Gay Guide to Washington DC
In April 1953 Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which made what it called sexual perversion grounds for dismissal from federal employment, and the purge that followed took thousands of careers. One of them belonged to Frank Kameny, fired from the Army Map Service in 1957 and blacklisted from government work for life. He argued his own case to the Supreme Court in 1961, the first civil rights claim based on sexual orientation ever to reach it, and lost. On 17 April 1965 he led a small picket outside the White House, the first organized gay rights protest held there. The federal ban came off in 1975. The government apologized to him in 2009.
Dupont Circle is still the address most people know, and 17th Street is its spine: JR's has been on that block for the better part of four decades, with the Dupont Italian Kitchen bar, Larry's Lounge and The Fireplace around it. It is the most relaxed part of the scene and the one that looks most like a neighborhood rather than a night out.
The center of gravity has been moving east for years. Logan Circle and the 14th Street corridor hold Number Nine, Trade, The Little Gay Pub, Bunker and Spark Social House; U Street and Shaw carry Nellie's, Kiki, Uproar and District Eagle. Up in Adams Morgan, Pitchers shares a building with A League of Her Own, which matters more than its size suggests, because there are only a few dozen lesbian bars left in the entire country.
On 11 October 1987 the AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded on the National Mall for the first time, 1,920 panels laid out over more ground than a football field, and roughly half a million people walked it across one weekend while volunteers read the names aloud. Whitman-Walker, which started as a clinic for gay men, is still running.
Capital Pride takes the city in June with a parade and a festival on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the High Heel Race has run down 17th Street each October since the 1980s.