An Age of “Revulsion” Inspires Uncommon Vision
As we age, we come to appreciate how quickly current events turn into history. In recent days, I’ve been reflecting on the 1960s—not the latter part of the decade with its mass movements for peace and personal liberation, but the earlier years when prevailing American attitudes and policies toward minority groups were still very oppressive. Fortunately, our country had bold and visionary activists like Washington’s Frank Kameny and Texas-born John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me. The efforts of both men have received new public attention lately—as well they should.
Many of us know Kameny as founder of the Washington Mattachine Society and an early proponent of employment rights for lesbian and gay people. However, until the recent publication of his correspondence with the federal government in 1966, few of us were aware of the depth of disdain our government had for homosexual citizens. In the January edition of The Gay and Lesbian Review, Charles Francis, founder of the Kameny Papers Project, details the situation in an article aptly titled “A Dark Legacy: How a Civil Servant’s Revulsion Letter Doomed a Generation.”
An exchange of correspondence between Kameny and federal officials, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was inspired in part by the scandal over President Lyndon Johnson’s lifelong assistant and chief of staff Walter Jenkins, who was arrested in 1964 in the men’s restroom of a YMCA on “morals” charges. Jenkins was forced to resign, and the sensationalistic reaction of the press and government officials personally terrified me, a high school student at the time, about the kind of future I would have should people ever discover my dark secret.
Kameny, who had lost his job with the Army Map Service years earlier for being gay, had the gall and guts to protest such expulsions. When Republican Party Chairman Carl Shipley accused the White House of sheltering a snakelike “nest of perverts,” Kameny wrote: “Your characterization of Mr. Jenkins as a pervert is malicious. Your characterizations of homosexuals...are gratuitous insults to the many tens of thousands of respectable, responsible, reputable, loyal, moral homosexual citizens of the United States. ...We are not going to disappear from the scene, and we are not going, any longer, to be content with second-class status.”
A nervous LBJ asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate whether there were other homosexuals in his administration. (We can all now laugh here.) Francis quotes the following conversation between the two:
LBJ: “I swear I can’t recognize them. I don’t know anything about them.”
Hoover: “It’s a thing that you just can’t tell sometimes. Just like in the case of the poor fellow Jenkins. ...There are some people who walk kind of funny. That you might think a little bit off or queer. But there was no indication of that in the Jenkins case.”
(I guess Hoover’s personal Gaydar wasn’t working so well at the time. Perhaps he should have consulted his lifelong companion, Clyde Tolson.)
Kameny asked for a meeting with Vice President Humphrey, who coordinated federal civil rights activities. Humphrey replied with a short, polite letter stating that the “problems of homosexuals” are irrelevant to the Civil Rights Act.
The Washington Mattachine began picketing the White House in the spring of 1965 and was joined for larger protests in October by gay and lesbian members of Mattachine and the Janus Society from several states. The demonstrators politely requested protection in federal hiring status for gay people, but their audacity alarmed the highest levels of government.
The next year Kameny finally received an official response from LBJ’s Civil Service Commission chairman John W. Macy, Jr., who earlier had chaired the Commission on Equal Opportunity in Hiring. After consulting other government colleagues, Macy wrote a letter that became the basis for decades of discrimination against gay people. It was cited by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker last year in striking down California’s Proposition 8. Judge Walker said that the letter demonstrates how LGBT people have long been victims of discrimination in the U.S. for no good reason, and for one bad reason: a sense of “revulsion.”
Macy’s three-page “revulsion letter” stated in part: “Pertinent considerations here [for maintaining the ban on gay people in government] are the revulsion of other employees by homosexual conduct and the consequent disruption of service efficiency, the apprehension caused other employees by homosexual advances, solicitations or assaults, the unavoidable subjection of the sexual deviate to erotic stimulation through on-the-job use of common toilet, shower and living facilities, the offense to members of the public who are required to deal with a known or admitted sexual deviate.”
Macy later described the letter as a “landmark” policy statement, and it certainly was in the sense that it slammed the door on any inclusion of LGBT people in federal hiring. Not that Kameny ever gave up. And his persistence in the face of repeated rejection is a major reason he is and should continue to be cherished by the gay community today.
Much of Kameny’s work—and the complete text of Charles Francis’ fascinating article on the “Revulsion Letter”—is available at www.kamenypapers.org.
As much as I was personally frightened by the Walter Jenkins scandal and the condemnation of homosexuality it produced, I was also becoming increasingly disturbed by the way racial minorities were treated in American society. So I was profoundly moved as I read John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, which I purchased on a curious whim one summer afternoon at my neighborhood F.W. Woolworth store. The book chronicles the white writer’s experience (on assignment for Sepia magazine) traveling through the South in the late 1950s after having changed his complexion to black with chemical treatments. His observations are chillingly insightful and poignant as he discovers that he has gone from a man of esteem and privilege to one of ridicule and hate for no reason other than his skin tone.
All but forgotten in the decades since, Griffin and his groundbreaking book are receiving fresh attention thanks to documentary filmmaker Morgan Atkinson, who (as a few of you may recall) spoke at the very first Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival in 1998. Atkinson’s new film, Uncommon Vision: The Life of John Howard Griffin, is the riveting story of a white American, raised in a segregated town in Texas, who through his studies and worldwide sojourns came to appreciate the oneness of humanity. His life’s path wound from Paris, where he helped the French Underground provide escapes from the Nazis for persecuted Jews, through the South Pacific and Mexico where he worked with—and learned from—indigenous peoples. When he went blind for several years, it barely slowed the pace of his quest for knowledge about how interconnected we all are.
As longtime civil rights activist Dick Gregory points out in the film, Griffin “made a difference, a big difference.” Yet, somehow it’s not surprising to hear Griffin say that his biggest regret toward the end of his life was how much time he had frittered away on meaningless pursuits instead of doing more to help mankind appreciate its commonality.
It seems to me that men like the late Griffin and still thriving Kameny did more than their share, and younger generations can learn important lessons from them—so long as documentarians like Charles Francis and Morgan Atkinson continue to bring their important work to the attention of new generations.
Uncommon Vision is currently playing select indie venues, including a screening by the Faith and Policy Institute in Washington on February 9. For more information or to purchase a copy, go to www.morganatkinson.com.
Bill Sievert’s new LGBT comic mystery novel “Sawdust Confessions” is available from all major internet booksellers and from Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. Contact Bill at http://billsievert.blogspot.com or billsievert@comcast.net.