The Long Road To Visibility

After decades of being unseen and "unclean," gay people found an unlikely champion in Frank Kameny, a fired government worker who knew that the first step to equality was a clean bill of mental health

A child growing up in America in the 1950s could easily reach puberty before he ever saw anyone identified as a homosexual--or even saw the word homosexual in a newspaper, book, or magazine. I first encountered the word as a 13-year-old reading about Nazis in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. When I asked my parents what it meant, their only reply was, "Oh, you know." But while I was certainly familiar with the feelings that word described, I had never seen that name for them in print.

The 30-year period between 1930 and 1960 was one of the darkest of the dark ages for gay people in America. Beginning with a film censorship system, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, that banished all positive portrayals of gay people from the screen, a remarkably successful national effort prevented most Americans from ever hearing, seeing, or reading about a happy, good-looking, or intelligent lesbian or gay man. In a period when practically everyone thought that homosexuals were made and not born, the custodians of the national morality believed that one of the best ways to contain this scourge of deviance was to make gay people even more invisible than the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. At the same time, the ancient homophobia of the church was reinforced by the medical doctrine embraced by the emerging "science" of psychiatry, which proclaimed that the only acceptable homosexual was the one who was determined to reverse his sexual orientation--even if electric shock was necessary to achieve that result.

Gay self-hatred was reinforced by everything we heard or saw. It was even reflected in the books and plays gay people wrote themselves. Dozens of gay-written novels were published between 1930 and 1960, but almost every one observed the same convention: Anyone succumbing to such distasteful behavior was doomed to catastrophe. Even someone as bold as Gore Vidal ended The City and the Pillar in 1948 with the murder of one protagonist by another. This provoked the privately expressed disappointment of his friend Christopher Isherwood, who read Vidal's book while visiting Peru. The British-born author of The Berlin Stories conceded in a letter to Vidal that many homosexuals were "unhappy." "But," he added,

   ... there is another side to the picture which you (and Proust) don't show.
   Homosexual relationships can be, and frequently are, happy. Men live
   together for years and make homes and share their lives and their work,
   just as heterosexuals do. This truth is peculiarly disturbing and shocking
   even to "liberal" people, because it cuts across their romantic, tragic
   notion of the homosexual's fate. Certainly, under the present social setup,
   a homosexual relationship is more difficult to maintain than a heterosexual
   one ... but doesn't that merely make it more of [a] challenge and
   therefore, in a sense more humanly worthwhile? The success of such a
   relationship is revolutionary in the best sense of the word. And, because
   it demonstrates the power of human affection over fear and prejudice and
   taboo, it is actually beneficial to society as a whole--as all
   demonstrations of faith and courage must be: they raise our collective
   morale.

These were revolutionary words indeed in 1948--and no political activist (unless you include Allen Ginsberg in that category) would start saying anything that radical in public until the 1960s, when visionaries like Frank Kameny began to say out loud for the first time that just because you were gay did not mean you were sick. (It was also in the `60s when Vidal finally succumbed to pressure from other gay writers and changed the final scene of The City and the Pillar from a murder into a mere rape.)

When I began my research in 1992 for The Gay Metropolis, a history of gay life in America since 1940, our invisibility had ended. But the idea that gay people were still doomed to a lonely and unhappy old age remained a persistent theme of homophobia. As a result, it was part of my private agenda to find older gay men who had figured out how to grow up and grow old as happy, fulfilled men. Kameny was one of my first discoveries.

Kameny was a World War II combat veteran who had earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1956 and went to work for the U.S. Army Map Service in July 1957. When he was fired a few months later, after the government learned of a previous arrest for "lewd behavior," Kameny became one of the first people to challenge the official policy that excluded homosexuals from employment by the federal government or any of its contractors--a rule enshrined by an executive order signed by Dwight Eisenhower at the beginning of his presidency.

Kameny's lawsuit ended in failure when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case in 1961. But his experience transformed him into a man of absolute convictions and unrelenting intensity. Over the next 20 years he would do as much as any other member of his generation to transform the attitudes of homosexuals toward themselves--and then, even more amazingly, the attitude of the rest of America toward homosexuals.