THE LONG ROAD TO VISIBILITY.

After decades of being unseen and "unclean," gay people found an unlikely champion in Frank Kameny, a fired government worker who knew that the first step to equality was a clean bill of mental health

A child growing up in America in the 1950s could easily reach puberty before he ever saw anyone identified as a homosexual--or even saw the word homosexual in a newspaper, book, or magazine. I first encountered the word as a 13-year-old reading about Nazis in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. When I asked my parents what it meant, their only reply was, "Oh, you know." But while I was certainly familiar with the feelings that word described, I had never seen that name for them in print.

The 30-year period between 1930 and 1960 was one of the darkest of the dark ages for gay people in America. Beginning with a film censorship system, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, that banished all positive portrayals of gay people from the screen, a remarkably successful national effort prevented most Americans from ever hearing, seeing, or reading about a happy, good-looking, or intelligent lesbian or gay man. In a period when practically everyone thought that homosexuals were made and not born, the custodians of the national morality believed that one of the best ways to contain this scourge of deviance was to make gay people even more invisible than the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. At the same time, the ancient homophobia of the church was reinforced by the medical doctrine embraced by the emerging "science" of psychiatry, which proclaimed that the only acceptable homosexual was the one who was determined to reverse his sexual orientation--even if electric shock was necessary to achieve that result.

Gay self-hatred was reinforced by everything we heard or saw. It was even reflected in the books and plays gay people wrote themselves. Dozens of gay-written novels were published between 1930 and 1960, but almost every one observed the same convention: Anyone succumbing to such distasteful behavior was doomed to catastrophe. Even someone as bold as Gore Vidal ended The City and the Pillar in 1948 with the murder of one protagonist by another. This provoked the privately expressed disappointment of his friend Christopher Isherwood, who read Vidal's book while visiting Peru. The British-born author of The Berlin Stories conceded in a letter to Vidal that many homosexuals were "unhappy." "But," he added,

   ... there is another side to the picture which you (and Proust) don't show.
   Homosexual relationships can be, and frequently are, happy. Men live
   together for years and make homes and share their lives and their work,
   just as heterosexuals do. This truth is peculiarly disturbing and shocking
   even to "liberal" people, because it cuts across their romantic, tragic
   notion of the homosexual's fate. Certainly, under the present social setup,
   a homosexual relationship is more difficult to maintain than a heterosexual
   one ... but doesn't that merely make it more of [a] challenge and
   therefore, in a sense more humanly worthwhile? The success of such a
   relationship is revolutionary in the best sense of the word. And, because
   it demonstrates the power of human affection over fear and prejudice and
   taboo, it is actually beneficial to society as a whole--as all
   demonstrations of faith and courage must be: they raise our collective
   morale.

These were revolutionary words indeed in 1948--and no political activist (unless you include Allen Ginsberg in that category) would start saying anything that radical in public until the 1960s, when visionaries like Frank Kameny began to say out loud for the first time that just because you were gay did not mean you were sick. (It was also in the `60s when Vidal finally succumbed to pressure from other gay writers and changed the final scene of The City and the Pillar from a murder into a mere rape.)

When I began my research in 1992 for The Gay Metropolis, a history of gay life in America since 1940, our invisibility had ended. But the idea that gay people were still doomed to a lonely and unhappy old age remained a persistent theme of homophobia. As a result, it was part of my private agenda to find older gay men who had figured out how to grow up and grow old as happy, fulfilled men. Kameny was one of my first discoveries.

Kameny was a World War II combat veteran who had earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1956 and went to work for the U.S. Army Map Service in July 1957. When he was fired a few months later, after the government learned of a previous arrest for "lewd behavior," Kameny became one of the first people to challenge the official policy that excluded homosexuals from employment by the federal government or any of its contractors--a rule enshrined by an executive order signed by Dwight Eisenhower at the beginning of his presidency.

