Franklin E. Kameny was a decorated World War II veteran, a Harvard Ph.D., and a rising astronomer employed by the U.S. government. On December 20, 1957, the U.S. government fired him—for being gay.
Unemployed, blacklisted from federal employment, and broke, Kameny was outraged. The shy scientist decided to fight to get his job back. In 1961, he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. What happened there would shape the course of gay rights.
“. . . perverts who have infiltrated our Government . . . are perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists.”
—Republican national chairman Guy George Gabrielson in The New York Times, April 19, 1950
Photograph of Frank Kameny as a WWII serviceman. Courtesy of Franklin Kameny Papers, Library of Congress
Frank Kameny during World War II, when he served in the U.S. Army. The 18-year-old recruit fought on the front lines, where he loaded mortar shells.
In the years following World War II, a fear of communism gripped the country. When a 1950 U.S. Senate investigation revealed that there were homosexuals—seen as weak and susceptible to blackmail by communists—in federal jobs, President Eisenhower signed into effect Executive Order 10450. Its goal: purge LGBT people from government.
In its first four months, 1,456 supposedly gay or lesbian federal employees received pink slips. Thousands more followed in what came to be known as the “Lavender Scare.” The ban on federal employment was not lifted until 1975.
“How the Reds Blackmail Homosexuals Into Spying for Them,” from Top Secret magazine, 1961
“You have said: ‘Ask not what can your country do for you, but what can you do for your country.’ I know what I can best do for my country, but my country’s government, for no sane reason, will not let me do it.”
—Frank Kameny in a letter to President John F. Kennedy, May 15, 1961
Petition for a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court case Franklin Edward Kameny v. Wilber M. Bruckner, 1960
Hoping to win back his job, Frank Kameny took his case to the courts. Like society, though, the courts rejected the idea of legal protections for LGBT people. In 1961, the Supreme Court—America’s highest federal court—denied his petition.
Instead of an end, it was a beginning. The court’s decision radicalized Kameny and helped fuel a small but growing movement for gay civil rights. Within a few short years, he and others would shed the protective cloak of invisibility to protest—in public.
“Underneath it all there was a subdued hysteria. . . . You would be socializing with somebody, and then they disappeared, they had gotten kicked out and left town. . . . I can’t describe that kind of fear.”
—federal employee Madeleine Tress, who was suspected of being a lesbian and resigned in 1958, quoted in The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson