Kameny presents award to Charles H. Ramsey

Distinguished Service Award to Charles H. Ramsey

Presented by Frank Kameny

GLAA 36th Anniversary Reception
Washington Plaza Hotel
Thursday, April 19, 2007


It is with not only great pleasure but with a strong element of personal satisfaction that I present our next very well deserved award to a recipient who has truly earned it.

A little history might provide perspective. When I came to Washington, in 1956, just over 50 years ago, the Federal government had declared war upon gays through the 1949 or 1950 Senate Wherry and Hoey Committee Reports, which designated and utilized the Metropolitan Police Department as their troops for waging that war. With the sodomy law to back them up, the MPD made arrests by soliciting solicitations for sodomy -- and by other means -- as a device for getting lists of names of gays to feed over to the US Civil Commission which had a ban on gays as rigorous as the current military gay ban and quite as ferociously enforced, so that those gays could be fired or excluded. And they were in droves. And countless others were just arrested.

In 1959 when it was proposed to increase to size of the MPD from 5400 to 5700 or some such numbers, I wrote in, as a private citizen, opposing the increase as long as they were wasting the personnel they already had by utilizing them to hound and harass harmless homosexuals.

We organized in 1961, and as the years progressed, we fought back, and forced a gradual retreat on the part of the MPD. But as late as about 1972 some of our people were arrested at a sit-in in the office of then Chief Jerry Wilson because he refused to meet with us. And the arrests of gays as gays and because we were gay continued.

With the massive cultural changes occurring through the ensuing decades relations between the gay community and the police department improved, and we even had an MPD recruiting table at Gay Pride Celebrations. But there was little initative or leadership shown by a long series of mostly mediocre Police Chiefs.

Things changed, abruptly and massively in 1998, with the appointment of our Awardee as Police Chief. Unlike his predecessor of a quarter century earlier, on the very day of his appointment HE took the initiative by requesting a meeting with GLAA representatives, leading to a series of such regular meetings, and commencing a long and fruitful relationship not only with us collectively, but on a cordial individual basis which I, personally, valued very highly.

Of all of his relevant accomplishments, the most important, by far, in my view, occurred in 2000, when he authorized the establishment of the Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit of the MPD -- the GLLU. While similar units exist elsewhere, they are merely public relations entities. Once established and operating under the indefatigable Sergeant Brett Parson, ours was given full police powers, which were utilized to the uttermost. Happily it remains in operation, and has won very well-deserved national recognition and awards.

In my view, the GLLU is one of the two shining jewels in our D. C. governmental crown. Full credit for it goes to our awardee this evening.

He has included representatives of GLAA in his Community Policing Task Force and otherwise worked with us. Beyond just our community and issues, he won national attention and praise for instituting training for police officers in the history and lessons of the Holocaust in cooperation with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Of course he had a very full platter, as did we, and so when there was overlap, we have occasionally disagreed with him -- quite expectedly. but not often and not seriously. My very first meeting with him occurred when we testified before the City Council on opposite sides of an issue relating to police in bars. But the encounter was civil and we shook hands afterward and a good personal relationship was established thereby.

Perhaps the vast changes which have occurred over the past half century were best epitomized at the Gay Pride Parade last June. There, as part of the parade itself were police vehicles and, as I recall it, a float, all staffed by numerous police officers, which went by to the very enthusiastic cheers ot the bystanders there at Dupont Circle. For the collective gay community to be cheering, much less enthusiatically cheering the Metropolitan Police Department would have been so unthinkable back in 1959 as to have been utterly inconceivable. We have indeed progressed!!

Credit for bringing all of this to full maturity, fruition, and completion and establishing it firmly, goes to our Awardee of this evening.

And so, thanks to him, over the past year or so, I did a 180-degree reversal of the position which I took in my 1959 letter which I mentioned at the beginning f this presentation, in which I opposed increasing the size of the MPD. I wrote another letter, this time to the Mayor and the City Council urging that the MPD, which is now significantly smaller than it was back then, be raised back up to its 1950s strength.

Thank you, Chief Ramsey.

And so it is with a sense of pleasure, privilege, honor and gratitude, that I present this amply deserved Award for Distinguished Service to former Metropolitan Police Department Chief Charles H. Ramsey.