Bio

Charles Francis co-founded in 2011 a re-purposed Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.  Originally the first lasting gay and lesbian political organization in Washington, the new Mattachine is a history society with an edge to advocate for full LGBTQ civil equality.  The society’s motto is “Archive Activism”.  Francis and the Society have received extensive media coverage of  their discoveries including “The New York Times”, “Washington Post”, National Public Radio, C-Span “American History TV”, NBC and an award-winning documentary film about their work produced by Yahoo News and reported by Mike Isikoff entitled “Uniquely Nasty, the U.S. Government’s War on Gays.”

Francis is a retired public affairs consultant who has worked for the largest public affairs firms and their corporate clients worldwide including AT&T, Chase Manhattan Bank and ExxonMobil.  He and his family live in Washington, D.C. and Homer, Alaska. In 2006, Francis co-founded the Kameny Papers Project which donated the papers and historic artifacts collected by gay civil rights pioneer Dr. Franklin E. Kameny to the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.  He is the author of “Freedom Summer Homos, An Archive Story”, a recovery of erased history published by the “American Historical Review” (2019) Oxford University Press. For ten years, Francis served as a Trustee of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia (College ’73) and studied (1975-1976) at the University of Southern California graduate school of Cinema Arts in Los Angeles.