus making a pervert vulnerable in many ways.”
4. Homosexuals “invariably express considerable concern” about concealing their condition.
5. Homosexuals are “promiscuous” and often visit “various hangouts of his brethren,” marking “a definite similarity to other illegal groups such as criminals, smugglers, black-marketeers, dope addicts, and so forth.”
6. Homosexuals with “outward characteristics of femininity — or lesbians with male characteristics — are often difficult to employ because of the effect on their co-workers, officials of other agencies, and the public in general.”
7. Homosexuals who think they are discreet are, in reality, “actually quite indiscrete (sic]. They are too stupid to realize it, or else due to inflation of their ego or through not letting themselves realize the truth, they are usually the center of gossip, rumor, derision, and so forth.”
8. Homosexuals who try “to drop the ‘gay’ life and go ‘straight’ … eventually revert to type.’
9. Homosexuals are “extremely vulnerable to seduction by another pervert employed for that purpose by a foreign power.”
10. Homosexuals are “extremely defiant in their attitude toward society,” which could lead to disloyalty.
11. “Homosexuals usually seem to be extremely gullible.”
12. Homosexuals, including “even the most brazen perverts,” are constantly suppressing their instincts, which causes “considerable tension.”
13. Homosexuals employed by the government “lead to the concept of a ‘government within a government.’ That is so noteworthy. One pervert brings other perverts. They belong to the lodge, the fraternity. One pervert brings other perverts into an agency … and advance them usually in the interest of furthering the romance of the moment”

The testimony of subsequent intelligence officials echoed that of the CIA director, and the Hoey committee’s final report primarily drew from the testimony of its lead witness, sometimes verbatim. As the Hoey report concluded, homosexuals were ipso facto security risks. Colonel Red remained its only example.

Hillenkoetter’s thirteen principles became official government doctrine. The government incorporated the Hoy report into its security manuals, forwarded it to embassies, and shared it with its foreign allies.”

“Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952 with the help of the slogan “Let’s Clean House” and whispers that his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, had homosexual tendencies. Three months after his inauguration, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which expanded the government’s purging authority originally given to the State Department-to all federal agencies. Any employee who exhibited “criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct” had no place in the federal bureaucracy. With a Republican in the White House, the purges became less of a spectacle and more of a quiet, well-oiled machine. In Eisenhower’s 1954 State of the Union, he boasted of removing 2,200 security risks in only a year.

McCarthy’s downfall came later that year, but the purges remained alive, as did the rumors that always seemed to saturate America’s capital. After two Republican senators learned that the son of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming, a Democrat, had been arrested in Lafayette Park, they gave Hunt a choice. He could withdraw from his 1954 reelection campaign or face the publicity of his son’s homosexual arrest. The Senate was virtually tied. If Hunt resigned, he risked shifting power to the Republicans.

On the morning of June 19, 1954, Senator Hunt, a straight victim of antigay political blackmail, entered his Capitol office and shot himself with a .22-caliber rifle.”

“Karpman predicted a sexual revolution within weeks of World War Il’s end. “Definite changes in sexual freedom were observed in the wake of World War I,” he told an interviewer, “and this war, more global in character and involving many more people, is likely to bring in its wake far greater changes in sexual behavior.” He foresaw that America would have more divorces, men would demand virgin brides less often, and premarital sex would become more common. He made these arguments with unprecedented authority; psychiatrists had screened over eighteen million inductees during the war, thrusting the field into the consciousness of the nation.”

“In 153 B.C., Ancient Rome fixed January 1 as the inauguration day of its consuls, and that date became the beginning of a new year. On that day, the two new chief magistrates sacrificed bulls to Jupiter, and in later centuries, they swore an oath to the emperor. Romans celebrated the occasion, known as the kalends, with impressive festivity: they exchanged so many gifts that package deliveries congested roads across the empire. Citizens ate and drank to excess at lavish banquets, and the rules that defined Roman society were temporarily loosened. Masters even played dice with their slaves.

The early Christians denounced the kalends as pagan devil worship, but the festival’s traditions only grew in popularity. When the empire banned the consuls’ bull sacrifice in 399 A.D., a new tradition grew in its place. The kalends became an occasion to mock the regime. Revelers, often wearing animal masks, traveled from door to door, harassing public officials in the middle of the night. Soldiers in Amasea elected a mock emperor, and many of them dressed as women to join his “harem.” During the kalends, as one sixth-century church official complained, a man “se frangit in feminam,” or weakens himself into a woman.

