The Gay Menace: How Government Policy Turned LGBTQ Individuals into Activists
An Executive Order, a Gay Stargazer, and the effort to Challenge the Criminalization of Homosexuality
In 1957, Franklin Kameny was fired from his dream job for being gay. This injustice pushed him into activism. Since he was young, he had always wanted to be a “professional stargazer” (Boyd, 2024). After graduating from Harvard with a degree in astronomy, he secured a job in Hawaii at the US Army Map Service, where he worked on targeting “intercontinental ballistic missiles more precisely” (Boyd, 2024). This work was necessary given the ongoing Cold War and the danger of Nuclear warfare between the United States and the Soviets. It was also around this time that the United States Government grew increasingly worried about homosexuals. Psychiatric and religious claims bolstered these policies. Kameny lost his job because the US Government classified his homosexuality as a “sexual perversion” and a national security threat.
This week’s post largely borrows from the work of David Boyd, which served as a partial fulfilment of his requirements to graduate from Harvard’s Extension School with a Masters’s Degree
This week, we look into how government policy inadvertently turned men like Kameny into activists. He would lead an organization pivotal in changing how American society viewed gay individuals.
The “Gay Menace”
On May 27th, 1953, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which asked the Civil Service Commission, with support from the FBI, to determine whether Federal employees posed a security risk. Among other factors, this order allowed the codification of homosexuality as “sexual perversion” and a threat to national security (Boyd, 2024).
The Government feared that the Soviet Union could blackmail gay and lesbian employees by “threatening to expose them as sexually deviant people” and demand “sensitive information" in exchange for keeping their “secret private” (Boyd, 2024). This could imply that homosexuals are, by nature, deviant and thus corruptible, or that the social costs of being out were so high that these individuals would betray their country to hide their alleged perversion.
In May 1966, a magazine, the Homosexual Citizen, printed a letter in which the US Civil Service Commission detailed the kinds of grounds for dismissal: "arrest records, court records, or records of conviction for some form of homosexual conduct or sexual perversion; or medical evidence...that the individual has engaged in... such acts... Evidence showing that a person has homosexual tendencies... is sufficient to support a rating of unsuitability on the ground of immoral conduct" (as cited in Boyd, 2024).
David Boyd argued that the government “crafted policy positions that resulted in the oppression of the gay community,” which were partly “driven by current understandings of homosexuality as perversion or deviance” and “strengthened with religious and psychiatric opinions” (Boyd, 2024). Thus, psychiatry, religion, and morality were the areas activists needed to debate.
Kameny and the Effects of Executive Order 10450
Some five thousand people lost their jobs because the government learned they were homosexuals or had homosexual tendencies. We will cover this Executive Order’s history in a future post. Medicine played an essential role in legitimizing the stigmatization of homosexual individuals and, thus, in policies that resulted in their discrimination and dismissal.
In the fall of 1957, Kameny was summoned by the US Civil Service Commission to Washington, DC, where he was fired. Thereafter, he struggled to find another job. By the 1960s, Kameny took actions he “never dreamed” he would take (Boyd, 2024). He started the Mattachine Society of Washington to undermine “the federal government’s firing practices” (Boyd, 2024). Kameny realized that success would require “allies, particularly psychiatrists, religious leaders, and his fellow homosexual community, many of whom remained closeted (Boyd, 2024). Eisenhower’s executive order thus propelled Kameny into activism (Boyd, 2024).
In other countries, homosexuals were also seen as a threat to national security. For example, in the United Kingdom, during most of the 20th-century, homosexuality was criminally punished. This led to the arrest of some prominent figures, such as Alan Turing. In 1952, the genius mathematician and key player in the Allied victory during WWII, was convicted of “gross indecency” for his homosexuality. He was given the choice of imprisonment or undergoing chemical castration in exchange for conditional probation. He chose the latter. Two years later he was found dead from cyanide poisoning, with suicide being the most likely cause.
The Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW)
By using religious and psychiatric arguments to bolster its policies against homosexuals, the Government implied that the question of whether homosexuality was deviant and dangerous was a psychiatric and religious one. Thus, according to Boyd, the MSW sought to “weaponize favorable religious and psychiatric opinions” to oppose oppressive governmental policies (Boyd, 2024). Their activism was primarily directed at government policy, and secondly, at changing people’s minds.
The MSW believed that policy changes are more critical than cultural ones. Boyd wrote that the MSW leadership thought that “people must be forced to change by laws and policies rather than laws and policies being changed by society at large” (2024). In 1964, Kameny said, "It is...obvious...that if we work almost infinitely to change public attitudes and are successful in doing so...we might see laws and official policies change. The reverse process is faster, and more efficient" (2024). This strategic approach raises questions about how to best achieve cultural changes. One can imagine scenarios where changes in the law of the land have profound positive and negative changes in how the public perceives an issue. It would be interesting to investigate how Roe v. Wade impacted views on abortion and how Obergefell v. Hodges has affected views on gay marriage.
MSW Uses Psychiatry and Religion to Undermine the Government’s Position
The MSW published the Homosexual Citizen, a magazine through which they sought to make change happen. In this publication, they explicitly opposed Governmental policies that allegedly discriminated against homosexuals and encouraged readers to live openly.
The Homosexual Citizen sharply criticized psychiatric and religious arguments against homosexuals and sought to feature professionals from those areas who supported homosexuality. MSW leaders like Kameny and Jack Nichols (known as Warren Adkins to protect his father, who worked for the FBI) met with different groups to garner support and provide them with the space to support homosexuals “however they saw fit” (Boyd, 2024). For example, they met with Dr. Wardell B Pomeroy, co-author of the Kinsey reports, which depicted homosexuality as normal. Likewise, this group reprinted a letter where Freud reassured a concerned mother that homosexuality was not an illness and that it was “nothing to be ashamed of” (Boyd, 2024).
