Andrew Sullivan eulogizes Frank Kameny, one of the founding fathers of the modern Gay movement

The great, perhaps greatest ever, campaigner for gay equality, Frank Kameny, died last night. Picketing the White House in 1962 in a tie for homosexual equality tells you much that you need to know. That he never gave up, that he insistently engaged even his fiercest opponents for decades with unremitting conviction and self-worth, that he was firing off clarifying emails to his last days ... this was a giant of a man. Without him, the movement to remove homosexuality as an impediment to security clearance in federal work would never have gotten off the ground. Ditto sodomy law repeal. Ditto the removal of homosexuality from the list of psychological disorders by the American Psychiatric Association board in 1973.

But what I treasure about Frank was his refusal to write anyone off. The most ferocious bigots he wrote polite but stern letters to. Here is an extract from one that was sent to the raging bigot, Joseph Farah, of WorldNetDaily. And they published it. Classic Kameny quote:

I am a long-time gay activist, considered by many to be one of the remaining Founding Fathers of the gay movement. I initiated gay activism and militancy in 1961 and coined the slogan "Gay is Good" in 1968. It is!

I am a gay veteran of front-line combat in Europe in World War II. I did not fight that war to return to second-class citizenship or back-of-the-bus status (or off the bus altogether) for me and my fellow gays...

We gays know that our homosexuality is a divinely inspired gift and blessing, given to us by our true God to be enjoyed to its fullest, exultantly, exuberantly and joyously.

We seek not "special rights and privileges" as you term them, but precise equality of rights and privileges in what is our America, for us explicitly as gay Americans (not merely "American Americans" so to speak) fully – fully – as much as it is your America as non-gay Americans.

To repeat: For us, as gay Americans, this is our America, fully as much as it is yours, and you are not going to be allowed to steal it from us, try as you may – and you are certainly trying very hard.

And they are our White House and our president, fully as much as they are yours.

Any time one's nerve faltered, or when the price of being a bit in the drill of a civil rights movement seemed too high, Frank's enthusiastic embrace of the goodness of gayness always cheered me up. There was not the slightest trace of defensiveness about him or his arguments. He believed, as I do, that gayness is not a disorder but an objective wonder, a way of being human that has its own unique patterns and staggering achievements through the centuries of our civilization and others.

The tragedy is not that gays are discriminated against because of who we love. That is an absurdity. The tragedy is that the goodness of gayness is barely grasped by many gays, beaten down as they have been by social and cultural pressure, and only recently grasped by large numbers of straights.

Frank Kameny believed in the goodness of gayness with all his mind, heart and soul in 1957. And he lived a long life, and died a peaceful death at home. His thought and his life made "gay tragedy" finally an oxymoron. He was a gay triumph.