By the thirteenth century, the new year’s tradition of mockery had seeped into French and Italian churches as the Feast of Fools, a celebration of the Bible’s proclamation that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.” For one day, low ranking clergy and choirboys assumed the positions of bishops or cantors. They elected a Bishop of Fools, wore masks, and dressed as women.

The church banned the practice in 1435, but the foolery had already spread to the townsfolk. In France, associations of young men called Sociétés Joyeuses devoted to satire, music, and comedy began to multiply. One of the most important societies, a legally recognized organization with hundreds of members, was led by the Mère Folle, or the Mother Fool, a man in drag. On Mardi Gras, she paraded down the streets of Dijon on a chariot behind her dominion of hundreds of colorfully uniformed, scepter-wielding men. On moving stages, actors criticized the immoral and the corrupt behind the comedy of their satire and the anonymity of their masks.

One of their routines involved a comedic, choreographed sword fight timed to music, known as les matassins, or the mattachine. The name, derived from either the Italian matta (fool) or the Spanish matar (to kill), was telling in either sense; the dancers wore bells on their knees and feigned a dramatic combat to the death. Though the Sociétés Joyeuses disappeared with the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, les matassins survived.

Spanish colonists brought their own version, la danza de mattachines, to the Americas, where it fused with native analogues over the centuries. To this day, men in parts of Mexico dance los mattachines with masks and colorful headdresses while a viejo — often dressed as a woman — mocks and scares the audience.

Harry Hay discovered the dance of the mattachine while teaching his class, “Music, Barometer of the Struggle,” at the People’s Education Center of Los Angeles.”

“The dangers, after all, remained real. Before the 1959 national Mattachine conference in Denver, the host chapter persuaded Mattachine headquarters to allow publicity. Its officers sent out press releases and even held a press conference. They used their real names, and The Denver Post wrote about the convention fairly and extensively. The publicity led to a large convention crowd and a growth in membership, but at the convention itself, the delegates noticed two large men at the opening proceedings.

They were morals officers. One month later, the Denver Police raided the homes of three Mattachine members. In the home of the chapter’s librarian, officers found Society mailing lists and photographs of naked men. The librarian spent sixty days in jail, and at least two members lost their jobs. As the chapter newsletter described it, a “wave of fear” gripped gay Denver, and local homosexuals avoided the once-promising chapter for the rest of its existence.”

“The FBI, wrote Hoover, had obtained a list of 393 federal employees who had been arrested on charges of “sexual irregularities.” Within days, the FBI’s “Sex Deviates” program came into being. From then on, when the Metropolitan Police made a homosexual arrest, the department automatically forwarded the deviant’s fingerprints to the Bureau, which checked them against its files. The FBI then forwarded its information to the Civil Service Commission or the employee’s federal agency, which promptly purged the homosexual from its ranks.

Hoover’s Sex Deviates program grew from a simple clearinghouse of arrest information to a mammoth apparatus of homosexual surveillance. In June 1951, the director ordered his subordinates to begin forwarding not only arrests, but also mere allegations of homosexuality to the CSC. If federal employees had suspicions about a coworker’s sexuality, they could simply inform the FBI. The suspected homosexual would be in an interrogation room — and often without a job — within days.

The Bureau kept track of Washington’s homosexuals through a simple, elegant system. If a Bureau supervisor noticed an allegation of homosexuality in a file, the director held him “personally responsible” for underlining the deviant’s name with a green pencil. The Records section, when it saw the green underline, indexed the name accordingly, and Hoover gained one more homosexual for his vast collection of secrets.

Hoover also used the purges to strengthen his reign. To ensure that the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won the 1952 election, he leaked allegations that Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson had twice been arrested for homosexual activity — to Nixon, McCarthy, and the press. Sometimes, if the Bureau learned that a public official was closeted, the FBI refrained from telling that official’s agency. Instead, the Bureau stayed quiet if the official agreed to become a “listening post” for Hoover, giving the director one more set of ears to spy on political adversaries within the government. By maintaining this regime of blackmail, Hoover did not need further proof that homosexuals threatened national security. Indeed, if it was so easy for him to blackmail homosexuals, why would the Soviets not blackmail them, too?”

Charlie

“Charlie Hayden wanted to be the president of the United States, but he also wanted to have sex with men. By January 1959, the twenty-year-old already looked like a politician — his hair perfectly parted, his eyes an earnest gray blue, his suits well fitted. Yes, he enjoyed picking up men in gay bars, but as a college student, he prioritized achieving power for himself. Indeed, he understood that students accused of homosexuality at the University of Texas faced three options: withdraw with a clean record immediately, get expelled after a week, or take a lie detector test administered by the Texas State Police.

