On April 22, 2021 historian Eric Cervini, author of The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, joined Washington History managing editor Jane F. Levey in conversation about his book and the legacy of LGBTQ activist Frank Kameny.
On February 2, 2021, Pete Buttigieg became the first openly gay man to win Senate confirmation to run a Cabinet department. This historic appointment has its roots in an extraordinary moment in 1957 when Frank Kameny, a young astro-physicist, decided to stand his ground when the federal government dismissed him from his job for being gay.
While he did not get his job back, Kameny’s subsequent decades-long battle to decriminalize homosexuality fundamentally changed Washington and the world. Kameny (1925-2011) spent more than 50 years here as a civil rights activist and politician, including serving on Mayor Walter Washington’s inaugural Commission on Human Rights soon after DC gained Home Rule, and advocating for DC Statehood.
Two years before his death, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (the successor agency to the U.S. Civil Service Commission) presented Kameny with the agency’s highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Award, and formally apologized for the “shameful action” of his firing. As the 2009 apology also noted, “the civil service laws, rules and regulations now provide that it is illegal to discriminate against federal employees or applicants based on matters not related to their ability to perform their jobs, including their sexual orientation.”
To provide some historical context for the fight for the rights of LGBTQ federal employees by Kameny and others, we offer the following recommended reading. Also included are selected resources exploring the documentation of the broader social, cultural, and political history of LGBTQ life in DC, where the federal and the local are inevitably intertwined.
"The Fight for LGBTQ Rights" is an installment in the DC History Center’s Context for Today series of online conversations with thoughtful and thought-provoking historians, activists, journalists, and community members.
Dr. Eric Cervini is an award-winning historian of LGBTQ+ politics and culture. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar. As an authority on 1960s gay activism, Cervini serves on the Board of Directors of the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus and on the Board of Advisors of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of gay American history. His first book, The Deviant's War, was the result of seven years of research in several DC-based archives, including the Frank Kameny Papers at the Library of Congress, and was the first LGBTQ+ history book to appear on the New York Times Best Sellers list in 27 years.
Washington Post and New York Times articles are free with your DC Public Library or other local library card. To access the full list of newspapers available through DCPL click here.
Washington History Magazine can be viewed and downloaded from JSTOR after making a free account. Current and past issues are available for purchase from the DC History Center's online store.
Jeb and Dash: a diary of gay life, 1918-1945/edited by Ina Russell by The mission of the Rainbow History Project is to collect, preserve, and promote an active knowledge of the history, arts, and culture relevant to sexually diverse communities in metropolitan Washington, DC. Since 2008 the DC History Center has served as the permanent repository of RHP’s physical collections, including personal papers of individuals, records of LGBTQ organizations, and published periodicals. Materials physically transferred to the DC History Center are described in MS 0764, a collection that expands through periodic transfers.
**Please note: The Rainbow History Project’s oral history recordings are not available at the DC History Center. They may be requested directly from the Rainbow History Project website. You will also find the Rainbow History Project’s Walking Tours and Places and Spaces database on the RHP website.
Additional collections have been accrued and/or made accessible since the creation of the above 2016 "Guide to Selected Resources Relating to D.C.’s LGBTQ Communities Available at Local Repositories", including the below digital collections available through The People’s Archive, DC Public Library.
Help us keep the DC History Center's guide up-to-date. Send additional resources and/or edits to library@dchistory.org. We appreciate your efforts and contributions!
