TODAY IN HISTORY
Frank Kameny leads White House picket
Pioneering gay rights activist Frank Kameny led the first organized White House picket for gay rights on April 17,
1965, with the Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW). Kameny, a brilliant astronomer with a PHD from Harvard, had been fired from the Army Map Service in 1957 because he was gay. Fighting against this injustice, Kameny took his case to court, and in 1961 became the first person to petition the Supreme Court with a discrimination claim based on sexual orientation. The day after the Supreme Court declined to hear his petition, Frank Kameny contacted the Mattachine Society of New York, one of the earliest gay rights groups in the U.S., and asked for advice on starting a Washington chapter.
The Mattachine Society was originally founded in California in 1950, and grew to become one of the most prominent groups in the U.S. homophile movement. The homophile movement refers to the period of LGBTQ+ activism and organizing before Stonewall, roughly dating from the end of World War II to 1970.
Frank Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1961 with Jack Nichols. The idea to picket had been discussed prior to 1965, but when Mattachine members learned from an April 16 (1965) New York Times article that Cuba was planning to put gay people into labor camps, they saw an opportunity to act.
Since there was no Cuban embassy in DC in 1965, Nichols suggested they picket the White House, and they organized the protest overnight.
There were a number of influential homophile activists at the April 1965 White House Picket. Lilli Vincenz was the only lesbian to attend the picket.
Feeling emboldened with the relative success of the first picket (nobody was injured or arrested, as they feared), Kameny and the Mattachine Society of Washington then held similar pickets in 1965, again at the White House (May 29 and October 23), at the Pentagon (July 31), the State Department (August 28), and the United States Civil Service Commission (June 26). The pickets then moved beyond Washington, D.C.
From 1965-1969, the Mattachine Society of Washington worked with the East Coast Homophile Organizations (E.C.H.O.) to organize an annual July
4th “Reminder Day Picket,” at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. E.C.H.O (later reformed as E.R.C.H.O) was founded in
1962 as an organization of East coast homophile groups. After the Stonewall Uprising in June 1969, E.R.C.H.O voted to turn their attention to organizing for Christopher Street Liberation Day 1970.
Frank Kameny continued to be an influential activist for the rest of his life. In 2009, more than 50 years after they had fired him for being gay, the Federal Government officially apologized to Kameny and recognized him with the prestigious Theodore Roosevelt Award. Kameny passed away at age 86 on October 11, 2011, on National Coming Out Day.
Source: Library of Congress