A top Air Force official is leading a Veteran’s Day ceremony to honor Washington’s first champion for LGBT rights in the government.
Air Force General Counsel Gordon O. Tanner, the first presidential appointee who is gay and married to a same sex spouse to be approved by the Senate, will keynote the headstone unveiling for Franklin E. Kameny on Veterans Day.
Kameny was an early LGBT civil rights leader who was fired from his federal post in the late 1960s for being gay.
The unveiling will take place at Capitol Hill’s Congressional Cemetery in the world’s only graveyard section dedicated to gays. The 12th annual Veterans Day observance will take place at the graveside of former Air Force Tech Sgt. Leonard Matlovich.
A decorated Vietnam War veteran and hero, Matlovich was the first gay service member to purposely out himself in his bid to end the military’s ban on gays.
Kameny, a World War II Army vet, began his LGBT trailblazing in 1961 and started the effort to reverse the classification by the American Psychiatric Association of homosexuality as a mental illness. In 1993, a law that Kameny drafted overturned the D.C. sodomy law and he is known for coining the phrase “Gay is Good.”
That phrase will be on the marker.
“Four years after his death, it is an honor to have LGBT pioneer Frank Kameny memorialized in the LGBT corner with a VA stone and a foot marker bearing his phrase ‘Gay is Good,'” said the gay President of Congressional Cemetery, Paul K. Williams. “His site joins a growing number of LGBT individuals and couples in that section both deceased and those that have chosen a truly unique final resting place amongst the LGBT community in perpetuity.”
At the Wednesday ceremony, the National Anthem will be sung by the Gay Men’s Chorus, and copies of the cemetery’s new LGBT walking tour brochures will be available.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
