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Frank Kameny's crusade against discrimination began after his sexuality cost him his federal job ...
Kevin M. Kruse RetweetedFrank Kameny’s crusade against discrimination began after his sexuality cost him his federal job, in the 1950s.
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Frank Kameny’s Orderly, Square Gay-Rights Activism
An astronomer for the Army Map Service was an unlikely, but crucial, combatant for erotic freedom.
By Caleb Crain
June 22, 2020
{snip}
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.
{snip}
Published in the print edition of the June 29, 2020, issue, with the headline “An Accidental Activist.”
Caleb Crain is the author of “Necessary Errors,” “American Sympathy,” and “Overthrow.”
An astronomer for the Army Map Service was an unlikely, but crucial, combatant for erotic freedom.
By Caleb Crain
June 22, 2020
{snip}
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.
{snip}
Published in the print edition of the June 29, 2020, issue, with the headline “An Accidental Activist.”
Caleb Crain is the author of “Necessary Errors,” “American Sympathy,” and “Overthrow.”
