Oct 05, 2007  |  By: REBECCA ARMENDARIZ  | COMMENTS     

intellect to this world,” she said.

When Baldwin was first coming out, she says she sought out some of the publications and documentaries of the movement that were available to her because she hadn’t learned about the gay civil rights movement in her public school experience.

“The notion that we need to achieve social justice has not begun in the U.S. Senate or House or any state legislature. It has begun because people have organized for change,” she said.

Lesson number two, she said, is that our democracy provides us with the tools to go from a grassroots movement to the point of securing protections and equality.

“We need to use those tools,” she said. “We need to understand them and be active participants in making change.”

The point of the entire month-long project is that the strategy for gaining equality comes from looking at the achievements of gay role models.

“I think it’s an opportunity to be proud of what we’ve played a role in achieving,” Baldwin said.

Yoshino agrees. “So much of what we define as possible for ourselves has to do with who has come before us,” he said. “I have been involved in GLBT issues for so long that I don’t feel like I need any more role models. But both years, when I’ve been able to work on this list with my terrific co-chair, I realize I’m in a good mood for days afterwards.  If that’s true for me, my hope is that it will be viscerally true for the kid who is just coming out.”

Kameny says he feels good about being named a hero of gay history.

“I think as ideas and projects of this kind come along, provided people do pursue them, we’ll be able to establish our history and our place in history, using the word history in a larger sense. There is an extensive gay history,” Kameny said. He added that he has too many gay heroes to name.

Kameny has played a key role in achieving civil rights for the gay community. His early focus was repealing sodomy laws and removing homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders. He is hopeful that with a Democrat in the White House in 2008, that his final goal of repealing the ban on gays in the military will be realized.

“More than anything else, not as a specific issue, but simply as a tactic, we just need to get people out and open. I think that’s absolutely necessary,” he said.
Recently, Kameny’s papers and materials from the 1960s were put on display at the Smithsonian.

“We would have never believed when we were making those signs in 1965 that they were going to end up actually in the Smithsonian and some of my paper