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The
Washington
Post
At Smithsonian,
Gay Rights Is Out of
the Closet, Into the Attic
Activist Frank
Kameny's Memorabilia Are Now Signs of Progress
By Philip Kennicott,
washingtonpost.com from the Web, September 8, 2007
The obvious question gets the obvious
answer: Of course Frank Kameny, a pioneer of the gay rights movement, had
no inkling that the protest signs he carried more than 40 years ago would end up
in the Smithsonian. But there they are, hand-lettered, with little stains
from their staples discoloring the faded white cardboard. Two of them,
plus three campaign buttons, are now in the same case as Joe Louis's boxing
gloves, near the glass closet that holds Jackie Kennedy's inaugural gown and in
the same shrinelike exhibit known as "Treasures of American History" that also
has Thomas Jefferson's writing desk and the ruby-red slippers that Dorothy wore
on her way to meet the Wizard.
Kameny, now 82, was on hand Thursday evening to see the very functional tools of
his early activism officially made totems of American history. Although
the objects are part of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History's
collection, the reception was held at the National Air and Space Museum, which
is offering space for the must-see icons while the history museum itself is
closed for renovation.
It was a coincidence, but a fortunate one, that a man who trained as an
astronomer, who earned a PhD from Harvard before he was fired by the government
in 1957 for being gay, was honored amid rockets and planes and depictions of the
solar system.
"At the time I was fired, the whole space program was just beginning," says
Kameny. He might have volunteered as an astronaut, he says. "I might
have gone to the moon."
Instead, he got busted in Lafayette Square across from the White House (a gay
cruising ground), lost his job, lost any hope of ever using his formal education
as an astronomer and became, instead, an activist. He remembers living on
20 cents' worth of food a day during the darkest years. And he remembers
every victory with precision.
"December 15, 1973," he says, "when we were cured en masse by the
psychiatrists." Kameny played a huge role in persuading the American
Psychiatric Association to stop treating homosexuality as a mental disorder and
remove it from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
"July 3, 1975," he says, "when the Civil Service Commission rescinded the ban on
gay people." He played a major role in that one, too. He also
mentions Executive Order 12968, signed by President Bill Clinton, which allowed
gay people to get security clearances. He also remembers the repeal of the
District's anti-sodomy law in 1993.
"He ate baked beans, but he didn't despair," said Dudley Clendinen, co-author of
"Out for Good," a history of the gay rights movement that contains several
chapters in which Kameny is the central character. Clendinen spoke at
Thursday's reception, calling Kameny an "authentic hero" of American culture.
One chapter in Clendinen's book (written with Adam Nagourney) is devoted to
Kameny's run for the District's non-voting congressional seat in 1971. It
was, for most people, a quixotic effort by an obscure activist promoting a
distasteful cause, with no hope of winning. But it had in it all the
essential elements of a civil rights strategy that was remarkably prescient and
ultimately effective. It was all about visibility, proving to the world
that there were unapologetically homosexual people, and proving to closeted
homosexuals that they were not alone. The goal wasn't so much a
congressional seat, but publicity.
Kameny's campaign was well covered by local media, and it presaged an age when
gay issues were increasingly discussed in public. News coverage was often
hostile, generally condescending and frequently mocking. "Deviate,"
"pervert" and "homosexual" were essentially interchangeable terms.
Which makes it all the more bracing to look at the signs in the Smithsonian
exhibition. One reads, "First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals"; another,
"Discrimination against homosexuals is as immoral as discrimination against
Negroes and Jews." A photograph from 1965 shows Kameny's supporters
carrying the placards, or ones just like them, in front of the White House.
That was four years before the Stonewall riots, a series of confrontations with
police in New York that are often cited as the foundational event of the gay
rights movement.
The picture captures well-dressed men and women in orderly procession, a
snapshot of a historical moment that conveys none of the fear and loathing and
the very physical danger one risked by making such a declaration in 1965.
