Love and death: The legacy of Congressional Cemetery’s ‘Gay Corner’

To the left of his grave is a modest memorial to Kameny that reads “Homosexual is Good,” a then-heretical slogan that the activist coined in 1968. Kameny isn’t truly buried at Congressional, however many different homosexual women and men are. About 60 have been interred in Homosexual Nook, and 100 extra have purchased plots, in accordance with Williams. Kay Lahusen was buried this spring subsequent to her companion, activist Barbara Gittings, generally known as the mom of the homosexual rights motion. Gittings based the East Coast chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the primary U.S. lesbian rights group, in 1958 and led the struggle to drive the American Psychiatric Affiliation to declassify homosexuality as a psychological sickness. William Boyce Mueller, a founding father of Forgotten Scouts — which fought the ban on gays within the Boy Scouts (the group his grandfather established) — is buried shut by below a broad magnolia. An obelisk put in in 2017 honors Antinous, an enslaved younger man who was Roman emperor Hadrian’s lover and has been referred to as a “homosexual god.”