Gay is good

HomeAnnouncements‘Gay is Good: The Experience and Letters of Queer Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny’ Edited by Michael G. Long

The metonymic adage “The pen is mightier than the sword” is all too fitting to the life and letters of gay rights pioneer Franklin Kameny. Never one for hiding his true feelings, Kameny’s tireless fight against the American establishment spearheaded a new period for homosexual rights in the early 1960s. Kameny’s campaign not only changed how gay rights were viewed by mainstream America but also in essence prophesied the LGBT rights movement to come a decade prior to the Stonewall Inn riots of 1969, as well as after. Although Franklin Kameny never got the full recognition that he truly merited, editor Michael G. Distant finally gives his life’s work the canonization that it deserves.

With a Ph.D. in Astronomy and in IQ of 148, Kameny proved to be a formidable foe to anyone who would eventually cross his path, whether in ink or in actual life. Existing during a time where homosexuality was both deemed unacceptable socially, spiritually and politically, the silencing actions taken by many men and women in order to mask their sexuality from the general
gay is good

“Gay Is Good”

Internet Resources

Lisa N. Johnston

Digital collections in LGBTQ U.S. History

Lisa N. Johnston is director of library services at Eckerd College, email: johnstln@eckerd.edu

June 28, 2019, was the 50th anniversary of the first day of the Stonewall Uprising. In the preceding morning hours, a series of spontaneous protests began at the Stonewall Inn following a police raid. Just over one year later, on July 1, 1970, librarian Israel Fishman organized the first conference of the ALA Task Force on Gay Liberation at the ALA Annual Conference in Detroit.1 A few months later, activist Barbara Gittings, created the organization’s first “Gay Bibliography,” complete with the “Gay Is Good” slogan she adopted from her comrade, Washington, D.C. activist, Franklin Kameny. She distributed 3,000 copies at the ALA Annual Conference in 1971.2 Gittings knew from exposure the challenges of researching the history of sexual minorities.

The ensuing 50 years have seen the LGBTQ community gain enormous rights and visibility. The LGBTQ experience is more noticeable than ever, and there is a need to teach students the history as well as the current issues.3

A common t

Gay Is Good: The Existence and Letters of Queer Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny

Contrary to popular notions, today’s LGBT movement did not begin with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Elongated before Stonewall, there was Franklin Kameny (1925–2011), one of the most significant figures in the male lover rights movement. Beginning in 1958, he encouraged lgbtq+ people to embrace homosexuality as moral and well, publicly denounced the federal government for excluding homosexuals from federal employment, openly fought the military’s bar against gay men and women, debated psychiatrists who depicted homosexuality as a mental disorder, identified examine cases to advance civil liberties through the federal courts, acted as counsel to countless homosexuals suffering state-sanctioned discrimination, and organized marches for gay rights at the White Home and other public institutions. In Gay Is Great, Long collects Kameny’s historically rich letters, revealing some of the early stirrings of today’s politically strong LGBT movement.

These letters are lively and colorful because they are in Kameny’s inimitable voice—a voice that was consistently loud, echoing through such places as the Oval Office, the Pentagon, a

Gay Is Good: The Moral Case for Marriage Equality and More

Abstract

The struggle for marriage equality in this country is ripe for an intervention. If the effort continues along in the manner in which it has been headed, gay couples may or may not succeed in gaining access to civil marriage. But even if gay couples succeed in "getting marriage," the queer rights movement may possess missed a critical opportunity-a chance to make a positive moral case for gay sex and homosexual couples. In other words, it will have missed the opportunity to contend that "gay is good."

Moreover, to the extent that the struggle for marriage equality focuses solely on achieving the right to marry because that is what a pure equality discourse calls for, the movement will also long for the chance to form a moral case for supporting the range of other creative ways in which we currently construct our intimate relations outside of marriage. And that would be as much of a missed opportunity as would be the lost opportunity of convincing the general public of the moral equivalence of gay and heterosexual sex.

Publication Citation

17 Yale J.L. & Feminism 139-184 (2005)

Scholarly Commons Citation

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