Today, at the start of Pride Month, Google dedicates its Doodle to Frank Kameny, one of the most critical individuals in America’s homosexual rights struggle.
Frank Kameny died in October 2011, at the age of 86, on National Coming Out Day. One of his famous statements is engraved on his Veterans Memorial gravestone in Washington DC’s Congressional Cemetery: “Gay is good.”
Google refers to Kameny as “one of the most important protagonists in the US LGBTQ rights movement” and praises him for “courageously setting the path for decades of change.”Every June, Pride Month is observed to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan.
Franklin Edward Kameny, astronomer and a soldier, was a crucial player in the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. On May 21, 1925, he was born in Queens, New York. He enrolled in Queens College to study physics when he was 15 years old.
Kameny became the first open homosexual candidate for Congress in 1971. He lost against Walter E Fauntroy, but he and his team found the Lesbian and Gay Alliance of Washington DC. Which remains to lobby the government and fight for equal rights today.
Years before the Stonewall Riots, he founded one of the earliest homosexual rights advocacy organizations in the United States. He successfully challenged the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the early 1970s.
By 1975, over two decades after Kameny’s firing, the Civil Service Commission had lifted its restriction on LGBTQ+ employees.
After decades of devoting his life to working for the rights of the LGBTQ community, the US government eventually made an official apology to him in 2009, more than 50 years after his dismissal.
He personally wrote a measure to repeal DC’s sodomy restrictions, which was eventually enacted in 1993. He continued to be an activist until his death in 2011 at the age of 86.
