Frank, Baldwin, Eskridge, and Others Remember Frank Kameny

At yesterday’s memorial service for Frank Kameny [see AP's story], each speaker praised his fiery, ornery, valiant pioneering of gay rights activism, with Tammy Baldwin quoting Emerson’s “...go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Barney Frank expressed gratitude for a forerunner who proved it possible “to be a leader in the gay rights movement without an obligation to dress well.” Barney also honored Kameny as a “great strategist” and acknowledged his “profound insight” that “the gap between their bigotry and who we are is so great their case would inevitably collapse.” Eleanor Holmes Norton said Kameny stands “alongside the nation’s great human rights champions” and compared him to Rosa Parks. Tripling that, Yale law professor William Eskridge tried to claim that Kameny was our Rosa Parks, our Martin Luther King Jr., and our Thurgood Marshall. Yet isn’t what makes Kameny’s struggle so noble that he persevered largely alone and often in obscurity, without the support of millions of followers and media celebrity, and without the Supreme stature, earned by Dr. King and Justice Marshall? 

But everyone agreed that Kameny would have loved the impressive service in the grand caucus hall of the Cannon building, organized by Kameny Papers Project cofounders, Bob Witeck and Charles Francis, my pard. In his opening remarks Charles pointed out that the event was taking place 50 years to the day after Kameny formed the Mattachine Society of DC, and was held in the very room where the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee got an indignant earful from Kameny on the subject of the government’s banning gay employees. As Barney Frank said, Kameny was the “walking repudiation of the notion of the shrinking violet.” He added, “I never met anyone less inclined to shade his opinion.” Charles also noted that Kameny’s military grave marker and an additional plaque reading “Gay Is Good,” will lie in Congressional Cemetery near Leonard Matlovich’s and “just far enough away” from Hoover’s and Clyde Tolson’s.

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See five great pictures of Charles and the others through the AP link.