1965
Sixteen People Picket the Pentagon
On July 31, 1965, sixteen people walked a picket line outside the Pentagon. They were protesting the ban on gay people working for the federal government and serving in the military, and they were doing it four years before Stonewall, at a point when almost nobody thought a public protest by homosexuals was survivable.
The rules they picketed under were strict, and Frank Kameny had written them. Men in suits and ties, women in dresses. Every placard twenty-two inches by twenty-eight, with the same words on both sides so nobody could photograph a blank. Anyone driving past was to see people who looked exactly like the federal employees the government insisted they could not be.
Kameny had reason to know how that worked. He was an astronomer with the Army Map Service until 1957, when the government learned of an arrest in San Francisco the year before and sacked him, then barred him from federal employment altogether in January 1958. He spent the rest of his life on it.
The Pentagon picket was one of a run that year. They had picketed the White House in April, ten people carrying signs reading WE WANT FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT, HONORABLE DISCHARGES, SECURITY CLEARANCES, and they went on to the Civil Service Commission, the State Department and the United Nations, and to Independence Hall in Philadelphia every Fourth of July until 1969.
The Civil Service Commission did not drop the ban on employing gay people until July 1975. By then something like five thousand people had lost federal jobs over it. The military ban outlasted Kameny himself. In June 2009 the government apologised to him for the sacking, fifty-two years late, and gave him its most senior award.