Call number
Publication
Description
"A biography of gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny. From a young Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall. In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back. Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory."--… (more)
Awards
Language
Original publication date
ISBN
Similar in this library
User reviews
Cervini's biography is the result of ten years of consistent labor (one wonders what he'll be able to do as a sophomore effort). While the book rightly admires its subject, it does not gloss over his less attractive personality quirks. The result is a fully human portrait of this complex, but greatly important personality.
Eye-opening and saddening are accounts of the resistance Kameny encountered from other homophile organizations who felt the proper focus of their energies should be the schooling and education of the homosexual, rather than the correction of straight society's discriminations and prejudices.
Perhaps the single most interesting tidbit is story behind the formal creation of gay pride celebrations, which resulted from a motion by Ellen Broidy, an NYU student attending the 1970 ERCHO conference. It proposed moving Kameny's July 4 "Reminder pickets" to the last Saturday in June. And the rest, as they say, is history.
If this book has an annoying weakness, it is the lack of a bibliography. The endnotes are plentiful, but the citations therein are sketchy, and in any event it is not possible to scan the list of references consulted for the text, which might have proved a useful reading list.