To kick off Pride month, LGBTQ+ activist and scientist Dr. Frank Kameny was honored with a Google Doodle on Tuesday. The doodle, an image that replaces the Google logo on the site’s homepage for the day, shows Kameny wearing a flower garland among flowering trees in Washington, D.C. The illustration is based on an image of him attending a Pride event in 2010.
Kameny, who was fired for being gay in the 1950s, challenged the McCarthy-era ban on LGBTQ+ government employees, as well as the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder.
As a young man, Kameny concealed his sexuality in order to enlist in the military and fight in World War II. After the war, he went on to receive his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University and got a job with the Army Map Service. But just months after being hired, a background check revealed an August 1956 arrest for “lewd conduct” in a San Francisco train terminal, although the exact site has been disputed by historians. He was subsequently outed and dismissed from his job.
Kameny was employed by the government at a dangerous time for LGBTQ+ people. The 1950s encompassed a period known as the “Lavender Scare,” a purge of queer federal employees that grew out of the Red Scare, led by the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which ordered the investigation and firing of queer government employees under the reasoning that their supposed “lifestyle” rendered them suceptible to blackmail by Communists.
Instead of remaining quiet and accepting his termination, Kameny chose to sue. His case has been noted as one of the first LGBTQ+ rights appeals to make it to the doors of the Supreme Court, although the court ultimately refused to hear it. In his petition he wrote that discrimination against gays was “no less odious than discrimination based upon religious or racial grounds.”
This fight spurred Kameny’s decades-long activism. He lobbied to lift Eisenhower’s ban on LGBTQ+ employees, which was partially overturned in 1975, and called upon the American Psychological Association (APA) to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder, which took place in 1972. Kameny led pickets in front of government buildings in Washington, D.C. as a leader of the Mattachine Society’s local chapter. These protests received significant media coverage, as well as mixed reception from the broader LGBTQ+ community for their adherence to respectability politics. Men had to wear suits, women had to wear dresses, and smoking was not allowed.
Kameny also advocated for other fired LGBTQ+ government employees who sought restitution. One of these employees was computer scientist and government contractor Otis Francis Tabler, who successfully argued his termination and became the first openly gay person to recieve a security clearance in 1974. Kameny also helped Jamie Shoemaker become the first openly gay National Security Agency (NSA) employee to be investigated and still keep their job in 1980.
Kameny died in 2011 at the age of 86. Just two years before his passing, the U.S. government formally apologized to him for its former treatment of queer employees. In a ceremony held by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under the Obama administration, he reportedly said: “[I]t took 50 years, but I won my case.”
“All I can say is from the long view, 50 years, we have moved ahead in a way that would have been absolutely unimaginable back then,” he said two years later, when his personal papers were put on display at the Library of Congress.
Kameny’s story will reportedly soon be coming to FX in a new show from Pose co-creator Steven Canals. Based on the award-winning This American Life episode “81 Words,” the limited series will explore Kameny and fellow activist Barbara Gittings’ fight against the APA’s classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. The show has yet to announce a cast or an airdate.
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