James Baldwin is born, Barbara Deming goes to jail so people can walk down the street together, Winnipeg marches with paper bags on, and the government stops calling gay people security risks.
1995
Sexuality No Longer a Security Risk
The government stops treating gay people as security risks
For four decades gay and lesbian people were barred from serving their country. Why? Because being gay was itself grounds to be refused a security clearance. The reasoning was that a man (or woman) with a secret could be blackmailed into giving up others - a logic that only worked because the government had made the secret dangerous in the first place. Agencies enforced it by purge. In 1961 the National Security Agency dismissed twenty-six employees as sexual deviates over a defection by two men who it turned out were not even gay at all.
On August 2, 1995, Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12968. It set uniform standards across the federal government for granting access to classified information - the biggest overhaul of clearance rules in forty years - and it barred agencies from denying a clearance on the basis of sexual orientation.
The NSA, the CIA and the State Department had all still been excluding lesbian, gay and bisexual staff up to that point. Applicants could still be asked whether anything in their conduct left them open to coercion. They could no longer be told that the answer was yes by definition.
It was a milestone for the LGBTQ+ community as one of the first presidential orders to put the words "sexual orientation" into federal policy that way, and campaigners had been asking for it since the day Clinton took office.
William F. Buckley called him "an eloquent menace."
It was meant as an insult. It was also a confession - that a gay Black man from Harlem had become the most dangerous writer in America.
In February 1965 the two men met at the Cambridge Union to debate whether the American dream had been built at the expense of Black Americans. Buckley had starred on the Yale debate team.
"I picked the cotton," he said.
The students voted 544 to 164. Baldwin received a standing ovation the Union's own narrator said he had never witnessed in all his years there.
He had earned that room the hard way.
Go Tell It on the Mountain made him famous in 1953. Then he wrote Giovanni's Room - a novel about a white American in Paris and the Italian bartender he falls in love with. His agent read it and told him to burn it. Knopf, who had launched his career, refused to publish it and explained why: he was a black writer, he had a particular audience, and a book like this would destroy him.
Dial Press published it in 1956. It is now routinely named the greatest gay novel ever written in English.
In 1963 he published The Fire Next Time. It was a national bestseller and it put him on the cover of Time that May, at the exact moment the movement he was writing about broke into the open.
That August, a quarter of a million people gathered in Washington. Baldwin was not invited to speak. King was overheard calling him too inflammatory. Bayard Rustin, who built the march from nothing, was kept off the podium as well - also Black, also gay, also handled.
So Baldwin stood in the crowd.
Then he sat down in front of a television camera with Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte and told the country what the march had actually meant.
They kept him from one microphone. He had never needed their permission to be heard.
In 1964, Barbara Deming was on the Quebec-Washington-Guantánamo Walk for Peace. While making their way through Albany, Georgia the authorities decided the walk stopped there. But it wasn't the peace slogans that bothered them, it was because black and white marchers wanted to walk down the street together.
The town jailed Deming and thirty-five others.
They went on a hunger strike. Some of them barely survived. Deming did twenty-seven days and wrote the entire time.
Then Albany gave up. The marchers came out of the jail and walked through the town as they intended.
Her writing later went on to become Prison Notes. People still read it today.
In 1968 she picked a fight with Frantz Fanon. Fanon and Sartre were arguing that violence was necessary to liberation, and much of the movement agreed.
Nonviolence has two hands, she wrote. One holds your opponent still. The other refuses to stop treating him as a human being. Defiance alone is just a brawl. Respect alone is just manners. Together they do something neither can by itself. We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show real human concern.
In 1975 she started Money for Women. Small grants, a few hundred dollars at a time, to feminist writers and artists nobody else was funding. It's the oldest feminist granting agency still operating in the US and Canada.
She lived for years with the painter Mary Meigs on Cape Cod, and later with the artist Jane Verlaine, with whom she built a feminist community of several households on Sugarloaf Key in Florida. From the 1970s she wrote about it openly, and drew the line herself: the discipline she'd learned in a Georgia jail was the one she wanted for the women's movement.
She died on August 2, 1984, aged sixty-seven. Her fund Money for Women is still supporting women today.
On August 2, 1987, about 250 people gathered at the Manitoba Legislature and marched through downtown Winnipeg. It was the first Pride parade in the province.
Some of them wore paper bags over their heads.
They had jobs they could lose and landlords who could evict them, and families who didn't know. One organiser said the strange part was recognising people on the sidewalk from the bars, then watching friends walk past with their faces hidden.
That summer Manitoba replaced its Human Rights Act with a new Human Rights Code. Bill 47 added sexual orientation to the grounds you could not be discriminated against on. It had taken years of campaigning. In July, gay Manitobans appeared before a legislative committee to argue for it.
The law had changed, but that didn't mean society moved at the same pace. Employers, landlords and neighbours were not working to the same schedule, and neither were parents.
Peetanacoot Nenakawekapo marched without a bag. She is Anishinaabe, of the Ojibwa Nation and the Wolf clan, a two-spirit woman from Skownan, Manitoba, and also goes by Winnie Sunshine. She said she went because she was proud and wanted to show it without a disguise.
In 2019 she marched again, as the grand marshal of the Winnipeg Pride parade. It was her thirty-second one.