Seen side by side with the crowd that gathered at the Air and Space Museum --
well dressed and orderly -- it suggests the degree to which the gay rights
movement has come full circle, from an early and essentially conservative
request for basic equality to a final and essentially conservative request for
complete equality.
It's difficult to know the importance or impact of the inclusion of this
material in the Smithsonian's display. Smithsonian curator Harry
Rubenstein says you can never be certain what will be controversial, but, "this
is really mainstream in terms of our mission in political history."
But look around the display, at Rosie the Riveter, an early Teddy Bear, a pair
of Keds sneakers and a Barbie doll, and gay rights signs seem like rather
different objects. People may object to whether the museum gets the
history of the labor movement right, or whether toys and pop icons are worthy to
be seen next to Gen. George Washington's uniform. But gay stuff, whether
it's a photograph in a newspaper or an exhibition in a museum, elicits a more
visceral negative response. Rather than argue with the message, or the
truth of the image or display, people tend to say, "I shouldn't have to see
that." Or rather, "My kids shouldn't have to see it."
That reaction, if it comes, only reinforces the potency of Kameny's
half-century-old strategy. It is still all about visibility. In that
sense, the old picket signs that Kameny, a self-confessed "pack rat," stored all
these years are still working (even in a museum) in their original way.
Their presence there is the message.
We are an increasingly fractured and atomized society, and perhaps for that
reason, there's an almost surreal power to canonical, culturally central,
institutionally sanctioned displays such as "Treasures of American History."
The authority and validity of institutions such as the Smithsonian (and academia
and the mainstream media) are challenged on all sides, but inclusion in them is
still assiduously pursued. The Smithsonian display of gay rights
memorabilia is in that sense a major milestone -- even as the very idea of being
gay tends to fade as a meaningful identity. Young people who would have
called themselves gay a decade ago now announce that they don't like labels and
will sleep with whomever they want, thank you.
If this had happened 10 or 20 years ago, one might have said that perhaps the
open display of a "Gay Is Good" button (Kameny coined the phrase) in the
nation's premier museum would help some confused or questioning youth to know
that he or she is not alone. But that's just pablum now. Youth use
the Internet, and except for gay kids from very conservative and isolated
families, they don't lack access to information about sexuality. The genie
that Kameny and others let out of the bottle will never go back in, and now
people who object to (or hate) homosexuals are forced to fight tactical delaying
wars on peripheral issues (keeping them out of the military, denying them
marriage rights).
Curiously, the strategy of gay rights opponents is akin to Kameny's: He
fought to make homosexuality visible in a positive way; they fight to keep it
controversial, to keep it visible in a negative way. The success of his
effort -- assimilation into society -- makes his memorabilia seem almost quaint;
the success of their effort -- keep gay rights a subject that riles people --
reawakens the old power of his objects.
So if there's no controversy with this new display, perhaps the battle is over?
Hard to say. Racism became taboo in public discourse, but it still
functions in code words, jokes, attitudes and unspoken assumptions, so much so
that people such as Don Imus, who insulted the black women on a basketball team,
often act startled by their own seemingly unconscious channeling of the
rhetoric. An anthropologist looking at our society would probably observe
that hating people for their difference must be useful for some purpose, given
the extraordinary lengths we go to preserve our animosities in elaborate and
ritualized ways.
Homophobia will likely settle into the same marginal but powerful cultural
habits, flaring into public controversy only when a superannuated comic uses a
crude anti-gay slur, then repents, or a red-state senator is cashiered by his
political party for the faintest whiff of homosexual desire.
It's a strange sort of progress. Perhaps people will pass by this little
glass case in the Smithsonian, with children in tow, completely unruffled, maybe
even amused. But in the middle school locker room and the U.S. military,
symbolic lines will be maintained, and real cruelty perpetuated. The
closet from which Kameny sought to liberate gay people gets smaller and smaller,
reduced to a transitional stage in adolescence, or a canny career choice for
emotive cable anchors and right-wing political operatives. But it, too,
must be preserved if the demand of Kameny's sign -- first-class citizenship for
homosexuals -- is to be deferred.
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