But with the Moral Majority warning that Washington was on the verge of becoming “the gay capital of the world,” the House of Representatives overwhelmingly vetoed the law, intervening for the first time in a local matter under a provision of the charter that grants Congress the power to block legislation enacted by the DC council in the first 60 days after passage. Immediately thereafter, LGBT activists helped draft a sex law reform bill that passed the city council the following year. Under the home rule charter, the city was barred from changing any of its criminal laws until 1980. Repealing the district’s sodomy law, though, proved much more difficult.
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In 1976, the GAA led a successful effort to have the first elected council add a provision to a marriage and divorce law banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in child custody and visitation cases, the first such protections granted in the United States. But, more importantly, hundreds of local LGBT people became politicized through their involvement in the campaign and formed one of the nation’s most accomplished gay advocacy groups, the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), following the election.Įven before limited home rule was granted to the district in 1974, the GAA had succeeded in lobbying the then-appointed city council to pass a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, making DC the first major city in the country to do so. He finished fourth in a six-way race, receiving a respectable 1.6 percent of the vote and signaling that LGBT people were a significant voting bloc in the city.
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Five years later, when the district was given the right to elect a nonvoting delegate to Congress, the heightened level of gay awareness that had arisen from the protests was channeled into a campaign to elect Frank Kameny, one of the founders and leaders of MSW, to the position. In the short term, the pickets emboldened many LGBT people in the district (and throughout the country) and greatly increased the visibility of the city’s LGBT community. The demonstrations began the long process leading to the eventual banning of discrimination based on sexual orientation in federal employment. The demonstrations were small, involving only 10 to 16 white, mostly male activists, as few Washingtonians were willing to risk being publicly identified as “homosexual.” Not only did they justifiably fear losing their jobs and facing ostracism from family and friends, but participants were initially also concerned that they would be arrested or attacked.īecause Washington, DC, had no local government until the 1970s, activists had to turn to the federal government to address what would be local issues elsewhere. Subsequent pickets also targeted the Pentagon, State Department, and Civil Service Commission. The initial picket, at the White House, was Washington’s first LGBT rights demonstration.
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The MSW’s most visible action, in 1965, was holding a series of pickets of government institutions that discriminated against individuals suspected of being gay. Focusing on how people suspected of being gay were denied civil service jobs, security clearances, and the ability to serve in the military, the group announced its formation in the early 1960s with a press release sent not just to the media, but also to the president, the vice president, cabinet secretaries, the justices of the Supreme Court, and every member of Congress. So the first LGBT rights group in DC, the Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW), logically targeted the federal government. Activists had to turn to the federal government even to address what would be local issues elsewhere. And prior to the 1970s, the district had no local government, but was administered by three commissioners appointed by the president. Similar practices by government contractors and witch hunts instigated by Congress during the 1950s further limited employment opportunities for gay people in Washington. The government was by far the city’s largest employer, yet federal agencies were barred from employing gay people by a 1953 executive order. In the late 1950s, the District of Columbia’s first lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists recognized the need to challenge the virulently anti-gay policies of the national government. LGBT life in Washington, DC, has historically been rooted in two larger aspects of the city: its unique status as the nation’s capital and its long record of racial segregation.