‘Archive Activism’ reveals efforts to recover hidden LGBTQ gov’t documents
A newly released book called “Archive Activism: Memoir Of A ‘Uniquely Nasty’ Journey” describes the efforts by author Charles Francis and his supporters to uncover long hidden documents, among other things, revealing how LGBTQ federal workers were forced out of their jobs in the 1950s and 1960s.
Francis, a former public relations consultant and longtime Washington insider, co-founded in 2011 a repurposed Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.
as an advocacy group to uncover LGBTQ-related historical and archival documents while advocating for LGBTQ equality. The original Mattachine Society of Washington was co-founded by pioneering D.C.
gay rights advocate Frank Kameny in the early 1960s as D.C.’s first gay rights organization. Francis points out that the title of his book is taken, in part, from a 1964 document in which an attorney for the then U.S.