When Charlie returned to Austin for the spring semester of his junior year, he learned that campus newsstands had stopped selling Playboy and other adult magazines. Distributors had bowed to pressure from an anti-obscenity committee of the local Parent-Teacher Association.

Charlie drafted a petition labeling the extralegal censorship a “violation of our right to freedom of the press,” and three days later, he had acquired more than 1,700 supporters, including a significant number of faculty members and local figures. The PTA retreated, and Playboy returned to the students’ newsstands.

The student’s crusade turned him into a university hero, and he planned to harness his fame into political power on campus. He turned to an issue that he thought would galvanize all students: rising tuition costs.

“Hayden plans Capitol March to Protest House Fees Bill,” read the front page headline of the May 6, 1959, Daily Texan. Students had not marched for fifteen years, and Charlie planned the march against the wishes of the student body president, who called the walk “irresponsible.” Why risk alienating legislators?

At one o’clock that hot Texas day, a crowd of hundreds began gathering at the university’s Littlefield Fountain, which stood on a hill above the state Capitol. Uninterested in the protest itself, they began heckling Charlie. “Then,” as a student magazine described the scene, “a small group of fun-loving boys broke from the sidelines, dashed out onto the esplanade, seized Hayden, and dunked him, wash ‘n wear suit, button-down shirt, regimental tie and all, in the fountain.”

Cognizant of the live audience and the rolling television cameras, Charlie smiled throughout the ordeal. “Well, we came for a riot, now we’ve had one!” he stood and yelled, dripping from the edge of the fountain. Everyone laughed.”

“Newspapers across the state reported on the lighthearted tale, and as a result, something remarkable hap-pened. Readers, drawn to the whimsical drama, found themselves alarmed by the possibility of a tuition increase at all of Texas’s state colleges. They wrote to their legislators en masse, and the bill stalled.

“You are a radical. Your methods of accomplishing things are most unorthodox; nonetheless you are a true nonconformist,” a group of supporters wrote to Charlie after the embarrassment. “So to you Fearless Charlie .. CRAZY CHARLIE, we say onward and upward!”

Charlie spent the summer of 1959 working as a hustler on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. He wanted to get away from Texas for a while, and why not hang out with the other pretty queens, making money from an activity he already enjoyed? After eight weeks of standing on a street corner, eyes burning from the soot, Charlie eventually concluded that the profession was not for him. One man in a Corvette gave him only two dollars for a parking lot blowjob. He returned to Austin with a craving for an office job and a redefined notion of what constituted hard work.”

“In April 1962, he heard an opportunity to combat the stereotypes. On New York’s WBAI radio channel, a panel of psychiatrists claimed that they could cure homosexuals with just eight hours of therapy. Wicker promptly marched into the WBAI office with a business card. WBAI had featured a biased, one-sided panel, argued Wicker, and now it owed the homosexual minority — the only real experts on the issue — equal time to respond.

The station acquiesced, and a few weeks later, on a humid summer night, Wicker sat on the floor of a Village apartment with seven other homosexuals.”

“For the next hour and a half, the homosexuals talked frankly among themselves — about their minority, about society, and about sex. No, they explained, the homosexual’s life was not primarily “concerned with seduction,” as the moderator put it. “Generally,” said one participant, “the homosexual has a very strong moral fiber and a very definite set of rules.”

How should the “straight world” approach homosexuals?

“Well, I’d sum it up in a phrase,” responded Wicker. “I’d say, just: ‘Live and let live.”

“I think we all have skeletons in our closets, and the less stones thrown the better,” said another homosexual.

With that, the program, titled “Live and Let Live,” ended. To experience the momentous occasion, homosexuals hosted listening parties across the city. Gay men had never simply talked to one another, as gay men, on the air.

The next day, The New York Times featured two separate articles on the “unusual” program. “The contemporary public seems ready to accept almost any subject matter so long as it is presented thoughtfully,” concluded its media critic. Stations rebroadcast the program in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Alternative and adult magazines clamored to print the program’s transcript.

Reveling in the media circus, Wicker consolidated his position as America’s homosexual spokesman.”

Mattachine

“On August 28, 1962, the Mattachine Society of Washington commenced the largest political action ever undertaken by a group of homosexuals. The Society made itself known to nearly every high official, elected or appointed, in all three branches of the United States federal government. Letters arrived in the offices of President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and the entire presidential cabinet, all 535 senators and congressmen; every justice of the Supreme Court and an array of lower court judges; and every commissioner of the District of Columbia. Each official learned the name of the Society’s unemployed president, Franklin E. Kameny.

