Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's emotional good-bye for Gabby

From a family of patriots: Jeff Wilfahrt, whose gay son Andrew was killed in Afghanistan, has announced he will run for the Minnesota House of Representatives

Jeff Wilfahrt will run for the Minnesota House of Representatives in District 37B, a seat currently held by Rosemount resident Kurt Bills. He and his wife are fierce defenders of the LGBT; they are my kind of gutsy and plain spoken people.

Oh, Joseph Skillings, you are full of grace

Via Towleroad:

Joseph Skillings was an elementary school teacher near Seattle, WA, until one day he tried to help a woman being harassed at a bus stop. He was attacked, knocked unconscious, and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Upon waking, he'd lost his ability to spell and complete math problems, and he could no longer run a classroom. But through his husband, who is a teacher for the visually impaired, Joseph found a new calling.

What a man!/joe

James Hormel writes about his experience as America's first openly gay ambassador and his life as a gay activist

James C. Hormel - "Fit to Serve" from James C. Hormel on Vimeo.

Bombastic, courageous & often rude, Congressman Barney Frank announces his retirement. Watch him disassemble the phrase "the radical homosexual agenda"

Frank Kameny: our great gay patriot

Why is it that I often call Frank Kameny the gay rights movement’s closest thing to King? Because, like King, he rooted his life in the Declaration of Independence’s promise and never lost faith in it, or with it. All men are created equal. Frank held his country to its founding promise and helped it find the better angels of its nature. That is why I remember him not just as a great gay activist but as a great American patriot.

He used to say that his fight for equality at home was an extension of the fight he waged against tyranny in Europe. And so it was that in June, when his car passed, I didn’t cheer. On an impulse, I stood at attention and silently saluted. I will never know if he saw me in the crowd, but I know that, if he did see me, he understood.

--Jon Rauch

RIP: One last post on the moral courage of Kameny

Slate's Linda Hirshman on Frank Kameny, a man of action:

And when the American Psychiatric Association, which defined homosexuality as a mental disorder, decided to hold a meeting in Kameny’s hometown, he quickly organized the disorganized protesters of the GLF and the alphabet soup of other burgeoning gay organizations to disrupt the meeting. They then and force the shrinks to listen to their claims that they were not crazy.

When the moment came, the protesters upended the psychiatrists’ convocation, and actual fighting broke out, with the doctors using the medals they had just been awarded to beat back the invading homosexuals. Kameny, seeing that the designated protest speaker had been pushed out of the meeting room, leaped onto the stage. “I saw that nothing was going to happen unless I did it,” he recalled. The psychiatrists had taken away the microphone, but “I never needed a microphone. And I knew exactly what to say because I had been speaking about how wrong they were for years.”

And so Frank Kameny proceeded to regale the assembled professionals with his recitation of how their diagnosis of homosexuality as a mental illness was unscientific, groundless, immoral and harmful. Two years later, the APA took homosexuality out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Not Crazy. Two years after that, the federal government explicitly rescinded Executive Order 10450.

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.

Today, there is no Blue or Red America, only one nation

"The personification of courage", indeed! : Gabby Giffords returns to vote for debt compromise

Betty Ford, a profile in courage, remembered today