influential early gay organization. In both cases, that’s the Mattachine Society – the original chapter in southern California launched by the late Harry Hay in 1951, and the Washington chapter in the 1960s from which the late Frank Kameny – a fired federal worker himself – made his name. Hay named Mattachine after the Italian Renaissance’s court jesters – who, while wearing masks, were free to speak the truth. Hay conceived of Mattachine as a response to the government purges of gays, which was impacting his home base of Los Angeles by virtue of the increasing number of contractors working for the Defense Department in the region. Yet Hay kept Mattachine focused on providing education, research, and social services, not political activism or legal counsel. An early attempt to create an activist-oriented Washington chapter of Mattachine by Buell Dwight Higgins failed, and it wasn’t until Hay’s Mattachine had collapsed that Kameny was able to make it the force that ultimately pushed the federal government to stop its Lavender Scare purge. Under Kameny, the Mattachine Society of Washington worked from a “Gay is Good” premise. The organization developed pamphlets to help the accused – with titles such as “If You Are Arrested” and “How to Handle a Federal Interrogation” – and provided legal assistance to help them fight both the federal government and the DC police – and its “notoriously aggressive pursuit of homosexuals,” as Johnson put it. Eventually, disgruntled city residents and federal employees starting winning in the courts, and the local police and the federal government stopped targeting gays. Kameny’s success in bettering life for gays and lesbians in Washington was so significant and so instrumental that the late Steve Endean, who founded the Human Rights Campaign Fund – today’s HRC – has called him the “grandfather” of the LGBT movement. “Kameny…has probably done more for lesbian and gay Americans than any other person,” Endean wrote in his 1993 memoir Into The Mainstream. Kameny also became the first openly gay candidate for Congress when he unsuccessfully ran as DC’s first nonvoting delegate to the US House of Representatives in 1971. His campaign committee reorganized as the Gay Activists Alliance – now the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance – which helped secure passage of the DC Human Rights Law in 1973, one of the nation’s first laws banning discrimination against gays and lesbians. The next year then-Mayor Walter Washington tapped Kameny for the city’s Human Rights Commission, making Kameny the first openly gay appointee in DC government.
BAYARD RUSTIN AND THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON 1963 Frank Kameny had so much success with Mattachine in the 1960s in large part because he adapted tactics of the civil rights movement – such as building coalitions with other groups and seeking publicity for its efforts – to suit the LGBT cause. Interestingly enough, the civil rights movement’s initial success stems from the work of its own gay leader: Bayard Rustin. Martin Luther King, Jr. may be the man most associated with the seminal 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but this first mass march on the National Mall succeeded because of Rustin. “In my judgment, Bayard Rustin was the only man who could have organized the march, and I say that out of some sense of history,” Eleanor Holmes Norton told Metro Weekly in 2013. Norton, DC’s long-serving representative to the US House, was a key figure in the 1963 march, and it was because of her efforts that President Barack Obama posthumously recognized Rustin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during festivities marking the 50th anniversary of the march. Rustin was also one of the first to gain national attention – mostly unfavorable – as an openly gay man. “Racism and homophobia have long clouded the narrative of Rustin’s work, erasing him from our history books and stymieing the proper celebration of his contributions to our country,” Sharon J. Lettman-Hicks
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LGBT march on the Mall was in 2009. This National Equality March, called for by activist David Mixner in part to protest a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California, was intentionally more of a grassroots and lowkey affair than its predecessors. It attracted approximately 200,000 people. The Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, held on October 11, 1987, has come to be known as the Great March. It was a reaction in part to the Supreme Court’s ruling the previous year in Bowers v. Hardwick that states could criminalize sodomy between two consenting men, even in the privacy of a home. (That decision, thankfully, was overturned in 2003.) Another principal motivating factor for the Great March was the AIDS crisis, which triggered intense political agitation and activism on the part of the movement throughout the latter half of the 1980s and into the ’90s. And a year later, it inspired the first National Coming Out Day, now held annually on October 11.
This was the era of ACT UP, or the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the formation of which was inspired by Larry Kramer in New York in the spring of 1987. The organization led protests that generated great publicity and eventually helped propel increased funding for AIDS research at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health. Although it would have been better if such protests weren’t needed in the first place, both the LGBT movement and society at large are still reaping rewards from ACT UP’s activism. Most significantly have been two developments helping to curtail both the spread and the severity of the disease: The rise in the late ’90s of the treatment known as combination therapy, in which an HIV-positive person takes a daily regimen of antiretroviral drugs effectively preventing the development of AIDS; and the more recent rise in pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a daily pharmaceutical regimen that effectively keeps HIV-negative people from seroconverting. Within the next decade we may reap an even bigger reward from ACT UP’s pioneering push for AIDS research: a vaccine against the disease. Researchers in the field have reported getting tantalizingly close to such a development. This would be something to celebrate every bit as much as other advances in the LGBT movement since the advent of Capital Pride. --Doug Rule