The Society had borrowed a Robotype machine, a mammoth apparatus that typed form letters like a player piano, to send customized letters to each official. In each envelope, the Society’s board enclosed the group’s statement of purposes and its press release. And in each letter, Kameny attacked the government’s antihomosexual policies as “archaic, unrealistic, and inconsistent with basic American principles.” He extended a request to meet with each recipient.”

“On September 8, Kameny received a one-sentence letter. “In answer to your letter of August 28, 1962, you may see me at my office at 9:30 on Wednesday, September 12th. Yours very truly, ROBERT N. C. NIX, M.C.”

Congressman Nix of Philadelphia, a Democrat, was Pennsylvania’s first Black U.S. representative and the sixty-four-year-old son of a former slave. In 1962, by agreeing to meet with the Society, Nix became America’s first member of Congress to speak to homosexual activists. He did so within weeks of an election.”

“Nix told Kameny he was willing to help the Society in any way possible, and he even suggested they meet again once Kameny had specific ideas for how his office could help the MSW. Kameny quickly wrote to a Philadelphia-based homophile organization to urge its members to vote for Congressman Nix in the upcoming election.

Two days after Nix’s letter, the Society’s president received a response from Congressman William Fitts Ryan, a first-term Democrat from New York’s Upper West Side. The tall, forty-year-old Princeton man was glad to hear of the Society’s formation. “I hope that you will continue to keep me informed of the views of your group,” he said.

By the end of the week, Kameny had secured a meeting with Ryan’s administrative assistant. Yes, Ryan was willing to help his homosexual constituents in need, said the staffer. Yes, he would speak on the Mattachine’s behalf and even present specific legislation. No, he had not been aware that there existed a Mattachine Society of New York. And no, said Ryan’s assistant, the congressman would not be embarrassed by a show of support from homosexuals in the upcoming election. Kameny immediately wrote to MSNY, urging the New Yorkers to establish relations with their congressman.

For the first time, homosexuals had committed allies in the legislative branch of the federal government, and they immediately utilized the relationship. In September, the House of Representatives debated H.R. 11363, a bill that strengthened the Department of Defense’s security clearance program in the aftermath of Greene v. McElroy. The legislation permitted the Department of Defense to deny a clearance holder’s right to cross-examination if it threatened “the national security.”

Kameny wrote to Nix and Ryan to urge them, “on behalf of 15,000,000 American homosexuals,” to vote against the security clearance bill. It would, he warned, cause “a ‘purge’ of homosexuals, in large numbers, from jobs in government and in private industry.”

On September 19, both Nix and Ryan voted against H.R. 11363, which ultimately failed by only six votes. Yes, Congressman Ryan told Kameny, he had voted in accord with Washington’s first homosexual lobby.”

“She had married a man and given birth to a daughter. As World War II came to an end, she had fallen in love with a female neighbor, acknowledged her homosexuality, and left her husband.

Martin understood that she would be forever stigmatized; she contemplated suicide. When her ex-husband remarried, he approached Martin with an irrefutable argument. Their daughter needed a mother and a father, he said. She needed to be raised by a normal, stable couple.

Martin allowed the heterosexual couple to take her only child.”

“When he returned to his car, Kameny found a parking ticket waiting for him. He promptly mailed it to the Department of Commerce attorney who had cross-examined him, requesting that the official pay it.”

“On car journeys, Kameny whipped out a map and calculated the exact time it would take to reach their destination; he had timed the District’s stoplights.”

“Bayard Rustin had many strikes against his name: Black, gay, socialist, pacifist. In 1944, while the Quaker-influenced Pennsylvanian was in jail for refusing to fight in World War II, a prison psychiatrist described him as “a classical picture of a constitutional homo — the invert type, the high voice, the extravagant mannerisms, the tremendous conceit, the general unmanliness.”

Over the next two decades, authorities arrested Rustin more than twenty times for his nonviolent, Gandhi-inspired activism, but one of his arrests haunted him for the rest of his life, ensuring that his name remained in the shadows of history.

On January 21, 1953, Rustin spoke about African de-colonialization in Pasadena, California, on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a peace organization. By then, he was on the path to becoming an American Gandhi. In 1947, he had codirected the country’s first Freedom Ride, designed to test the Supreme Court’s desegregation of interstate transportation. By 1953, he was speaking to captive audiences across the United States.

After Rustin’s Pasadena speech, at 3:00 a.m. that night, police officers arrested Rustin for performing oral sex on two men in the back of a car. A judge sentenced him to sixty days in jail.

