Kameny offers Founders Toast on GLAA 36th anniversary

Founders Toast on GLAA 36th anniversary

Presented by Frank Kameny

GLAA 36th Anniversary Reception
Washington Plaza Hotel
Thursday, April 19, 2007


Thirty six years ago tomorrow, on the evening of April 20, 1971, following a number of preliminary meetings in the apartments of various people, in the apartment of Jim McClard, on the west side of 25th Street, NW, just south of Pennsylvania Avenue, toward K Street, GAA Washington was formally founded. I was there.

Within three weeks we were involved, with others, in the famous zap of the American Psychatric Association. The local, still infantile and restructuring Democratic Party establishment, under the late John Wilson saw us as potentially valuable allies and invited us in, and so we made our entre into DC politics.

We started rating candidates promptly, initating a proocess which, in highly refined form, continues to the present as one of our major undertakings. Later that year we gave a minus 10 or 15 rating -- our lowest rating of that period -- to Board of Education Candidate Marion Barry also just entering DC politics. He learned his lesson, and never again got other than high ratings as he moved upward into DC politics.

Once full home rule arrived, in 1974-75, we became deeply involved in the newborn political scene, and began a long process of polishing up our techniques. This has paid off magnificently over the ensuing three decades. We have worked closely with both the City Council and the Mayors office -- and the entire Executive Branch of the city government -- to achieve what we perceived as needed to advance the interests of the DC gay community. And that has been done marvelously effectively.

And "effective" is the key word; I will repeat it more than once here. Consisting of a group of enormously competent, very hard-working, highly knowledgeable people, who know what they are doing and how to do it efficiently and effectively, now working closely together through the internet as we could not years ago, we are known throughout the DC government for high quality presentations, representations, and testimony, collectively drafted, and are heard and are listened to. We don't win them quite all -- one never does in politics -- but our success record is far more than merely enviable.

The result is that despite the exaggerated and occasionally sensationalized reputation of San Francisco, Washington is the shining national gay political success story, thanks almost entirely to the GAA which has become the GLAA.

And so I offer a toast to GLAA's truly enviable record of past successes which have improved the lives of all of us and have made us far more comfortable than we would have been, and to a future of continued success and effectiveness at the same high level, in every expectation that that success will continue in full measure. We all know that Gay is Good. Here in Washington, D. C. GLAA has made it far, far better.

[TOAST] To GLAA and its magnificent record of achievement and successes, past, present, and on into the future !!


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