In another article, Nichols summarized a conversation with Dr. John Gargon, Director of the Institute for Sex Research at Stanford University, who argued that laws to police sexual behavior are harmful and “impossible to enforce” (as cited in Boyd, 2024). Boyd observed that “publishing the work of a sex expert against criminalizing homosexual behavior strategically challenged the rationale of such laws and discriminatory action by governmental agencies as unjustified in a medical sense” (Boyd. 2024).
MSW leaders also tried to harness the legitimacy of religious authorities to support homosexuality and frame the issue as one of civil rights. On January 7th, 1966, the National Council of Churches of Christ invited homophile attorneys, psychiatrists, and psychologists to meet with clergy. The mere fact they were invited, demonstrated a willingness to engage and allowed activists to forge ties with potential allies. Nichols invited clergy to speak about the discrimination of gays. The MSW featured supportive religious voices where they could because it allowed them to leverage the moral authority of religious leaders against federal discrimination practices.
The MSW sought to form alliances that could help them change federal policies and how society viewed them (Boyd, 2024). We have previously questioned whether specific categories reduce people into simple and misleading caricatures in Are Criminals Real? In another post, we also suggested that classifying people as sick can change how their actions are interpreted. Both of these mean there may be something to MSW’s strategy. Boyd argued that by seeking allies in psychiatry and religion, the MSW was able to “strengthen homophile opposition to federal firing practices, and second, to induce a cultural shift away from societal and political norms that had long encouraged socially adaptive closeted living” (2024). Finally, the criminalization and persecution of homosexuals based on psychiatry demonstrates the importance of science and medicine in answering social questions.
MSW and Breaking Out of the Closet
Boyd innovatively posited that homosexuals often adopted socially adaptive closeted living where they hid their sexuality to avoid the negative social and legal consequences of being openly gay. The MSW encouraged gays to come out but to be careful about what their image projected. In short, they sought to “recast homosexuality away from negative connotations that contributed to the adapted behavior of closeted living by promoting that “gay is good” (Boyd, 2024).
The MSW advised gay men to be “dressed conservatively” and engage in “respectable behavior” (Boyd, 2024). This was essential in dispelling the public’s view that homosexuals were deviant and radical. In January 1966, Eva Friend, an author, said that casual observers in 1965 would have seen men in suits and women in dresses picketing and protesting respectfully. They were encouraged to show “normality within confined gender roles, yet defiantly, albeit respectfully, carrying protest signs” (Boyd, 2024). MSW leaders claimed that “people are more likely to listen, to examine, and hopefully, to accept new, controversial... ideas... if these are presented to them from sources bearing symbols of respectability” (as cited in Boyd, 2024).
During one such protest, Friend reported that a passerby said, “I always thought you could spot a deviant; now I wonder how many of my friends are homosexuals” (Boyd, 2024). On the one hand, this showed homosexuals were regular people; on the other, the threat is scarier if it is more challenging to identify. More interestingly, this view reveals an ingrained view that internal factors connected to undesirable behaviors have outward bodily manifestations. MSW strategy was a way to “garner support from a society primed to view them as sex deviants and thus criminals” (Boyd, 2024). Thus adopting heteronormative appearances was a way they could directly challenge “the stigma of abnormality” (Boyd, 2024).
There is a lot of other history to cover about changes in the perception of LGBTQ individuals. In this column, we wanted to explore how one Executive Order changed one man’s life and how that man had a significant impact on the decriminalization of homosexuality.
Obama Repeals Executive Order
The American Psychiatric Association ceased classifying homosexuality as a disease in 1973. Twenty years later, the US Military Instituted a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, allowing LGBTQ individuals to serve only if they successfully hid their sexuality.
Kameny continued to advocate for LGBTQ rights and met with President Obama in 2009. Six years later, Kameny died. He never saw the repeal of Executive Order 10450, which Obama did in 2017.
Conclusions
The significance of psychiatric, medical, and religious concerns about homosexuality undoubtedly played an essential role in its criminalization, demonization, and the passage of Executive Order 10450. As a result, five thousand Americans lost their jobs in the government. This case study also demonstrates that governmental policies can have unintended consequences, which, in this case, were opposed to their intent.
Were homosexuals a national security threat? Could the Soviets effectively blackmail them? Did Einsenhower’s order give more leverage to such blackmail, given that these individuals would also lose their jobs if exposed?
Lastly, perhaps more saliently for our purposes, there has been a seismic shift in discourses about homosexuality. Societies can radically change how they perceive certain traits and behaviors, and what once was seen as a crime or a sign of deviancy may, in a relatively short time, be seen as normal. Or not be seen at all.
Currently, an overwhelming number of Americans and Europeans would have no issue with LGBTQ individuals serving in the military or working for the Government. These individuals are not often seen as deviant, rarely targeted because of their sexuality, and in many countries, they can live happy and open lives. We do not mean to say there is no homophobia, that there are no problems, but instead, to highlight the degree to which deviancy and what constitutes a crime may be socially constructed.
Sources and Notes
Christian studied with David and enrolled in the same class for a year. Christian wanted to thank David, who provided valuable feedback (to Christian’s work), engaging conversation, and support throughout the program. David kindly said we could draw from his work.
This is a deeply thought-provoking read. History offers countless examples of society discriminating against those it deems different, but it remains heartbreaking to see this prejudice extend to individuals who were nothing short of heroes like Turing. The continued persecution of some individuals well into the late 1990s serves as a harrowing reminder of the profound injustices inflicted upon so many. Tragically, such discrimination persists in parts of the world today, with consequences that can be devastating, even fatal. Here’s to striving for a future defined by greater inclusion, compassion, and acceptance for all.