One gay FOR member, upon hearing the news, wrote to Harry Hay’s Los Angeles Mattachine Society. Was there any way he could be saved? The Mattachine could do nothing, and Rustin served the full sixty days.

Civil rights leaders began to see him as a liability. When Rosa Parks’s bus boycott began in Montgomery, Alabama, FOR officials warned that Rustin’s involvement would “set back the whole cause.”

Undaunted, in February 1956, Rustin drove to Montgomery. When he arrived, the young Martin Luther King Jr. had not entirely embraced nonviolence. Floodlights surrounded his house, which had been bombed by white terrorists only days earlier. Armed guards protected his home, which also contained loaded guns.

Civil rights leaders must give up all arms, Rustin explained to King, if they were to inspire nonviolence among their followers, exposing a regime that relied upon arrests, bombs, and fear.

Montgomery’s reporters became suspicious of Rustin, who spoke with a peculiar accent and claimed to be a foreign reporter. King had him smuggled out of Montgomery in the back of a car, and the movement attempted to hide the secret of the gay pacifist.

But because of Rustin, who continued strategizing for the minister from New York, the guns and floodlights disappeared. King became America’s beacon of nonviolent protest.”

“Wicker brought his lover, Peter Ögren, and then there were the League’s members: music critic Jack Diether, LSF president Jefferson Poland, and his girlfriend, who brought her infant child. The total number of attendees at America’s first homosexual picket, child included, was nine.”

“Officer Robert Graham, the Morals Division officer assigned to monitor the ECHO conference that weekend, had the key to the padlock. When Jenkins entered the restroom, Graham was hiding in the abandoned shower room, watching from one of two peepholes in the door. A second Morals Division officer stood next to him.

The officers saw Jenkins encounter another man, an older Hungarian immigrant. Without saying a word, Jenkins entered a stall with him. The officers’ elevated position allowed them to look over the partition between the two rooms, and watch.

“Who was supposed to have been workin’ on who?” an intrigued President Johnson, in a recorded telephone conversation, later asked a top FBI official.

Walter was supposed to be the active one, Mr. President. In other words, this 62-year-old man was letting Walter have it and Walter was taking it.” Officer Graham and his colleague arrested the two men. At 10:10 p.m., Jenkins paid fifty dollars in bond, left jail, and worked at the White House until midnight.

One week later, on October 14, Jenkins received the first call from a Star reporter, who had received an anonymous tip. The White House aide called Abe Fortas, President Johnson’s longtime attorney and fixer. “A terrible thing has happened,” he told Fortas.

Jenkins arrived, distraught and incoherent, at Fortas’s home. Jenkins had destroyed the president, he told Fortas. He threatened to shoot himself. Fortas took him to George Washington University Hospital for “high blood pressure and nervous exhaustion,” and the hospital put the heavily sedated Jenkins on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.”

“Television stations described the affair as

“sad and

sordid.” the same two adjectives used by LIFE magazine to describe the gay underground in its “Homosexuality in America” article, published less than four months earlier.

“”Mr. Jenkins is now in the care of his physician and his many friends will join in praying for his early recovery,” announced the president.

Johnson’s opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, refused to add to Jenkins’s “private sorrow” by campaigning on the scandal. “As for Mr. Jenkins and his family, there can be only compassion,” wrote The New York Times.

To the media’s surprise, America shrugged its shoulders about the possibility of a sick homosexual in the White House. “The voters we talked to,” concluded columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “simply didn’t care.””

“Johnson beat Goldwater in one of the largest electoral landslides in American history.”

“Walter Jenkins, like Alfred Kinsey, unwittingly catalyzed a revolution in pressrooms across the country. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, for one, mentioned homosexuality at least twice per issue for an entire six months after the Jenkins scandal.”

“Kameny received the good news only three weeks later. “Cal-loo, Callay, oh frabjous day — !!! I have a job,” he told Bob Martin.”

Stonewall

“Kameny, proud of his knowledge of New York’s gay landscape, was unfamiliar with the last venue. “What is the Stonewall, at which you danced?””

“The Hymnal’s first edition featured an article titled “Mafia on the Spot” as its lead story. “The Stone Wall on Christopher St. in Greenwich Village,” wrote Rodwell, “is one of the larger and more financially lucrative of the Mafia’s gay bars in Manhattan.” He reported that the bar, which washed its glasses in a filthy tub of old drinks, contributed to the outbreak of hepatitis in the homosexual community. Rodwell called upon homosexuals to wield their economic power to drive the Mafia-run bars out of business.”

