Sep 19, 2008  |  By: JOSHUA LYNSEN  | COMMENTS     

Two years after local gay activist Frank Kameny moved his archives to the Library of Congress, those papers are now available to researchers.

Charles Francis, organizer of the Kameny Papers Project, said the 50,000 items were “organized to perfection” by library staff and would be an invaluable resource to people reviewing the earliest days of the gay civil rights movement.

“The Kameny Papers, documenting the evolution of the gay rights movement in the United States, are now available to study for many years to come,” he said.

Kameny is credited with playing a lead role in launching the modern U.S. gay civil rights movement in the early 1960s after government officials discovered he was gay and fired him from his job as an astronomer with the Army Map Service.

According to a Library of Congress index of the Kameny archives, highlights include papers related to the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 removal of homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and the landmark 1974 federal decision to grant an openly gay man a Pentagon security clearance.

Also among the archives are materials Kameny used in marches and protests from 1965–1969.

The papers and other materials are valued at $75,000. Donations from the Human Rights Campaign, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and Liberty Education Fund, among others, facilitated the transfer of materials to the Library of Congress in 2006.