Monday, June 10, 2024
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I honestly cannot believe this is already the end of the 2nd week. Time is passing so quickly, and even in this short amount of time, so many memories have been made.
This week, I really dived into my work, as I decided to research a person named Frank Kameny. If you’ve heard the name before, it usually tends to be because he is regarded as the ‘grandfather of the gay rights movement.’ He co-founded the Washington DC branch of the Mattachine Society – an early gay rights organization dating to the 1950s. He organized the first demonstration by an LGBT+ advocacy group in 1965, picketing and marching for equal rights. He consistently pressured politicians to change their stance on whether homosexuals should be allowed to work in the government or not. In cases where public servants were stripped of their security clearances solely because of their sexuality, Kameny defended them by serving as their de facto attorney. Kameny was the first openly gay candidate for Congress, he helped convince the American Psychiatric Association to reconsider their classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and he attended the first briefing at the White House where gay rights were officially discussed. Kameny was truly remarkable, but what most people don’t realize (if they’ve heard of him) is that he was a Harvard-trained astrophysicist. When historians tell his story, they often minimize this aspect of his life because all his other accomplishments steal the spotlight. However, this side of him (his astronomy background) needs to be told and held in its full beauty – a task I’m attempting to do through my research.
To learn more about Kameny, I read The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini (a book I highly recommend if you are interested in doing a deep dive into Kameny) and countless articles, but I also spent all of Thursday exploring Kameny’s personal manuscripts and files using the Frank Kameny Papers in the Library of Congress. If you haven’t spent hours going through the finding aid for this collection, let me illuminate it for you: the Frank Kameny papers are essentially all the correspondence, case files, legal records, and writings that Kameny accumulated over his 86 years of life neatly tucked into a mere 161 containers totaling 56,300 items. It takes up 65 linear feet in the Library. That is about equal to a truck with a semitrailer, the height of a 5 or 6-story building, or the length of a large sperm whale. Mind you, I did not physically sort through everything, but I still needed to sort through all the information. In the end, I wound up going through 8 boxes over the course of 7 hours, and I managed to find everything I needed (which meant I didn’t need to go back the next day!). You’ll just need to wait until a future blog post to read more about my findings :O. My mentors, Corinne Mona and Will Thomas, have been super motivating throughout this entire week, and I could not have asked for better mentors. I am also eternally grateful for the rest of the CHP/NBLA staff who have shown genuine interest in my research and are always attentive listeners when I talk about it.
Honestly, this research has been quite timely, as it was also DC Pride this past weekend – an event that probably could not have happened without the advocacy, activism, and strength of Frank Kameny. This weekend, some of the other interns and I went, and it was a blast. For those of you who have never been to a Pride before, make sure to bring lots of sunscreen and water! This week was also full of internship programming. On Wednesday night, there was a Trimble Lecture hosted by CHP that was a conversation between John Mather and Mark Clampin and on Thursday, the SPS team scheduled a dinner cruise for all the interns and SPS staff which was extremely fun. Because this week was mostly dedicated to research, I didn’t have as much time to go to museums, but yesterday, I went to the zoo with some friends from college, and afterward, Maia and I got Filipino food at this restaurant called Purple Patch up in Mt. Pleasant (absolutely scrumptious and cannot recommend enough) and subsequently went to the DC Jazz Jam at Haydee’s restaurant (free jazz!). And, of course, since that wasn’t enough activity for me, I ended the day by playing a chaotic version of Uno with the other interns (“Guno”) and baking bread (because we were out of sandwich bread and I somehow got into my head that baking it would be easier than running out to CVS to get another loaf).
Until next time!
Recommended Activities: DC Pride, the National Zoo, eating at Purple Patch, DC Jazz Jam, checking out the Library of Congress.
Kai Hostetter-Habib