“Draft-eligible homosexuals faced the choice of risking death in Vietnam or declaring their homosexuality. When Curtis C. Chambers Jr. received an induction notice from his Virginia draft board, he responded that he was a homosexual and therefore could not go to Vietnam. The draft board’s clerk, dubious, wanted proof. She requested a letter from a psychiatrist and a sworn, notarized statement affirming his homosexuality.

He called several psychiatrists, but they demanded $125 (nearly one thousand in today’s dollars).

Chambers called Frank Kameny, who drafted an affidavit. “I hereby affirm and certify that I, Curtis C. Chambers Jr…. am, and for at least 9 months have been a homosexual by tendency and inclination.”

By the end of March, more than twenty thousand Americans had died in Vietnam, and requests from terrified homosexuals increasingly poured into the Society’s office.

Kameny’s affidavit strategy had a perfect success rate, and men like Chambers avoided Vietnam. The rest of the homophile movement followed suit, and that summer, Dick Leitsch reported that the MSNY had a file of more than four hundred men who had successfully avoided the war by declaring their homosexuality.

The war also gave homosexuals a strong incentive to come out of the closet.”

“Kameny also considered an alluring business proposition. In 1965, three Harvard students created Operation Match, America’s first computerized dating service. Each customer paid three dollars, answered more than one hundred questions in a personality survey, and mailed it to the company. Operation Match fed thousands of those surveys into an IBM 1401 computer — it filled a small room — and determined the most compatible pairings. A few weeks later, each customer received their matches, a list of fourteen names and telephone numbers. Operation Match spread from Harvard to other universities and then to the rest of the country. By the end of 1965, it had seventy-five thousand customers.

By 1968, Operation Match acquired a new IBM S/360 — the size of a large refrigerator — and hoped to expand to a new clientele: homosexuals. The new service would be called Man-to-Man and offer a “discreet,” computer-operated way to meet other men.

In May, after interviewing him for four days in New York, the owners of Operation Match offered the presidency of Man-to-Man to Dr. Frank Kameny. They promised him flexibility and freedom. He would be able to continue his homophile activism. Kameny was tempted, but he hesitated. How would it look?”

“The word homosexual did not roll off the tongue, and the word gay was still an in-group term (in speeches before heterosexuals, Kameny still had to define it). He did not want a word — like power — that suggested a sense of superiority, for he wanted it to appeal to heterosexuals, too.

One day in August, while eating an orange in his kitchen, Kameny discovered a solution: “Gay is Good.” The phrase was bland, but more important, it was broad. Not only did good connote a positive condition, but unlike other options — “Gay is Great” or “Gay is Grand” — it also connoted moral goodness.”

“After considering the effects on his mage and the movement, Kameny rejected the presidency of Man-to-Man. He agreed to rewrite the company’s personality survey for homosexual customers — he later suggested adding a question about preferred penis size.”

“In 1844, New York faced a state of insurrection. Farmers in the Hudson River Valley were rioting against exorbitant rents imposed by their landlords. Local authorities, when they attempted to evict tenants, encountered angry mobs.

To avoid identification, the farmers, who called themselves “Indians,” created a secret cell structure and bound themselves by oath. They wore masks and women’s calico dresses, the “chiefs” of the cells wearing especially long dresses, like nightgowns.

By the end of the year, the “Indians” claimed to have ten thousand knife-wielding, cross-dressing farmers united against an unjust system. “In many a farmhouse, closemouthed wives and mothers ran up the seams of outlandish dresses for the menfolk,” described historian Henry Christman.

In January 1845, New York’s new governor, Silas Wright Jr., insisted that action be taken against the disguised farmers. Within days, the New York legislature passed “An act to prevent persons appearing disguised and armed.” The new law deemed “every person who, having his face painted, discolored, covered or concealed, or being otherwise disguised, in a manner calculated to prevent him from being identified” a “vagrant” — subject to six months in prison.

The riots only increased in scale. The state sent in its militia, which retaliated with such ruthlessness that New Yorkers, once ambivalent, flocked to the anti-rent cause. Voters demanded a constitutional convention, which, in 1846, granted significant concessions to the farmers, including an end to perpetual leases. The drag farmers disbanded, victorious.

The “disguised and armed” law remained on New York’s book of statutes. By the turn of the century, the state continued enforcing it not to suppress farmers, but to persecute cross-dressers in the public spaces of New York City. Those living beyond the boundaries of gender learned that in practice, as long as you wore three gender-conforming items of clothing (if the state identified you as a “male,” perhaps a tie, a men’s watch, and men’s underwear), you were safe.”

