[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 166 (Wednesday, November 2, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1980]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           HONORING STORIED GAY RIGHTS LEADER FRANKLIN KAMENY

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. JAMES P. MORAN-

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, November 2, 2011

  Mr. MORAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce a recent editorial by 
Nick Benton, editor and publisher of the Falls Church News Press. His 
editorial, which appeared on October 19, 2011, reads as follows:

       It was by a remarkable and gracious coincidence that the 
     first weekend after the passing of our gay movement's 
     greatest pioneer, Franklin Kameny, the Martin Luther King Jr. 
     Memorial was dedicated on the National Mall.
       The ceremony included a viewing of the entirety of Dr. 
     King's 17-minute ``I Have a Dream'' speech delivered on the 
     steps of the Lincoln Memorial to 300,000 in the ``Great March 
     on Washington'' of August 28, 1963, the year of the 100th 
     anniversary of Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation 
     Proclamation.
       Seven of the handful of original gay members of the 
     Mattachine Society of Washington, led by Kameny, attended 
     that historic rally and heard that speech. It was with its 
     echoes ringing in their ears that in 1965, Kameny and a tiny 
     cadre of fellow homosexuals carried out the first-ever 
     organized picket line demanding homosexual equality held at 
     the White House gates.
       In his 1963 speech, Dr. King welcomed the racially-diverse 
     makeup of the rally. ``Many of our white brothers, as 
     evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize 
     that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have 
     come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to 
     our freedom,'' he intoned.
       ``We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are 
     created equal,'' Dr. King declared. ``I have a dream that my 
     four little children will one day live in a nation where they 
     will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the 
     content of their character.''
       That speech directly inspired the rise of our modern gay 
     movement, led by Kameny (May 21, 1925-October 11, 2011), 
     Lilli Vincenz, Barbara Gittings and a handful of others, as 
     chronicled in the film documentary, ``Gay Pioneers'' (2004), 
     produced by the Philadelphia Equality Forum.
       Frank Kameny, I am proud to say, was my friend in recent 
     years. He was arguably the single most seminal influence in 
     the history of our movement, so claimed at a Rainbow History 
     Project forum last week. Kameny was scheduled to speak at 
     that forum before his untimely death at age 86 just two days 
     before.
       His was the strident, compelling force that led the effort 
     against the 1950s McCarthyite anti-homosexual witch hunts in 
     the government (David K. Johnson, ``The Lavender Scare, The 
     Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal 
     Government,'' 2004).
       He organized picket lines when no one else was doing it and 
     carried on a relentless, lifelong fight for equality. He ran 
     for public office and railed loudly against injustice in an 
     era when no one, except in rarefied circles of literary or 
     artistic elites, dared publicly declare their homosexuality.
       His crowning achievement was his relentless, eventually 
     successful campaign to get the American Psychiatric 
     Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental 
     disorders in 1973. That signal achievement changed the public 
     perception of homosexuality, laying the groundwork for 
     growing public acceptance and affirmation since.
       Kameny invented the slogan, ``Gay is Good,'' far more 
     controversial in its time than it seems now. I defended it 
     then against objections of dedicated gay friends who 
     considered it too radical.
       When I first met Frank, I was a young gay activist in 1970 
     in San Francisco. Dr. King's speech permeating the national 
     ethos, I'd made two life-changing decisions, entering 
     seminary in 1966 and joining Kameny and his San Francisco 
     counterparts prior to Stonewall in early 1969 to ``come out'' 
     and join the struggle for gay, and human, liberation.
       Our fight, I wrote in the editorial for the first Gay 
     Sunshine newspaper, ``should harken to a greater cause, the 
     cause of human liberation, of which homosexual liberation is 
     just one aspect.''
       Regrettably, about that same time, the onslaught of the 
     right wing, socially-engineered anarcho-hedonist 
     counterculture hijacked our movement, dashing Dr. King's 
     appeal to the ``content of character'' in the process. We've 
     had to live, and die, with the consequences of that since.
       I reconnected with Frank in recent years, while his 
     contributions became more recognized and appreciated. A 
     milestone came when the many picket signs, leaflets, speeches 
     and photographs he'd kept from his earliest activist days 
     were formally received as a special collection at the 
     Smithsonian Institution. He was honored at the White House by 
     President Obama, and a photo of him and me with Vice 
     President Biden hangs in my office.
       Along with another other early activist and mutual friend, 
     Lilli Vincenz, and her long-time partner Nancy Davis, I 
     hosted Frank as my guest at the national dinner of the Human 
     Rights Campaign in 2005, and often invited him to lunches at 
     The Palm restaurant in downtown D.C.
       Those many lunches were not only to enjoy his company, but 
     to provide opportunities for my friends, especially younger 
     ones, gay and otherwise, to meet and appreciate this genuine 
     hero of our movement. Recently, of this ``Gay Science'' 
     project, Kameny smiled and quipped, ``I think we wind up in 
     the same place.'' I concurred.

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