Gay is good

5 Ways Being Gay Is Better Than Being Straight. Here are just a few reasons why being gay is so much better than being straight. Get the latest on what's happening At the Smithsonian in your inbox. Sixty years of work by gay rights activists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and leaders in the mental health community have shaped our current views about individuals from sexual minority communities and the care that they receive.

Robinson Jr. InKameny became the first openly gay person to run for U. While Kameny lost his bid, he played a big role in pressuring the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses and disorders inand some two decades later, he lobbied President Bill Clinton to sign a executive order banning anti-gay discrimination in federal security clearances.

Brandon Tensley is a national political writer at CNN, where he covers culture and politics. Born in New York City on May 21,to a Jewish family, Kameny became a trailblazing activist for gay civil rights.

Gay is Good Gay

There, civil service investigators asked him to respond to reports that he was gay. Intwo years before he died, the U. They held information about places across the U. Brandon Tensley Read More. Gay rights activist Franklin Kameny’s letters paint a lively and colorful narrative of the politicization of the gay and lesbian movement in the United States.

Kameny appealed his dismissal in various courts and in petitioned the United States Supreme Court to take up his case; the court declined to review it.

What rsquo s Good

Watch on. He was soon fired. "A lively look at the life of a civil rights hero, as revealed by his letters This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the gay rights movement."—. It is hard to take all that is so awesome about being gay and distill it down to just five points, for the sake of space and time, here are the five best reasons.

At the time, the government deemed gay Americans to be security risks and effectively banned them from federal service.