Founders' Toast presented by Frank Kameny
Accompanied by fellow GLAA founder Paul Kuntzler
GLAA 30th Anniversary ReceptionJurys Washington Hotel
Thursday, April 19, 2001
But that difference didn't just happen. GLAA made it happen, by hard, relentless work, always of the highest quality. And that continues. And so, prior to toasting GLAA, I want to tell you a little bit about what and why we are toasting GLAA.
When I ran for Congress, here in the District, in March of 1971, with the able assistance of my campaign manager, Paul Kunzler, we gays had hardly risen even to the status of a fringe group. On a couple of occasions, even as a certified candidate, I had to force myself onto the platform in campaign debates, and dare them to throw me off. But we conducted a respectable and impressive campaign, which drew public praise for its high quality. We caught the attention of those attempting to revitalize the then almost moribund District Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, GAA/New York who had helped us out, caught the attention of my campaign committee, who visited them and came back determined to replicate them and their success here in Washington. And so, thirty years ago tomorrow, on April 20, 1971, our local Gay Activists Alliance was born. Little did we dream then of where we are today. Little did we imagine that the GAA that we were founding then would be instrumental in making of Washington the gay movement success story nationally that it is today.
Hardly had GAA been born when during the first week of May 1971, in cooperation with the fading Mattachine Society of Washington and the short-lived local Gay Liberation Front, plus some of the anti-Viet Nam War activists, who were closing down Washington, all under the remarkably effective leadership of one of our founders, Cliff Witt, we took seriously the word "Activists" in our name, and engineered the famous invasion of the American Psychiatric Association at which I seized the microphone and denounced them.
Later that year, we commenced a thirty-year process still continuing, of rating candidates for public office. The only people we elected back then were the School Board. Marion Barry wasn't yet clued in, made a dreadful impression, and was given a resounding negative rating. He was a quick learner, and the following year under his leadership, the Board enacted a resolution, far in advance of anything anywhere in the country, prohibiting anti-gay discrimination in any aspect of D.C. school system functioning. And so we were off and running politically. With our participation, the D.C. Human Rights Law was passed in 1973, and preserved against hostile amendment in 1977 and then cunningly and cleverly protected against initiative and referendum. At our fun Home Rule budget hearings, in 1975, we prevailed upon the D.C. City Council to delete the line item for funding the Metropolitan Police Department's Morals Division and -- poof -- the Vice Squad, which had plagued District gays since 1950 was gone. Then, the police were our enemies who were harassing us and entrapping us. Today, through years of work by GLAA, high ranking MPD officers have been present with us as honored guests, the Police Department has a Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit, and we confer with the Chief regularly and on a basis of mutual respect and cooperation.
In 1975, GAA, through its Mayoral Appointments Project, obtained my appointment, by Mayor Washington, as a Commissioner on the Human Rights Commission. Within a few years, at the behest of GAA, Washington had not only more openly gay appointees to its government than any other jurisdiction in the country, but more than all the other jurisdictions put together.
I won't bore you further with a recital of the accomplishments of thirty years; it would take the rest of the evening. Suffice it to say that we have been blessed with an almost unbroken series of absolutely superb GLAA presidents, under whom local gay-related issues involving all three branches of government have been effectively addressed. GLAA has fought many battles and lost few if any. Under a group of remarkably able people who work extraordinarily well together, and with the assistance of the Internet, our issuances - letters, news releases, testimony -- are of high quality, and have earned us both respect and political influence, to the continuing benefit of both gay people and all the people in Washington.
As the past few years have shown, our work is never done. The major battles seem to be won and behind us, but we are faced with a never-ending series of brushfire wars which will probably never stop. In slight paraphrase of the oft-quoted dictum: The price of equality is eternal vigilance. GLAA will be there vigilantly to ensure that equality for gay people, as it has for the past thirty years. And so we give a toast to an illustrious record of past successes and to another thirty years of even more impressive successes sure to come, TO THE GAY AND LESBIAN ACTIVISTS ALLIANCE OF WASHINGTON: IN CELEBRATION OF ITS SUCCESSES, PAST AND FUTURE. MAY IT LONG ENDURE.