Kameny's lawsuit ended in failure when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case in 1961. But his experience transformed him into a man of absolute convictions and unrelenting intensity. Over the next 20 years he would do as much as any other member of his generation to transform the attitudes of homosexuals toward themselves--and then, even more amazingly, the attitude of the rest of America toward homosexuals.

At the end of 1961, ten months after John F. Kennedy's inauguration as president, Kameny joined forces with another gay visionary, Jack Nichols, to found an independent chapter of the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C. Like every other gay person who lived during the 1950s, Kameny and Nichols faced a dual challenge from organized religion and organized psychiatry, which together had erected the principal barriers to gay rights in America. As science (abetted by the invention of the Bomb) continued to nip away at the supremacy of religion, Kameny's breakthrough moment arrived: He realized the absolute necessity to discredit the pseudoscience that guaranteed the second-rate status of all gay Americans.

"It became very clear that one of the major stumbling blocks to any progress was going to be this attribution of sickness," Kameny told me in an interview at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 1995--24 years after he had disrupted a convention of the American Psychiatric Association in that very hotel. "An attribution of mental illness in our culture is devastating, and it's something which is virtually impossible to get beyond. So the first thing was to find out if this was factually based or not. I had no idea what I was going to find. So I looked, and I was absolutely appalled."

Everything Kameny encountered was "sloppy, slovenly, slipshod, sleazy science--social and cultural and theological value judgments, cloaked and camouflaged in the language of science, without any of the substance of science. There was just nothing there. All psychiatry assumed that homosexuality is psychopathological. It was garbage in, garbage out."

Kameny made his discovery in a period when even gay publications routinely printed psychiatric opinions describing homosexuality as an illness. In 1964 he gave a speech that included a passage that recalled Isherwood's letter to Vidal, although Kameny had never read it: "I take the stand that not only is homosexuality ... not immoral but that homosexual acts engaged in by consenting adults are moral, in a positive and real sense, and are right, good, and desirable, both for the individual participants and for the society in which they live."

That same year Kameny scored his first important victory with the (heterosexual) liberal establishment, persuading the national convention of the American Civil Liberties Union to endorse a resolution opposing the exclusion of homosexuals from federal employment. (Since 1957 the ACLU had explicitly supported the federal government's position.)

The following spring the District of Columbia chapter of the Mattachine Society adopted a resolution whose radicalism is almost impossible to appreciate three decades after the Stonewall riots. The chapter asserted that "in the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology in any sense but is merely a preference, orientation, or propensity on par with and not different in kind from heterosexuality." Only after a fierce fight with reactionary gays were Kameny and his allies able to elect a militant slate in the New York City chapter of Mattachine, which then adopted the same position. Ironically, their fiercest opponent was Edward Sagarin, the author of 1951's The Homosexual in America, a groundbreaking book that had been the bible of the earliest gay activists. But in the intervening years Sagarin had become increasingly reactionary--and convinced that all gay men required psychiatric treatment.

In 1968 Kameny saw black activist Stokely Carmichael lead a group of protesters in a chant of "Black is beautiful," and the gay activist spontaneously invented one of the movement's most enduring slogans: "Gay is good." Three years later Kameny began his most important campaign of all--a concerted effort to persuade the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality per se from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The year after he disrupted the APA's convention in Washington, Kameny joined veteran activist Barbara Gittings and a psychiatrist who wore a mask in a panel discussion before the APA's 1972 convention. (The mask was necessary because Kameny could not locate a single openly gay psychiatrist in the organization.) And barely more than one year later, Kameny achieved the most important victory the gay movement has ever achieved: the unanimous decision of the APA's board to adopt Kameny's position.

For gay people this was our Bill of Rights: the triumph that made every one of our subsequent victories possible.

CHARLES KAISER interviewed pioneering gay activist Frank Kameny ("The Long Road to Visibility," page 26) for his book The Gay Metropolis, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Lambda Literary Award winner. Last year he contributed an essay about the 1960s to We Americans, a National Geographic history of the United. States. He teaches cultural reporting at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and is especially proud that his book 1968 in America (Grove Press) is still in print 11 years after it was first published.