A genuine and uniquely American hero died here in Washington last week. You've probably never heard of Frank Kameny. But for his courage and his perseverance, some have compared his importance to the gay rights movement with Rosa Parks, even Martin Luther King, in the struggle for civil rights.
Today, it's hard to imagine the social climate back in 1957, when Kameny was thrown out of his job as an astronomer for the Army Map Service after five months because he was gay. Unlike in Britain, where until 1967 homosexual acts in private were a crime, they were never technically illegal at a federal level here.
But owing to an executive order by President Eisenhower in 1953, "sexual perversion" was enough to get you sacked from government service. Until 1973 homosexuality was medically classified as a sickness, a "psychiatric disorder", and not until 2003 did a landmark Supreme Court judgment strike down anti-sodomy laws still in force in several southern states. Even in liberal DC, anti-sodomy legislation was not repealed until the mid-1990s.
It's tempting to compare Kameny with Alan Turing, the brilliant wartime code-breaker at Bletchley Park and father of modern computer science, who was convicted for homosexual behaviour, stripped of his security clearances and subjected to chemical castration so as to avoid jail. Broken and humiliated, Turing committed suicide in 1954.
Read more at The Independent...
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