Here, Queer, and Exploring Beyond the Atmosphere

In the Spring of 1943, three days before his 18th birthday, a young man named Frank Kameny enlisted in the army. World War II was raging on both sides of Europe, though the tide was beginning to turn for the Allies. Kameny, born into a Jewish family in New York City, strongly supported the war effort and was eager to enlist. But, unfortunately, if young Frank Kameny was going to serve his country, he would need to lie, for gay men were not permitted in the army. “They asked,” Kameny recalled in 2011. “I lied and didn’t tell—although as a healthy teenager, I can assure you, there were things to tell.” 

Through a series of appeals and petitions, Kameny protested this homophobic firing all the way to the steps of the United States Supreme Court. Discriminating against homosexuals, he wrote, “was no less odious than discrimination based upon religious or racial grounds.” It was the first civil rights claim in American history to center on a question of sexual orientation. The Court refused to hear his case. Fortunately for millions of LGBTQ+ Americans who came after him, instead of giving up, Kamney would become one of the country’s foremost gay rights activists.

Set against this backdrop, brave members of the LGBTQ+ community organized groups to support one another and counteract the hostility they encountered in their daily lives. At the time, many groups adopted the term “homophile,” to highlight the sense of community that underpinned their activities and to downplay the focus on sexuality that dominated gay stereotypes of the era. One such organization was the Los Angeles-based Mattachine Society. Founded in 1950 by labor activist Harry Hay, the group soon became central to America’s gay rights movement. Its goals, as detailed in the organization’s 1951 Statement of Purpose, were threefold: To Unify, To Educate, and To Lead. 

In the early 1960s, under Kameny’s leadership, the Washington Mattachine Society began pressuring the U.S. government to change its policies on LGBTQ+ employees. In the summer of ‘65, they picketed six times in front of prominent government buildings and the White House. Though crucial to the protests’ success, the media attention these demonstrations received was sure to escalate the personal risk each picketer faced. With this in mind, leaders like Kameny issued strict rules, encouraging activists to stick to “arbitrary” symbols of “acceptability, conventionality, and respectability.” Men were to wear suits; women to wear dresses. Smoking was prohibited, and conversations with passersby were discouraged. 

Kameny's work soon led him to Otis Francis Tabler, an openly gay man who had recently been fired after he was denied U.S. security clearance. In the late 1960s, Tabler was employed as a computer scientist at Logicon, a major information-technology contractor for the U.S. military. At the time, he was studying missile defense systems, for which he was granted a secret security clearance. In 1971, while seeking a renewal of his clearance, Tabler disclosed his sexuality to investigators, saying, “I am an overt, practicing homosexual who prefers to obtain a clearance without concealing his personal life from the investigative process.” His coworkers and supervisors gladly supported his petition and praised his skills and his reliability, and a recent psychological evaluation upheld his trustworthiness. Nevertheless, he was denied clearance and fired from his position at Logicon. 

One factor that contributed to Tabler’s success was a shift in the consensus on homosexuality among American psychiatrists. This too was in large part thanks to Kameny’s advocacy. In 1972, he and fellow activist Barbara Gittings lobbied the American Psychiatric Association (APA)  to remove homosexuality from the nation’s diagnostic manual (the DSM) which, until that point, considered gay people mentally ill. When the APA finally changed its diagnostic criteria a year later, Kameny wrote to his supporters: “At approximately 8:30 AM, on Saturday, December 15, 1973, by unanimous vote … the APA Board of Trustees passed the Nomenclature resolution … ‘curing’ us all, instantaneously, en masse, in one fell swoop, by semantics and by vote, instead of by therapy.” 

In 2011, after 86 years of remarkable courage and activism, Frank Kameny passed away at his home in Washington D.C. The international community of astronomers named an asteroid (40463 Frankkameny) in his honor and the American Astronomical Association presented a posthumous certificate of appreciation commemorating Dr. Frank Kameny’s lifetime efforts to secure equal employment rights for all. Organizations like Chicago’s Legacy Project erected monuments to celebrate his contributions to LGBTQ+ history, alongside his contemporaries, including Gittings, Johnson, and Rivera. Their work paved the way for generations of LGBTQ+ people across America. Today, in spite of historic successes, much work remains to be done. STEM fields in particular still present barriers to inclusion and representation, making it difficult for young people to find a home in the scientific community. The Adler Planetarium is proud to feature LGBTQ+ professionals, like Theresa Fisher and JJ Eldridge in this exhibition, while continuing to build partnerships offline with individuals like Nergis Mavalvala, all of whom make extraordinary contributions to science and help build a more diverse, inclusive future for STEM.

Dr. JJ Eldridge is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Auckland. Their general research concerns the lives and deaths of stars, from those in our own galaxy to those in galaxies at the edge of the observable universe — particularly the effects of binary interactions on the lives of binary stars and how these change the appearance of galaxies, alter the rates of different types of supernovae, and gravitational wave events. “It took me a long time to be confident enough to be myself at work. But since I've lifted the weight of secrecy, working is so much easier and I'm vastly more productive. So if you can and it's safe to do so, be yourself and don't hide who you are.”

Dr. Nergis Mavalvala is the Dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. Her research focuses on the detection of gravitational waves from violent events in the cosmos that warp and ripple the fabric of space-time. She is part of the team that in early 2016 announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, ushering in a new era in astrophysics. Dr. Mavalvala has also conducted experiments in the optical trapping and cooling of mirrors to enable observation of quantum phenomena in macroscopic objects. She is the recipient of a 2010 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Dr. Mavalvala earned a BA in physics and astronomy from Wellesley College and a PhD in physics from MIT.