Frank Kameny: Alive and laughing

Let’s
start with a heartfelt mea culpa. In our Pride issue, which
hits newsstands on May 22, we made one of the more
embarrassing factual errors in The
Advocate's recent history: We wrote in a story that
Frank Kameny, the great gay rights activist, is one of the
leaders we’ve “lost to AIDS.” Not
only that, we ran a picture of Mr. Kameny with a
caption that identified him as dead.

Well, Frank
Kameny is not dead—and he’s never had AIDS. We
phoned Frank Wednesday at his home in Washington,
D.C., to break the bad news of his demise. He was a
great sport about it.

“Did you
give a date of death?” he asked.

Since we got our
gay heroes mixed up, we figure our readers might also be
glad to get reacquainted with Frank Kameny, who turns 82 on
May 21 and whose accomplishments are legendary.

Look for a
profile of Frank in our next issue and get ready to spend
some quality time with a guy who can truly say
he’s laughed in the face of his own mortality.