What's Left of Our Communities?

So ... there used to be a couple of offices in LA where the Mattachine Society and Foundation operated. Gone - now a parking lot and a modern office building. There used to be a whole neighborhood of clubs and entertainment spots in DC, including the city's longest running and best drag show. Gone - obliterated when the city fathers wanted to build a baseball stadium for a team so bad that Montreal sold it.

Can we start saving our historic places instead of kissing them goodbye?! Queer America is still getting into the history business - writing up its past and collecting its documents and artifacts. We have hardly even begun preserving our historic sites. Ten years ago the Stonewall got listed as a historic national landmark. Nothing else has made the list. No one has pushed anything else on to the list. Between California and New York, virtually nothing has been saved or preserved, with the exception of Henry Gerber's house in Chicago. [see earlier posts]

Forty years after Stonewall, it's time for local queer communities to tally up the spots that celebrate their history, document them and get them onto the historic preservation/landmark lists before they're gone. And where there is already local preservation as with Milk's home and camera shop and Gerber's home, local communities need to press their state historic preservation officer (that's what they call the guy who recommends sites to the national register) to submit those local sites to the National Register of Historic Places run by the National Park Service, and maybe even to the National Historic Landmarks list.

With a new administration coming in, there is more of a chance that queer history won't be shoved into a closet the way it was during the Bush years.

We're a people with a past and we're a people with historic places. We need to keep those places safe, organize walking tours, and invite straight society to learn about our civil rights struggle.

DC's Kameny Historic Site

It couldn't be more historic or prominent in LGBT civil rights history: 5020 Cathedral Avenue NW, just a couple of blocks up the hill from MacArthur Boulevard in the Palisades -- is Frank Kameny's home and office.

This is where the self-affirming slogan of the Sixties' gay civil rights campaigns, GAY IS GOOD, was born. This is also where discussions and planning for regional and national gay civil rights organizations went on, where picketing plans were made, where campaigns against civil service and military discrimination were launched, and where the first campaign of an 'out' gay man for Congress was hatched.

Kameny moved there in 1962, from his 4th floor walkup on 18th St NW where he lived on 20 cents a day after being fired from his government job, renting at first and later buying the house. That's it there in the column on the right of this blog page.

The year before he moved to Cathedral Avenue, Kameny and Jack Nichols started the Mattachine society of Washington and completely turned the somewhat reserved world of homophile rights on its head with picketing, in-your-face legal battles, interviews (print, radio, and TV), and taking on the federal government, the psychiatrists' professional organization, and the religious community.

The little neo-colonial house with the patterned blue and white trim was at the center of national and local campaigning for gay civil rights from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. The upstairs bedroom overlooking the front yard (under Kameny's distinctively patterned shingles) has been Dr. Kameny's office for years. Here he met with members of the local Mattachine Society, with leaders of other gay civil rights groups, and with friends in the movement.

Forty-six years after Kameny moved in and forty-seven years after he stood up to federal employment discrimination and launched a militant campaign for equal rights for homosexuals, the little house at 5020 Cathedral NW, Washington, DC deserves preservation and recognition as a site at the center of a minority's assertion of equality and rights.

Rainbow History has nominated the Kameny home and office as a historic site. The District of Columbia's Historic Preservation Review Board will decide whether to accept that nomination on January 22, 2009. To read the nomination check out the pdf file at www.rainbowhistory.org/5020Cathedral.pdf.