Dr. Franklin E. Kameny Residence

For nearly half a century — from 1962 until his death here on October 11, 2011 — this modest Colonial Revival house was the home, office, archive and war room of Dr. Frank Kameny, the man many call the father of gay activism. Kameny's fight began with an injustice: a Harvard-trained astronomer, he was fired from the Army Map Service in 1957 for being gay. Instead of disappearing, he sued — his 1961 Supreme Court petition was the first US civil-rights claim based on sexual orientation — and then organized. He co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1961 and ran it largely from this house, which doubled as a meeting hall, informal counseling center, crash pad for visiting activists, and the filing cabinet of the movement. The campaigns waged from Cathedral Avenue reshaped American life: the fight against the federal employment ban and security-clearance denials, the picketing strategy of the 1960s (Kameny co-organized the Annual Reminders at Independence Hall), the slogan "Gay is Good," and the successful push to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders in 1973. Kameny was also the first openly gay candidate for Congress (1971). The house was designated a DC Historic Landmark in 2009 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 2, 2011 — three weeks after his death. His picket signs are now in the Smithsonian; his papers in the Library of Congress. What you see today: a private residence in a leafy Northwest neighborhood — view from the sidewalk only. It features on the DC Preservation League's LGBTQ+ history tour, and pairs naturally with the Matlovich grave and Dupont Circle sites across town.