Frank Kameny Quotes

When the Mattachine Society of Washington’s founder, Frank Kameny, testified to a congressional committee in 1962, he informed his interrogators that the group’s mailing list had only about a hundred names on it. That was inconceivable to congressmen such as John Dowdy, a Texas Democrat who had assumed that the society was an arm of a “national and international organization” with “up in the millions” of members.79 The committee was puzzled further by the fact that Kameny believed that there were a quarter-million homosexuals in the city—not because they doubted that there were so many, but because he didn’t have each one’s contact information. The investigators assumed, Johnson wrote, “that homosexuals were inherently drawn to the same clique and would somehow all be on the same mailing list.

Changing the social order in one fell swoop, Henry Gerber wrote in 1940, is “like trying to push over a big stone wall with your skull.” It can’t be done. But “we can undermine the wall by little individual blasts and it will topple down by-and-by.” Or, as Del Shearer said in 1965, social revolution required at least “a century of subtle attack” on the dominant culture. As riots engulfed the United States in 1968, Frank Kameny saw similarities between homophiles and those Black Americans taking to the streets to express centuries of anger. “BUT,” Kameny said, “the Negro has truly explored and exhausted well-neigh, if not actually all, other avenues, and has gotten to the firm, unyielding stone wall of prejudice which blocks them. WE have run into this, but have not yet reached the end of all avenues.” Queer people soon hit the end of all avenues, crashing into an unyielding stone wall.