“One Black trans woman, Marsha P. Johnson, miraculously climbed a lamppost in high heels and a tight-fitting dress. She dropped a bag full of bricks onto a police car below, shattering its windshield.”

The 70s and Beyond

“Moreover, as one activist explained to LIFE magazine, participating in one good zap was worth “months on a psychiatrist’s couch.””

“On November 9, Kameny spoke on the first day of a weeklong “Theology and Homosexuality” seminar at Catholic University in Washington. “How dare you insult us by including homosexuality in such a program with male prostitution, child molestation and behavior therapy!” he told the audience.

The audience was “lucky,” as he put it, that Washington’s “more militant” gay activists were not demonstrating at the seminar. Listeners could choose to accept his logic and outreach or face the wrath of the other, less predictable homosexuals in the movement. When Kameny extended an olive branch at the end of his speech, the audience grabbed it. “You can learn a lot more in a few hours’ tour of Washington’s fine gay bars than from all the psychiatrists,” he explained. “I shall be delighted to take you on a guided tour.” The next evening, Kameny took a group of fifteen priests, three nuns, and five seminarians on a tour of Washington’s gay bars. “The group relaxed quickly and a few even tried dancing,” reported The Advocate.”

“He continued marching in New York’s Pride parades, and in 1973, for the first time, Rae Beck Kameny marched beside her son, holding his hand. After experiencing the march, she joined the recently formed Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). “So, at 77, she’s joining the Gay Liberation Movement,” Kameny told Gittings. She would continue to support her son and the movement until she passed away at the age of one hundred.

The Pentagon, despite the victories of Wentworth, Ulrich, and Gayer, continued to revoke the security clearances of suspected homosexuals. In July 1974, after a successful ACLU lawsuit, the press witnessed the inner workings of the American security system for the first time.

During the four-day hearing, reporters heard Otis Francis Tabler’s mother testify about her knowledge of her son’s sexual practices, “including but not limited to acts of oral copulation and anal sodomy in both the inserter and insertee roles,” as she explained to the examiner. Five months later, the Department of Defense granted him a clearance. “PENTAGON SURRENDERS,” announced Kameny in a press release.

That year, the District of Columbia finally won home rule, and the homosexual citizens of Washington gained the ability to vote for their own city government. When the GAA learned that Mayor Walter E. Washington planned to appoint members to the District’s new Commission on Human Rights, the organization demanded that he appoint a homosexual.

On March 25, 1975, Kameny stood next to his mother and the mayor. He raised his right hand and swore to uphold the human rights of the District’s residents. The audience, full of GAA members and other gay Washingtonians, applauded for the District’s openly gay human rights commissioner.

As commissioner, Kameny became a hearing examiner, tasked with judging violations of the District’s Human Rights Act.”

“Immediately after his campaign, Kameny had initiated direct negotiations with the general counsel of the Civil Service Commission, and in August 1973, almost exactly ten years after his first request for a meeting, Kameny met with the chairman of the CSC himself.

On July 3, 1975, the general counsel of the SC called Frank Kameny with the news. Later that day, the CSC would announce that homosexual conduct no longer disqualified Americans citizens from federal employment.

“The war, which they have fought against the Gay Community since 1950, and against me personally since 1957, is over,” Kameny told Gittings and Lahusen. “We have won.””

“Around this time, Richard Socarides, the son of antigay psychiatrist Dr. Charles Socarides, fell in love with a boy at his New York private school. While his father continued his attempts to cure homosexuals in the downstairs office of their Upper East Side home, Richard began secretly meeting with his boyfriend on the upper floors of the town house. He later became President Clinton’s liaison to the gay community.

For Kameny, perhaps the most satisfying turn of events occurred on Monday, January 28, 1974. That day, Congressman John Dowdy reported to the front gate of a jail in Missouri. In 1965, the year after his anti-Mattachine bill overwhelmingly passed in the House of Representatives, Dowdy had accepted a briefcase containing twenty-five thousand dollars at the Atlanta airport. In return, according to an FBI informant strapped with a hidden tape recorder, Dowdy had blocked the investigation of a Maryland construction company. A jury convicted the congressman of eight counts of bribery, conspiracy, and perjury. After resigning from Congress, Dowdy served six months in prison.”

“THE COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS did not provide Kameny a salary, and he remained unemployed. He relied on help from his mother and on modest fees for his appearances; in 1973, he narrated a pornographic film. Though he gave approximately 150 speeches per year throughout the 1970s, they brought hardly enough income to pay rent. MSW veteran Nancy Tucker, disturbed by the lack of food in Kameny’s house, anonymously left bags of food on his doorstep.”

