Of natural causes, yesterday, at his home in Washington, DC.

I was lucky enough to have interviewed Kameny nearly thirty years ago, and to have visited him in his home, while working on the film Before Stonewall. Together we dug through his collection of memorabilia.

He showed me the State Department letter confirming that it “does not hire homosexuals and does not permit their employment” and his photos from picketing the White House in 1965.

While the women wore skirts and the men suits and ties to better win acceptance in those early demonstrations, Kameny is credited with bringing an aggressive new tone to the gay civil rights movement. Inspired by “Black is Beautiful,” he came up with the slogan “Gay is Good” in 1968.

Jonathan Rauch writing in 2006 on the occasion of Kameny’s papers going on display for the first time at the Library of Congress:

Forty years ago, this civil-rights pioneer came to the aid of a frightened Library of Congress employee who was accused of “enjoying” the embrace of men. (I am not making that up.) On Oct. 6, that same Library of Congress accepted Kameny’s papers and cemented his place in history’s pages. Professional archivists will now painstakingly sort thousands of documents–the gift of Charles Francis’s Kameny Project, which raised $75,000 to purchase and donate them–and will ensure their availability to generations of students of U.S. civil rights. There is no better record of the torment that homosexuals endured at the hands of their government in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kameny photo by Simon Bruty via a 2010 Washingtonian profile of Kameny, The Accidental Activist. Button photo from the Kameny collection.