Book of the week

The Deviant’s War By Eric Cervini (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $60)

Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you’re sick.

Today that simple declaration is the conventional wisdom in civilised places all over the world. But as recently as the 1960s, almost no educated person believed it.

One brilliant, litigious and exceptionally stubborn man did more to change the mind of the world than anyone else. His name was Frank Kameny, a Harvardeducated astronomer who lived in

Washington. Kameny may be responsible for more fundamental social change in the post-World War II world than any other American of his generation, but it’s usually only students of gay history who know that.

The Deviant’s War is a brilliant new book that ought to change that forever. The author, a young Harvard- and Cambridge-educated historian named Eric Cervini, is a smooth writer and a brilliant researcher.

The son of a Jewish electrical engineer and a secretary, Kameny enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life growing up in the New York borough of Queens. The precocious

student entered Queens College at the age of 16.

By then he was well aware of his attraction to other boys. But unlike nearly everyone else, he had decided that if his gay desires never went away, that he was right and society was wrong.

The reader gets a stark idea of how much time and energy were wasted – and how many thousands of lives were ruined – when Cervini points out that between 1945 and 1960, 1 million homosexuals were arrested in the United States, or one every 10 minutes. In Washington in the late 1940s, the police touted a ‘‘Sex Perversion Elimination Program’’.

After President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order in 1953 banning the employment of homosexuals in the US government and all of its contractors, thousands of gay employees were fired.

After fighting in the trenches in Germany in World War II, then gaining his doctorate in astronomy at Harvard, Kameny was hired by the Army Map Service in the summer of 1957. He dreamed of becoming one of America’s first astronauts. But his dreams were shattered just two months later, when the army discovered that he had been arrested on a morals charge in a San Francisco men’s

room a couple of years earlier, and he was immediately fired.

Unlike every other gay federal employee before him, Kameny fought his firing. He asked the Supreme Court to hear his case, and called the government rules banning homosexuals from federal employment ‘‘a stench in the nostrils of decent people, an offence against morality, an abandonment of reason, an affront to human dignity, an improper restraint upon proper freedom and liberty, a disgrace to any civilised society, and a violation of all that this nation stands for.’’

Kameny lost his appeal, but he had found his voice. For the next 50 years he would repeat these same ideas and – most importantly – transform the attitude of American psychiatry.

The black civil rights movement provided the blueprint and the inspiration.

Kameny lived long enough to see many of the great victories of the gay movement of the 21st century, and he was a guest of honour several times at President Barack Obama’s White House. I telephoned Kameny the day after his first White House visit. ‘‘How does it feel, Frank?’’ I asked.

‘‘I feel like the frog who turned into the prince,’’ he replied.

– Charles Kaiser, Daily Telegraph