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.