May 18, 2007  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

The national gay magazine the Advocate found itself in the awkward position this week of having to publish a correction saying it falsely reported that famed U.S. and Washington, D.C. gay rights leader Frank Kameny had died of AIDS.

Kameny, 82, laughed about the report of his demise Monday night at a meeting of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, where he put his characteristic booming voice to use in advocating for a local bill to help in the relocation of gay businesses displaced by a new baseball stadium.

“Let’s start with a heartfelt mea culpa,” said Advocate editor Anne Stockwell in an announcement posted on the Advocate’s web site Wednesday.

“In our Pride issue, which hits the newsstands on May 22, we made one of the more embarrassing factual errors in our recent history: We wrote in a story that Frank Kameny, the great gay-rights activist, is one of the leaders we’ve ‘lost to AIDS,’” Stockwell wrote. “Not only that, we ran a picture of Mr. Kameny and identified him as dead in the caption.

“Well, Frank Kameny is not dead and he’s never had AIDS,” Stockwell said in the correction. “We phoned Frank yesterday at his home in Washington, D.C., to break the bad news of his demise. He was a great sport about it.”

Although the Advocate contacted Kameny about the error on May 14, it apparently was too late to pull the issue from the printer, even though the magazine was not scheduled to appear on newsstands until eight days later, on May 22.

Stockwell did not provide details on how the mistake occurred other than to say, “we got our gay heroes mixed up.” She said the Advocate plans to publish a profile of Kameny in its next print edition to give readers a chance to get to know someone who “can truly say he’s laughed in the face of his own mortality.”

Kameny has been credited with helping to found the modern gay civil rights movement. Earlier this year, the Library of Congress accepted a donation of more than 70,000 of Kameny’s letters, papers and various documents that chronicle his pioneering work on gay rights beginning in the 1950s.

“Frank is knocking on all eight cylinders and fully engaged in activism, speaking and just enjoying himself,” said Charles Francis, the gay public relations executive who organized the Kameny Papers Project, a non-profit organization that raised money to help Kameny donate his papers to the Library of Congress.

The project also arranged for the Smithsonian Institution to acquire for its American history collection several picket signs that Kameny and his fellow activists used in a first-ever gay rights demonstration in front of the White House in the early 1960s.

“We laughed together about the Advocate’s report,” Francis said. “Kameny quoted Mark Twain saying, ‘the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’”

Rick Rosendall, vice president of the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, said that while Kameny hasn’t been as active in national gay organizations as he has in the past, he remains active locally while continuing to accept national speaking engagements.

“He still attends GLAA and Stein Club meetings, still monitors broadcasts of what he calls the nutty fundamentalists, and is still capable of giving ringing, fiery declarations,” Rosendall said.

“Younger members of the gay community, many of whom are six decades younger than he, are lucky to have a pioneer like Frank available to give first-hand accounts of just how far we have come since the 1950s,” Rosendall said.