“In November 1986, two million Californians voted to make AIDS patients subject to “quarantine and isolation,” and the possibility of homosexual detention camps became increasingly real.”

Conclusion

“A greater victory arrived on August 2, 1995, when Clinton signed Executive Order 12968, prohibiting the denial of security clearances on the basis of sexual orientation. The American government — including the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the CIA — could no longer discriminate against gay civilians in the name of security. “The Government has gone beyond simply ceasing to be a hostile and vicious adversary and has now become an ally,” marveled Kameny.”

“For many couples, the marriage fight had taken too long. Bayard Rustin, before he died in 1987, formalized his relationship by the only means available: adoption.”

“Barbara Gittings had shifted her energies to the American Library Association’s Task Force on Gay Liberation. Her lover, Kay Tobin Lahusen, published her book, The Gay Crusaders, only after her publisher forced her to list a man (she chose Randy Wicker) as a coauthor. Gittings and Lahusen remained together for forty-six years — they came out to the residents of their assisted living facility through a newsletter article — until Gittings passed away in 2007. A memorial bench in Washington’s Congressional Cemetery features both of their names and an epitaph: “Partners in life, Married in our hearts.””

“Randy Wicker met Marsha P. Johnson, the Black trans veteran of Stonewall and the cofounder of STAR. At the time, Wicker still identified drag queens and trans women as an obstacle to the gay movement. “The drag queen is something we’ve been stuck with,” he explained to one television audience.

In the 1970s, Wicker opened a new antique shop in Greenwich Village, and Johnson became a minor celebrity, modeling for Andy Warhol and performing with a drag group. By 1980, Johnson and Wicker had become friends, and after she became homeless once more, she moved into Wicker’s apartment.

For twelve years, they lived together, and Johnson became the house mother of Wicker’s extended gay family. When Wicker’s lover of eighteen years, David Combs, fell ill with AIDS, Johnson took care of him. She was by Combs’s side when he died in 1990.

On July 6, 1992, the NYPD pulled Johnson’s body from the Hudson River. Without an investigation, officials quickly ruled her death a suicide. Wicker believed it to be a murder, and he protested the police’s declaration.

To this day, the case remains open. At Johnson’s funeral procession, Randy Wicker and Sylvia Rivera walked side by side, and he apologized for his lifetime of transphobia. He had been, as he later called himself, a “male chauvinist pig.””

“Randy Wicker, after closing his antique shop in 2003, transformed his high-rise Hoboken apartment into a shrine to Marsha P. Johnson, whom he deemed a saint. Today, his walls are covered with her image, trans flags, and a poster of Saint Bayard Rustin. At the age of eighty-one, he continues to march in his wheelchair, wearing Marsha P. Johnson buttons, at trans protests and vigils across New York City.”

“Despite his wishes, he had not found a long-term love interest since Keith, the undergraduate who had first helped Kameny come out of the closet in Tucson, Arizona, six decades earlier.

On April 23, 2009, the director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the agency that had replaced the Civil Service Commission in 1979, took his oath of office. With Obama’s appointment, John Berry became the highest-ranking gay official in American history. Michelle Obama and Frank Kameny, eighty-three, attended his swearing-in ceremony.

Two months later, on June 17, Kameny stood in the Oval Office, peering over the president’s shoulder as he expanded the health benefits for the partners of gay federal employees.

The next week, on June 24, Kameny returned to the OPM headquarters. While Kameny sat on a stage, flanked by a row of American flags, Berry presented him with one last letter from the federal government.

“Dear Dr. Kameny: In what we know today was a shameful action, the United States Civil Service Commission in 1957 upheld your dismissal from your job solely on the basis of your sexual orientation,” it began. “With the fervent passion of a true patriot, you did not resign yourself to your fate or quietly endure this wrong. With courage and strength, you fought back. Please accept our apology for the consequences of the previous policy of the United States government.”

After Berry finished reading the letter, Kameny stood. “Apology accepted,” he said.”

“On July 21, 2011, the space shuttle Atlantis landed on a Florida runway. After 135 shuttle missions, it marked the end of NASA’s human spaceflight program. A crowd of NASA employees met the shuttle’s crew on the runway, where they wept for the end of an ета.

Frank Kameny had wanted to be one of them. Every now and then, he still wondered what life would have been like if his government had accepted him for being gay — where he would have traveled, what systems he would have invented, what stars he would have seen.”

“Kameny died in his sleep on October 11, 2011, a sensible day to die, since it was National Coming Out Day.

“Gay is good. It is.””