Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the Federal workforce because of their sexuality. This wave of repression, known as the Lavender Scare, was also bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation. As part of this, in 1957, Frank Kameny was fired from his job in the Army Map Service as an astronomer. He had been arrested in California a year earlier for consensual contact with another man.

Kameny sought to have the termination of his employment overturned by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. That court did not rule in his favor. Ultimately, Kameny appealed his firing all the way to the Supreme Court. In this letter, Kameny appealed to the President.

Kameny became the first openly gay person to testify before Congress in 1963. He did so to oppose Congressman John Dowdy’s bill, which sought to revoke Kameny’s advocacy nonprofit’s permit. Dowdy’s bill stipulated that before granting a fundraising license, the D.C. Board of Commissioners had to certify that the grantee would “benefit or assist in promoting the health, welfare, and the morals of the District of Columbia.”

Kameny went on to become a chief organizer of the first gay rights demonstrations in the nation’s capital. In 1965, he led protests at the White House, the Pentagon, and the Civil Service Commission. To remind the country that gay Americans lacked basic civil rights, Kameny joined with other gay rights organizations for “annual reminder” protests at Independence Hall in Philadelphia each Fourth of July from 1965 to 1969. Kameny later ran to become D.C.’s delegate to Congress. He lost the election, but his attempt marked the first time an openly gay candidate had run for Congress.

In 1975, the Civil Service Commission announced new rules stipulating that gay people could no longer be barred or fired from Federal employment because of their sexuality.

In the following letter, Kameny uses the terms “homosexual” and “Negro,” which were both commonplace at the time he was writing.  If it would make your family more comfortable, we invite you to substitute these terms for “gay person” and “Black person” when reading aloud.Dear President Kennedy:

I write to you for two reasons: (1) To ask that you act as a “Court of Last Appeal” in a matter in which I believe that you can properly act such; and (2) perhaps much more important, to bring to your attention, and to ask for your constructive action on, a situation involving at least 15,000,000 Americans, and in which a “New Frontier” approach is very badly needed. These people are our nation’s homosexuals — a minority group in no way different, as such, from the Negroes, the Jews, the Catholics, and other minority groups …

In World War II, I willingly fought the Germans, with bullets, in order to preserve and secure my rights, freedoms, and liberties, and those of my fellow citizens. In 1961, it has, ironically, become necessary for me to fight my own government, with words, in order to achieve some of the very same rights, freedoms, and liberties for which I placed my life in jeopardy in 1945. This letter is part of that fight.

The homosexual in the United States today is in much the same position as was the Negro about 1925. The difference is that the Negro, in his dealings with his government, and in his fight for his proper rights, liberties and freedoms, has not, at worst, merely indifference to him and his problems, and, at best, active assistance; the homosexual has met only active hostility from his government …

Your administration has taken a firm and admirable stand, and has taken an active interest in the maintenance of the civil liberties of minority groups, and in the elimination of discrimination against them. Yet the Federal government is the prime offender in depriving the homosexual of his civil and other liberties, and in actively discriminating against him. May I suggest that the homosexual is as deserving of his government’s protection and assistance in these areas as is the Negro, and needs that protection at least as much — actually much more. The abuses, by constituted authority, of the person, property, and liberties of American homosexuals are shocking and appalling, and yet not only is not a finger raised by the Government to assist these people, but the Government acts in active, virulent conspiracy to foster and perpetuate these abuses …

Under present policies, upon no discernible rational ground, the government is deprived of the services of large numbers of competent, capable citizens — often skilled, highly trained, and talented — and others are forced to contribute to society at far less than their full capacity, simply because in their personal, out-of-working-hours lives they do not conform to narrow, archaic, puritan, medieval prejudice and taboo.

In my own case, extensive technical training — a Harvard Ph.D. in Astronomy — is going completely to waste, entirely as a result of the Government’s actions and policies on this question. While the nation cries out for technically trained people, I, two years ago, as a result of the Government’s acts and policies, was barely surviving on twenty cents worth of food per day. Is this reasonable?

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. I wish to be of service to my country and to my government; I am capable of being of such service; I need only to be allowed to be so. Thus far, my government has stubbornly and irrationally refused to allow me to be so, and has done its best to make it impossible for me ever to be so. This is equally true, actually or potentially, of millions of homosexuals in this country — well over 10% of our adult population. Not only the society in which they live, but the government under which they live, have steadfastly and stubbornly refused to allow them to serve and to contribute …

Action by the government on this question is needed in four specific areas (listed here in no particular order) and a fifth general one. These are: (1) The law, and the mode and practices of its administration and enforcement, and the abuses thereof; (2) Federal employment policies; (3) The policies, practices, and official attitudes of the military; (4) “Security-clearance” policies and practices in government employment, in the military, and in private industry under government contract; and (5) The education of the public and the changing of their primitive attitudes. No constructive action has ever been taken in any of these areas.

Yours is an administration which has openly disavowed blind conformity. Here is an unconventional group with the courage to be so. Give them the support they deserve as citizens seeking the pursuit of happiness guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence …

I can close in no better a fashion than by quoting Thomas Jefferson:

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

His words could not be more aptly quoted than in this regard. Let us, as we advance into the Space Age, discard the policies and the attitudes, the “laws and constitutions”, the customs and institutions of the Stone Age …

Thank you for your consideration of the matters presented here. I look forward to your reply.

Most sincerely yours,

Franklin E. Kameny